Concerns About COVID-19 in India and Mississippi, and Sharing Vaccines

 #Billy Perrigo, "India's Disaster," TIME, May24/May 31, 2021. - "The true scale of the COVID-19 surges in India is impossible to accurately quantify. Officially, confirmed daily cases are plateauing just under 400,000, but remain higher than any other country has seen during the pandemic. Experts warn that the real umbers are far bigger, and may be rising fast as the virus rips through rural India, where two-thirds of the population lives, and where the testing infrastructure is frail."

"The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates the true number of new daily infections is around 8 million --the equivalent of the entire population of New York City being infected every day. Official reports say 254,000 people have died in India since the start of the pandemic, but the IMHE estimates that the true toll is more than 750,000 --a number researchers predict will double by the end of August." 

#Michael J. Mins, "Our eyes on the virus," TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - "In Mississippi, for example, only 31% of the population has received at least one [vaccine] dose." "As we navigate the next chapter of the pandemic, and work our way closer to normality, it is essential that we leverage accurate and highly accessible  rapid testing to keep schools, workplaces, and travel open in the safest way possible."

"Despite national support, the U.S. has failed to adopt a robust at-home rapid testing strategy that could make these kinds of tests available to all Americans at little or no cost to them."

#Gregg Gonvalses, "Sharing the Vaccine," The Nation, 5.31 - 6.7.2021. - "Luckily, $16 billion is sitting unused in the US Treasury right now, appropriated in the American Rescue Act for vaccine-related efforts just like this." "We are at the start of a race to vaccine the entire world, and there are larger tasks to accomplish -- particularly a massive tech transfer and industrial scale-up. The effort to vaccine as many people as we can, as the virus tries to outpace us, is the most urgent global priority of our time."

"The Biden Administration did the truly unexpected. Bucking the gigantic pharmaceutical lobby in Washington, it sided with low- and middle-income countries (LIMICs) by supporting a waiver provision to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that would set aside some intellectual property rights in order to expand the production of COVID-19 vaccines, which are now manufactured primarily by only a handful of companies in the world's richest nation."

#Katie Engelhart, "Home and Alone," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "Older people are more likely to live alone in the United States than in most other places in the world. Nearly thirty per cent of Americans over sixty-five live by themselves, most of them women -- forty-three per cent of Americans over sixty-five identify as lonely." 

"Research from the A.A.R.P. and Stanford University has found that social isolation adds nearly seven billion dollars a year to the total cost of Medicare, in part because isolated people show up to the hospital sicker and stay longer."

"Robots are increasingly being used to win the affinity of a human. For robots to win this affinity, "it doesn't have to seem real; real enough will do." "If some experts worry about robots being inadequate caregivers, others fear that older people will come to prefer certain kinds of care from a machine. And then what might we lose?"

Robots have advanced to the point that they can "determine how 'adventurous' a person is, then adjusts how often it suggests new activities."

"In 'A Biography of Loneliness,' from 2019, the historian Fay Bound Albert writes that 'concern about loneliness among the aged... is a manifestation of broader concerns about an aging population in the West, and considerable anxiety over how that population will be supported in an individualistic age when families are often dispersed.' "

"The 1965 Older Americans Act (O.A.A.), is a lesser-known part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. At the time, around  thirty per cent of elderly Americans were living in poverty. (Today, around nine per cent are.)"

#Wes Moore, (CEO of Robin Hood), "Implement universal housing vouchers," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "Millions of American families faced a housing emergency even before the COVID-19 crisis, with over 11 million households spending over 50% of their income on rent, according to the Urban Institute." "When low income families receive housing vouchers, data shows that they are less likely to experience food insecurity, be separated from their children, and experience domestic violence."