“Coronavirus Has Europe Treating Chinese People Like the Plague - The Daily Beast” plus 1 more

---

Coronavirus Has Europe Treating Chinese People Like the Plague - The Daily Beast Posted: 31 Jan 2020 10:12 AM PST ROME—The sign taped to the glass door of a popular gelateria in front of Rome's iconic Trevi Fountain is perfectly clear, and perfectly ugly. Written in both Chinese and English, it states what pretty much everyone in a country of hypochondriacs and the rest of Europe is thinking: "Due to international safety measures, all people coming from China are not allowed to have access to this place." The writer then apologizes for any inconvenience.  Italy has confirmed just two coronavirus cases despite quarantining 7,000 people on a cruise ship this week over a feverish woman from Hong Kong who had, as it turned out, nothing but the flu. A full 24 hours after the woman was cleared, citizens of the port town of Civitavecchia near Rome staged a protest at the port, demanding that all 750 Chinese passengers on board be tested for the disease before anyone could get off the ship.  The two cases that actually are confirmed in Italy are a Chinese couple who traveled from Wuhan to Milan and then across the peninsula on a bus tour with more than 100 other Chinese tourists over the last five days, sparking a panic across the entire country as authorities alert everyone at every stop of their tour—highway rest areas included. The hotel where they were staying, just a block from the Colosseum, was cordoned off with armed police on Friday, prompting passersby to ask each other if there was a terrorist threat.  You would think the epidemic has reached plague proportions.  On Friday, Italy's civil protection authority announced a six-month "state of emergency" over the health crisis—the first time in the country's history. Twelve people who are tied to the confirmed cases are in Rome's Spallanzani Infectious Disease Hospital under surveillance. But Chinese restaurants, Chinese-owned convenience stops and even coffee bars with Chinese staff have been empty all week. In Tuscany, where the town of Prato has the highest concentration of Chinese residents in the country, Italians have stopped sending their children to school out of fear they'll contract the virus.  About five million Chinese tourists visit Italy each year, pouring millions of euros into the economy, but the Rome Tourism Bureau told The Daily Beast that many tour guides have called off group tours for Chinese people "until things blow over" out of fear their very presence will make other tourists feel uncomfortable.  There are also 300,000 Chinese residents living and working across Italy, many in the service and fashion industries. The lack of government guidance on how to handle the epidemic has angered the Chinese community across Italy, many of whom feel betrayed that the government seems to be scapegoating them, according to the head of Rome's Chinese Community in Italian media interviews.   "On Friday, Italy's civil protection authority announced a six-month "state of emergency" over the health crisis—the first time in the country's history." A Chinese woman who runs a small convenience store in the bustling neighborhood of Trastevere told The Daily Beast that she has simply started wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves because Italians wouldn't enter her store. "I haven't been to China for more than 10 years, but they are so scared of us, it just makes sense to show them I'm being safe," she said. "It's either this or risk closing if I lose business." Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's xenophobic far-right League party, didn't miss an opportunity to exploit the situation. "Every day dozens of flights arrive in Italy from China," he said at a recent rally. "We need checks, checks and more checks."  At a civil protection press conference in Rome on Friday, the panel of doctors meant to calm fears continued to insist that only people with symptoms were contagious despite confirmation last weekend that the opposite is true.  There have also been troubling reports of blatant racism and bullying in the Italian press including how a Chinese-Italian boy playing in a school soccer match in Milan was told by an opponent, "I hope you get the virus, too." Roberto Giuliani, director of the prestigious Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, was sanctioned by the institution after telling students from China, Japan and even South Korea that they needed a doctor certificate to attend class—even if they had not traveled to China recently.  The same paranoia has sparked a race debate in France, where six cases have been confirmed. There, Chinese citizens have started using the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus or "I am not a virus" after the local newspaper Le Courier Picard used the race baiting headlines "Yellow Alert" and "Yellow Peril" over a photo of a Chinese woman wearing a white surgical mask. The French aren't only stigmatizing Chinese people but all Asians, it seems. Shana Cheng, a 17-year-old Paris resident of Vietnamese and Cambodian origin, told the BBC that she was hassled on a Paris bus last weekend. "There's a Chinese woman, she is going to contaminate us, she needs to go home," Cheng says she heard two passengers say. Then she said they looked at her "in a disgusted way, as if I was the virus." Another woman tweeted, "Not all Asians are Chinese. Not all Chinese were born in China and not all have been there. An Asian who coughs doesn't have the #coronavirus. Insulting an Asian because of the virus is like insulting a Muslim because of the bombings." In Germany, the only other continental European country with confirmed cases so far—six and counting tied to the automotive supplier Webasto in Stanberg—things aren't much better. A 33-year-old German who worked there is the first human-to-human contact case in Europe after attending a training session hosted by a visiting Chinese colleague who has since returned to Wuhan. All such training sessions with Chinese visitors have since been suspended. As the number of confirmed cases grows across Europe, fear will surely spread, too. And a continued lack of guidance by authorities about how the virus is actually transmitted and who potential carriers are will undoubtedly feed racism and xenophobia, which risks becoming a worse epidemic than the disease itself.

Africa's Worst Locust Plague in Decades Threatens Millions - The Wall Street Journal Posted: 31 Jan 2020 07:19 AM PST By Nicholas Bariyo Updated Jan. 31, 2020 10:19 am ET A Kenyan farmer tried to dispel desert locusts in a village east of Nairobi last week. The infestation in Kenya is the worst in 70 years. Photo: dai kurokawa/Shutterstock The time-tested method of repelling locusts from crops in East Africa is to bang on a metal bucket and whistle loudly. When swarms afflict five countries and swell to the size of Moscow, more drastic measures are needed. In Kenya, police facing the country's largest outbreak in 70 years have fired machine guns and tear gas into swarms in an effort to prevent them from consuming fields. Ethiopia is spraying pesticide from small planes to displace hovering throngs, though swarms have forced passenger jets in the region to make emergency landings. In Eritrea and Djibouti, teams in the hundreds are chasing swarms with hand-held pesticide pumps and truck-mounted sprayers. A farmer holds a desert locust in Kenya, around 120 miles east of Nairobi, on Jan. 24. Photo: dai kurokawa/Shutterstock The rising number of desert locusts presents an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods in the Horn of Africa, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said on Wednesday. "This has become a situation of international dimensions that threatens the food security of the entire subregion," Qu Dongyu, director general of the FAO said last week. Desert locusts—the most devastating of all locust species—can consume their weight in food each day. Swarms potentially containing hundreds of millions of insects each can travel over 90 miles a day; a swarm the size of Manhattan can consume as much food in a day as the population of the New York tri-state area, said FAO locust expert Keith Cressman. Some swarms are far bigger. Widening Scourge Desert locusts are breeding again in Africa, threatening more infestations SAUDI ARABIA Calm: no threat to crops Caution: potential threat to crops Threat: threat to crops Danger: significant threat to crops SAUDI ARABIA Calm: no threat to crops Caution: potential threat to crops Threat: threat to crops Danger: significant threat to crops SAUDI ARABIA Calm: no threat to crops Caution: potential threat to crops Threat: threat to crops Danger: significant threat to crops Calm: no threat to crops Caution: potential threat to crops Threat: threat to crops Danger: significant threat to crops Saudi Arabia If the outbreak isn't controlled and conditions remain favorable for breeding, it could reach 30 countries in Africa and Asia, the U.N. said. "This is a more serious emergency than we had earlier anticipated," said Guleid Artan, the climate prediction director at East Africa's Intergovernmental Authority on Development. "More locust swarms are entering northern Kenya daily and at this rate they could soon spread into Uganda and South Sudan." Extreme weather is behind the infestation, according to the U.N. East Africa experienced abnormally heavy rains late last year, flooding regions that are normally semiarid. Such conditions are favorable for locust breeding, which can grow substantially if not disrupted—a challenge in cash-strapped countries contending with insurgencies and other security challenges. Continued breeding in some areas is already deepening the crisis. SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS What is the worst crop infestation you know of or have personally experienced? Join the conversation below. Swarms entered Kenya in late December from Somalia, where security challenges had left a large breeding area uncontrolled. When the swarms crossed the border, relief officials said, residents in the Kenyan county of Wajir started shouting, whistling and drumming to scare the insects away. The efforts forced the initial swarm to retreat. But a day later, larger swarms returned, clouding the sky. Police units fired tear gas and bullets but the locusts didn't disperse. Locusts have continued to spread; this week, the swarms moved to around 90 miles east of the capital, Nairobi, alarming the region's corn and fruit growers, local officials said. A Kenyan farmer tried to dispel desert locusts in a village east of Nairobi last week. The infestation in Kenya is the worst in 70 years. Photo: dai kurokawa/Shutterstock The U.N. estimates that 23.6 million people in the region are already facing food shortages due to rains, insecurity and now locust infestation. Some 8.4 million people in Ethiopia alone may need food aid because of crop losses from the locusts, the U.N. warned. Aerial spraying is the only effective method to reduce locust numbers, according to the U.N., which said it needed more than $70 million from donors to address the crisis. Spraying, expensive and dangerous in areas where there are militants operating, has so far covered less than a third of affected areas, according to East Africa's Intergovernmental Authority on Development. In Ethiopia, Africa's second-most populous nation, locusts have invaded around 700 square miles of cropland, pastures and forests, in the country's largest infestation this century. Less than 10% of the affected area has been sprayed, according to FAO data. Spraying in grazing areas is particularly challenging as it can take days for herders to move their livestock out of the way. Desert locusts in Kenya on Jan. 24. Swarms move quickly, making infestations challenging to control Photo: Ben Curtis/Associated Press Ethiopia and Kenya need at least two more spray planes, while no such control measures have been possible in war-afflicted Somalia. The nexus of the locust breeding is around the Red Sea plains in the borderlands between Sudan and Eritrea. If unchecked, the locust swarms could grow by 500 times by June, when drier weather is expected to slow breeding, according to the FAO. Kenyan officials have attempted to play down the impact. The agriculture minister, Peter Munya, said this week that only five swarms remained and the government was in control of the situation. Locust swarms move quickly, shifting location and shape, making infestations challenging to control. A swarm of locusts settled on shrubs in a village around 180 miles north of Nairobi last week. Photo: tony karumba/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images For Kenya, sub-Saharan Africa's second-largest exporter of fruits and vegetables after South Africa, the stakes are high. Effects from a 2018 drought followed by flooding last year slashed Kenya's main grain harvest by around a third, pushing up food prices and stirring unrest in poorer pastoral communities. Economic growth slowed to 5.8% last year from 6.3% in 2018, weighed down in part by the decline in agricultural output. A major locust outbreak in northern Africa between 2003 and 2005 cost nearly $600 million to control, including some $90 million in food aid distributed to affected nations, according to the U.N. Post-harvest losses topped an estimated $2.5 billion, the U.N. said. "We need to deal with the locust invasion now," said an FAO spokeswoman. "And also take forward-looking action to protect rural livelihoods and safeguard food security." A swarm of desert locusts on Jan. 22 in Kenya. Photo: sven torfinn/food and agricultur/Shutterstock Write to Nicholas Bariyo at nicholas.bariyo@wsj.com Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

You are subscribed to email updates from "plague" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States