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classyfoxdestiny · 3 years

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Tigray massacre: How an Ethiopian festival turned into a killing spree

The corpses, some dressed in white church robes drenched in blood, were scattered in arid fields, scrubby farmlands and a dry riverbed. Others had been shot on their doorsteps with their hands bound with belts. Among the dead were priests, old men, women, entire families and a group of more than 20 Sunday school children, some as young as 14, according to eyewitnesses, parents and their teacher.

Abraham recognized some of the children immediately. They were from his town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, Edaga Hamus, and had also fled fighting there two weeks earlier. As clashes raged, Abraham and his family, along with hundreds of other displaced people, escaped to Dengelat, a nearby village in a craggy valley ringed by steep, rust-colored cliffs. They sought shelter at Maryam Dengelat, a historic monastery complex famed for a centuries-old, rock-hewn church.

On November 30, they were joined by scores of religious pilgrims for the Orthodox festival of Tsion Maryam, an annual feast to mark the day Ethiopians believe the Ark of the Covenant was brought to the country from Jerusalem. The holy day was a welcome respite from weeks of violence, but it would not last.

A group of Eritrean soldiers opened fire on Maryam Dengelat church while hundreds of congregants were celebrating mass, eyewitnesses say. People tried to flee on foot, scrambling up cliff paths to neighboring villages. The troops followed, spraying the mountainside with bullets.

A CNN investigation drawing on interviews with 12 eyewitnesses, more than 20 relatives of the survivors and photographic evidence sheds light on what happened next.

The soldiers went door to door, dragging people from their homes. Mothers were forced to tie up their sons. A pregnant woman was shot, her husband killed. Some of the survivors hid under the bodies of the dead.

The mayhem continued for three days, with soldiers slaughtering local residents, displaced people and pilgrims. Finally, on December 2, the soldiers allowed informal burials to take place, but threatened to kill anyone they saw mourning. Abraham volunteered.

Footage obtained by CNN shows the shoes of some of those killed in Dengelat. Credit: Obtained by CNN

Under their watchful eyes, he held back tears as he sorted through the bodies of children and teenagers, collecting identity cards from pockets and making meticulous notes about their clothing or hairstyle. Some were completely unrecognizable, having been shot in the face, Abraham said.

Then he covered their bodies with earth and thorny tree branches, praying that they wouldn’t be washed away, or carried off by prowling hyenas and circling vultures. Finally he placed their shoes on top of the burial mounds, so he could return with their parents to identify them.

One was Yohannes Yosef, who was just 15.

“Their hands were tied … young children … we saw them everywhere. There was an elderly man who had been killed on the road, an 80-something-year-old man. And the young kids they killed on the street in the open. I’ve never seen a massacre like this and I don’t want to [again],” Abraham said.

“We only survived by the grace of God.”

Abraham said he buried more than 50 people that day, but estimates more than 100 died in the assault.

They’re among thousands of civilians believed to have been killed since November, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for resolving a long-running conflict with neighboring Eritrea, launched a major military operation against the political party that governs the Tigray region. He accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades before Abiy took office in 2018, of attacking a government military base and trying to steal weapons. The TPLF denies the claim.

The conflict is the culmination of escalating tensions between the two sides, and the most dire of several recent ethno-nationalist clashes in Africa’s second-most populous country.

After seizing control of Tigray’s main cities in late November, Abiy declared victory and maintained that no civilians were harmed in the offensive. Abiy has also denied that soldiers from Eritrea crossed into Tigray to support Ethiopian forces.

But the fighting has raged on in rural and mountainous areas where the TPLF and its armed supporters are reportedly hiding out, resisting Abiy’s drive to consolidate power. The violence has spilled over into local communities, catching civilians in the crossfire and triggering what the United Nations refugee agency has called the worst flight of refugees from the region in two decades.

The UN special adviser on genocide prevention said in early February that the organization had received multiple reports of “extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting, mass executions and impeded humanitarian access.”

Many of those abuses have been blamed on Eritrean soldiers, whose presence on the ground suggests that Abiy’s much-lauded peace deal with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki set the stage for the two sides to wage war against the TPLF — their mutual enemy.

The US State Department, in a statement to CNN, called for Eritrean forces to be “withdrawn from Tigray immediately,” citing credible reports of their involvement in “deeply troubling conduct.” In response to CNN’s findings, the spokesperson said “reports of a massacre at Maryam Dengelat are gravely concerning and demand an independent investigation.”

Ethiopia responded to CNN’s request for comment with a statement that did not directly address the attack in Dengelat. The government said it would “continue bringing all perpetrators to justice following thorough investigations into alleged crimes in the region,” but gave no details about those investigations.

“They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers”

Rahwa

More than three weeks after CNN published this investigation, the Eritrean embassy of the UK and Ireland responded on March 22 by denying allegations of wrongdoing by Eritrean soldiers and denying that Eritrean troops were in Ethiopia.

The TPLF said in a statement to CNN that its forces were nowhere near Dengelat at the time of the massacre. It rejected that the victims could have been mistaken for being TPLF and called for a UN investigation to hold all sides accountable for atrocities committed during the conflict.

Still, the situation inside the country remains opaque. Ethiopia’s government has severely restricted access to journalists and prevented most aid from reaching areas beyond the government’s control, making it challenging to verify accounts from survivors. And an intermittent communications blackout during the fighting has effectively blocked the war from the world’s eyes.

Now that curtain is being pulled back, as witnesses fleeing parts of Tigray reach internet access and phone lines are restored. They detail a disastrous conflict that has given rise to ethnic violence, including attacks on churches and mosques.

For months, rumors spread of a grisly assault on an Orthodox church in Dengelat. A list of the dead began circulating on social media in early December, shared among the Tigrayan diaspora. Then photos of the deceased, including young children, started cropping up online.

Through a network of activists and relatives, CNN tracked down eyewitnesses to the attack. In countless phone calls — many disconnected and dropped — Abraham and others provided the most detailed account of the deadly massacre to date.

Footage of the 2019 festival shows congregants celebrating outside the church. Credit: Bernadette Gilbertas

Eyewitnesses said that the festival started much as it had any other year. Footage of the celebrations from 2019 shows priests dressed in white ceremonial robes and crowns, carrying crosses aloft, leading hundreds of people in prayer at Maryam Dengelat church. The faithful sang, danced and ululated in unison.

As prayers concluded in the early hours of November 30, Abraham looked out from the hilltop where the church is perched to see troops arriving by foot, followed by more soldiers in trucks. At first, they were peaceful, he said. They were invited to eat, and rested under the shade of a tree grove.

But, as congregants were celebrating mass around midday, shelling and gunfire erupted, sending people fleeing up mountain paths and into nearby homes.

Desta, who helped with preparations for the festival, said he was at the church when troops arrived at the village entrance, blocking off the road and firing shots. He heard people screaming and fled, running up Ziqallay mountainside. From the rocky plateau he surveyed the chaos playing out below.

We could see people running here and there … [the soldiers] were killing everyone who was coming from the church,” Desta said.

Eight eyewitnesses said they could tell the troops were Eritrean, based on their uniforms and dialect. Some speculated that soldiers were meting out revenge by targeting young men, assuming they were members of the TPLF forces or allied local militias. But Abraham and others maintained there were no militia in Dengelat or the church.

Marta, who was visiting Dengelat for the holiday, says she left the church with her husband Biniam after morning prayers. As the newlyweds walked back to their relative’s home, a stream of people began sprinting up the hill, shouting that soldiers were rounding people up in the village.

She recalled the horrifying moment soldiers arrived at their house, shooting into the compound and calling out: “Come out, come out you b*tches.” Marta said they went outside holding their identity cards aloft, saying “we’re civilians.” But the troops opened fire anyway, hitting Biniam, his sister and several others.

“I was holding Bini, he wasn’t dead … I thought he was going to survive, but he died [in my arms].

The couple had just been married in October. Marta found out after the massacre that she was pregnant.

After the soldiers left, Marta, who said she was shot in the hand, helped drag the seven bodies inside, so that the hyenas wouldn’t eat them. “We slept near the bodies … and we couldn’t bury them because they [the soldiers] were still there,” she said.

Marta and other eyewitnesses described soldiers going house to house through Dengelat, dragging people outside, binding their hands or asking others to do so, and then shooting them.

Rahwa, who was part of the Sunday school group from Edaga Hamus and left Dengelat earlier than others, managing to escape being killed, said mothers were forced to tie up their sons.

“They were ordering their mothers to tie their sons’ hands. They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers,” Rahwa said eyewitnesses told her.

Samuel, another eyewitness, said that he had eaten and drank with the soldiers before they came to his house, which is just behind the church, and killed his relatives. He said he survived by hiding underneath one of their bodies for hours.

“They started pushing the people out of their houses and they were killing all children, women and old men. After they killed them outside their houses, they were looting and taking all the property,” Samuel said.

As the violence raged, hundreds of people remained in the church hall. In a lull in the gunfire, priests advised those who could to go home, ushering them outside. Several of the priests were killed as they left the church, Abraham said.

With nowhere to run to, Abraham sheltered inside Maryam Dengelat, lying on the floor as artillery pounded the tin roof. “We lost hope and we decided to stay and die at the church. We didn’t try to run,” he said.

Two days later, the troops called parishioners down from the church to deal with the dead. Abraham said he and five other men spent the day burying bodies, including those from Marta’s household and the Sunday school children. But the troops forbid them from burying bodies at the church, in line with Orthodox tradition, and forced them to make mass graves instead — a practice that has been described elsewhere in Tigray.

“… most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible”

Tedros

Abraham shared photos and videos of the grave sites, which CNN geolocated to Dengelat with the help of satellite image analysis from several experts. The analysis was unable to conclusively identify individual graves, which witnesses said were shallow, but one expert said there were signs that parts of the landscape had changed.

The initial bloodshed was followed by a period of two tense weeks, Abraham said. Soldiers stayed in the area in several encampments, stealing cars, burning crops and killing livestock before eventually moving on.

Tedros, who was born in Dengelat and traveled there after the soldiers had left, said that the village smelled of death and that vultures were circling over the mountains, a sign that there may be more bodies left uncounted there.

“Some of them were also killed in the far fields while they were trying to escape and most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible. [The soldiers] tied them and killed them in front of their doors, and they shot them in the head just to save bullets,” he said.

Tedros visited the burial grounds described by eyewitnesses and said he saw cracks in the church walls where artillery hit. In interviews with villagers and family members, he compiled a death toll of more than 70 people.

The families hope that the names of their loved ones, which Tedros, Abraham and others risked their lives to record, will eventually be read out at a traditional funeral ceremony at the Maryam Dengelat church — rare closure in an ongoing conflict.

Three months after the massacre, the graves in Dengelat are a daily reminder of the bloodshed for the survivors who remain in the village. But it has not yet been safe enough to rebury the bodies of those who died, and that reality is weighing on them.

Update, March 22: A comment from the Eritrean embassy of the UK and Ireland has been added to this story.

Correction: An on-screen title in an earlier version of the video in this story misstated the date of CNN-obtained footage from Tigray. It was filmed in 2021.

Eliza Mackintosh wrote and reported. Barbara Arvanitidis, Nima Elbagir, Bethlehem Feleke, Gianluca Mezzofiore and Katie Polglase reported.

Edited by Nick Thompson. Video and editorial supervised by Dan Wright. Design and visual editing by Peter Robertson, Henrik Pettersson, Brett Roegiers, Sarah Tilotta, Temujin Doran and Lauren Cook.

Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report from Washington, DC.

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ellie-writes-things · 6 years

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Movement

The Sunbeams, a Lutheran group similar to the Girl Scouts without selling cookies that operated within Apostles Lutheran Church and School--of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod branch of Lutheranism--on Santa Teresa Boulevard, went around neighborhoods in December to sing Christmas carols to well-kept homes in the affluent subdivisions of Santa Clara County. One instance, in the December of my second grade year, has always remained with me. My mother, the current Sunbeam leader at the time, decided that this year would we would travel to senior neighborhoods as well. Little girls, bundled in eclectic blends of green and red sweaters and hats, set out for the night sometime around sunset with a couple volunteer parents and Pastor Kronenbusch in tow. As we sang “The First Noel,” our breaths floated and curled around us, they rose with our voices to the inhabitants’ windows and beyond. One woman sent out her nurse to ask us to stay awhile longer. We sang several carols at her doorway, but never saw her. We only saw the light that shone through her curtains. My throat tingled and my eyes stung with the cold, and I remember my mother clutched my hand in hers before she turned to face me, her eyes bright and damp and her mouth still moving to the words of “Away in a Manger.”

Later that night, our final destination included the street I lived on; a quiet neighborhood that lay within a mobile home park with the lofty name of Chateau La Salle in San Jose off of Monterey Road and Esfahan Drive. The asphalt of Chateau La Salle Drive glittered with the runoff from sprinklers, reflecting the radiance of the strands of fairy lights that lined the houses and street, setting the park aglow. We sang at a few houses before my mother and her assistant, a woman named Becky and the mother of my best friend at that time, Laura, said that we needed to get ready to finish. They revealed that a surprise lay waiting for us before the night ended, and they shuffled us down the road in the direction of the house my mother and I shared with my grandparents and her two brothers. Instead of my home, we stepped up to our next-door neighbors’, a house that belonged to an elderly couple I affectionately called Mr. Bob and Ms. Marilyn, who--along with my youngeset uncle, Randy--set up television trays that held a combination of store-bought and homemade cookies, and I spied a few that my mother made the day before and scolded me not to nick any of them. Ms. Marilyn gave me a hug and pushed a paper cup of apple cider into my mitten. The room buzzed and I wandered to find either my mother or my uncle after the excited group of little girls swallowed me up. The walls twinkled and thrummed, shadows chased by Santas and reindeer upon their surface. I took a sip and the cider burned my tongue, and instead of whimpering I swallowed the liquid along with my discomfort. My uncle stood at the edge of the crowd as he watched the other adults converse with each other-Mr. Bob asked my mother about my grandmother’s health and how my grandfather fared through the ordeal-and I wrapped myself around my uncle’s leg like ivy. My mother nodded and I watched Ms. Marilyn hold her hand, while Becky kept her eyes on the other girls, ever vigilant. I remember my uncle rested his hand on the top of my head and pulled my hat off, before smacking me with it.

I laughed, and leaned my head on his hip while I watched as the other girls giggled and drank and stuffed themselves with cookies, their faces luminous in the radiance of the Christmas tree.

About a week or so later, my mother and I moved out of my grandparents’ home.

I lived, during my elementary school years, in what has turned into one of the most expensive mobile home parks in the country, back when you could still buy a space and home there for a relatively modest sum and not the inflated $200,000 that you would spend now on a smaller home. With three bedrooms and two bathrooms, it housed my grandparents in the master suite, two of my uncles-Dale, the oldest, and Randy, the youngest--in one room, and my mother and I in the last bedroom. It was, originally, a seniors-only park, but, according to my mother, San Jose passed a law that forbade the discrimination of children, which I benefited from as my mother and I would have had nowhere else to go had we not been allowed to live with my grandparents when my mother left the studio we rented after the finalization of her divorce from my father. The added benefit, of course, was the built-in daycare in the form of my grandmother as my mother worked 50-60 hour weeks at Xicor in Milpitas. A 15-minute drive until you take into account Bay Area rush-hour traffic and the nightmare that is U.S. Highway 101. Our neighbors, Mr. Bob and Ms. Marilyn--who threw the Christmas party my Sunbeam troop attended--and Mr. Marty and Ms. Dorothy, kept an eye out for my grandmother while she was at home with my Uncle Randy alone during work and school hours.

My grandfather avoided homeownership for around 30 years, he and his family living in a 8x45 trailer during my mother’s childhood and adolescence, and moved around the west coast often for his job with the government. My mother would say that his reluctance to purchase a permanent home was due to my grandmother’s tendency to threaten divorce whenever they fought.

This, too, was often.

The house my grandmother chose, when she--at last--was afforded the opportunity, sat at the address 201 Chateau La Salle Drive, San Jose 95111. The mint siding and white awning glared under the midday sunlight in the summer, but appeared far more subdued in the darker half of the year. It came with a crimson porch whose steps we sat on to watch the fireworks from the fairground across the street every Fourth of July and where my Uncle Randy showed me how snails sizzle when introduced to salt. The inside had the dark faux-wood paneling popularized in the 80s and 90s and the earth-toned carpet my grandmother preferred because it was easier to keep clean. Tobacco and nicotine dyed the ceiling in nearly every room but mine and my mother’s and old clothes from second grade that I’ve managed to retain after all these years still hold that stale scent of smoke that settled into the fibers of the upholstery from my grandparents lighting up their Marlboro Lights, often as they watched television and drank coffee well into the evening.

As one of the first families to live in the park, and being my mother’s only offspring, other children were a rarity. I spent my time with adults on weekends and after school, and one of my mother’s favorite things to do with me when she managed to claim a slice of free time was visit the Oak Hill Cemetery situated next to the park and tour the gardens and funeral home.

Established in 1847, Oak Hill Cemetery is the oldest secular graveyard in operation within California. My mother would drive us along the roadway-on the occasional Sunday after church-up to the main parking lot where we would abandon her Volvo and walk along the manicured lawns and flower arrangements left by dutiful loved ones on the more recent additions to the landscape. Oleanders, white and pink, blocked the humming of traffic from invading the atmosphere, letting it, instead, waft over the hillside. I remember the thin leaves swaying in the breeze created by passing cars that zipped along the busy roadway while we looked at the engravings on the headstones, taking note of the dates and deducing how old the residents were when they expired. My mother pointed out the more historical graves, such as James F. Reed’s from the infamous Donner party whose body was interned there. The light caught on my mother’s hair, the strands gleaming when I would gaze up at her, and she kept my hand grasped in hers.

I enjoyed being out of the home. And I think that, when she could spare the time, she did too.

Sundays often became my mother’s and my special day to spend together; we attempted to cram a week’s worth of quality time in less than twenty-four hours. The day began at 9:00 am, bathed in a wash of the prismatic light that filtered in through the large stained glass windows behind the altar at Apostles during a sermon delivered by either Pastor Kronenbusch or Pastor Mahnke, followed by fellowship in the narthex where fresh-brewed coffee and hot chocolate and store-brand sandwich cookies awaited the parishioners; the fragrance, of which, emanated throughout the hall. Sunday school in what was normally my second grade classroom--for me--and bible study somewhere in the smaller onsite chapel--for my mother--and then choir practice when I became old enough comprised the rest of the morning for my mother and I. On the way home, we stopped by Winchell’s Doughnuts just off of Santa Teresa and would pick out a baker’s dozen to bring home to the rest of the family who, besides my oldest uncle who went to Peace Lutheran, were not the church-going type. I insisted on three types of doughnuts: chocolate glaze, chocolate cake, and chocolate old-fashioned. My mother comments still that this is a predilection I inherited from my father. I believe my grandparents preferred maple bars, and my grandmother favored those with custard filling. The sweet perfume lingered in my mother’s car and our home for the rest of the day.

After school one day, after one of these Sundays, my Uncle Randy took me out around the neighborhood on my bicycle as my mother was unable, due to her work schedule, with him following along on his. Wet asphalt assaulted my lungs and tongue with its thick fog clinging to the air around us as the sunshine glinted off of the trails the water sprinklers left behind. My training wheels still attached, I wobbled back and forth, nervous of riding over cracks in the pavement, thinking they would crumble and I would fall into a pit, and he eventually dismounted his bike and walked along side with me. He also quipped “Step on a crack and break your mother’s back,” and added to my anxiety. Chateau La Salle maintained a uniform appearance, even to an oblivious seven-year-old with no knowledge of Homeowner's Associations and the grief my grandfather dealt with regarding landscaping and the property manager. Resident’s lawns cut the same length, similar color-schemes, and manicured flower beds. Most homes also had jasmine that climbed up the sides of the houses, much like ours. When it was warm out, like that day in September, the whole park filled with that fragrance and bit my nose. I sneezed, and my uncle handed me his handkerchief, which I hated to use since it could not be thrown away. We encountered a sign that read “Dead End” and I pleaded with my uncle to go back. He insisted we just ride to the sign, and then we could turn around, but I started sniffling and told him I was scared. I felt queasy and hot and I struggled to breath in the air around us. In my mind, I saw myself falling into a chasm that would open if we went on just a bit farther with no end, just a complete absence of light where I could not see the dangers that could be posed to a little girl. He laughed a little, but agreed that we could go back home, even as I looked back towards the sign.

That night, after my mother arrived back home and after dinner and as I was drawing in front of the television with him, he explained to me that a dead end was only a road that went nowhere. I believe on that same night, as we all settled in to watch a movie, he darted out of the house yelling at someone. I tried to follow, but my mother would not let me, saying that Uncle Randy must have thought he heard something. Uncle Dale did take off after him, however, and my mother took me to bed where I watched the play of shadows behind the Ariel the Little Mermaid curtains my mother made.

Convinced I saw a witch’s face or claw reaching out from behind the plumeria that grew in front of my window, I clamored into my mother’s bed.

The next morning he and my mother were in an altercation over the milk for cereal; he slugged her across the face with the gallon jug, and she almost choked him out. My grandmother cried while my grandfather separated them. Milk still soaked the carpet by the time I got out of the bedroom, too scared to make my appearance known any earlier and too scared to ask what was wrong. Someone drew the curtains in both the living room and dining room closed and patches of sun lay across the table and floor in discordant shapes and the front of my mother’s t-shirt remained drenched.

She grabbed her carpet steamer and worked on the floor for two hours as my grandmother berated her for the quarrel, but the scent of stale dairy never fully dissipated in that spot, though over time the ever-present odor of nicotine masked its presence.

Places have a scent, an aroma you will recognize the moment you are confronted with it. If you’ve ever noticed the way 7-11 stores smell the exact same no matter what location you are in, you’ll understand this. Olfactory memories are the easiest, and strongest, to trigger, and, as someone once told me--Randy, I believe--they are frequently said to be the most vivid.

On campus, I will, on occasion, catch a whiff of smoke and am taken back to my grandmother’s living room with the drapes drawn, sitting in my Mickey Mouse chair next to her favorite armchair and watching an episode of “Days of Our Lives” after school or during summer vacation, the cherry on her cigarette a beacon in the shrouded room, diminished only by the flashes from the television set. I still enjoy the company of smokers, despite not smoking myself; the scent of them causes my stomach to unclench and to take a breath that I realize trembles within my lungs. Coffee houses, too, take me back to early mornings with my grandfather in their honey-colored kitchen brewing coffee at 5:30 am before school or on Saturdays, and his timbre rumbling, “That’s not coffee, that’s syrup, granddaughter,” after I added my customary four-to-five teaspoons of white sugar to the cup he gave me while we sat and read the newspaper.

I mumble this to myself when I make my coffee at home, and miss the hiss and pop of the old Mr. Coffee coffee maker my family had as I pour hot water over the freshly ground beans that lay in the single-cup pour-over style brewer a partner of mine preferred.

Likewise, I cannot abide the acridity of burnt plastic or oil as that miasma clung to my Uncle Randy’s clothing and hair, and later took over his presence along with the room my mother and I vacated in ‘95 and seeped into the blankets he used to cover his windows and his bedding before he, too, moved out with Uncle Dale, later the following year. For my grandmother’s health, I think, as it had always been fragile, and began to decline with an alarming rate after my mother remarried in May of ‘96.

Waves of cinnamon and cloves and cardamom and cocoa filled our home when Christmas of 1995 arrived, and the day itself passed with little incident between our official “baking day” that my grandmother and mother coordinated with each other and the caroling that my mother and I participated in that year with my Sunbeam troop and the holiday shopping everyone says they hate but participate in.

To this day I love the Christmas music and decorations that overtake malls and shopping centers. Even when I get the chance to go back to Oakridge and Valley Fair they maintain their magic for me in the form of strands of incandescent bulbs wrapped around faux-pine garland that hang from the balconies and windows of the interior.

The day after Christmas, when the tree still stood upright and our nativity fully displayed atop my mother’s piano and my grandmother and I watched a holiday film on her television that rested on the broken set we used as a T.V. stand, the routine of our post-Christmas tradition disintegrated like those snails my uncle and I poured salt on earlier that summer. My mother said something--I don’t recall what--to my uncle. A response, I believe, to something he may or may not have said to my grandmother and she sent me to our bedroom and told me to play with the artbox that I received the day before. I stared at the closed door of my room, at the blue-and-magenta Lion King cover my mother crafted out of the larger sheet set I received at some point in the year before as shouts and thuds emanated down the short distance of the hall, my grandmother’s voice a tinny echo barely perceptible unless the ear strained to catch it. My stomach twisted around itself and coiled alongside my lungs and my fingers skimmed the tops of the grey keys of the touch-tone phone on my mother’s bedside table. I pulled my hand away when my mother came in and told me to keep the door locked before she left again.

The flash of blue-and-red from behind my bedroom curtains is my next memory as is the pleading of my grandmother’s voice and the image of my uncle--staring at his knees--in the back of a squad car that proclaimed to be a member of the San Jose Police Department. Officers spoke to my mother, and neighbors--including Mr. Bob and Ms. Marilyn and Mr. Marty and Ms. Dorothy--gathered on their matching front lawns that lined Chateau La Salle Drive, still studded with leftover fairy lights from the advent season, their breaths visible and curling in front of their moving mouths, rising into the charcoal sky.

#ellie writes #memoir #mental health #cw: past trauma #mention of violent behavior #this is still pretty rough #writing i mean #i'm gonna smooth this out one day

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freenewstoday · 4 years

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New Post has been published on https://freenews.today/2021/03/01/massacre-in-the-mountains-how-an-ethiopian-festival-turned-into-a-killing-spree/

Massacre in the mountains: How an Ethiopian festival turned into a killing spree

A CNN investigation drawing on interviews with 12 eyewitnesses, more than 20 relatives of the survivors and photographic evidence sheds light on what happened next.

Footage obtained by CNN shows the shoes of some of those killed in Dengelat. Credit: Obtained by CNN

One was Yohannes Yosef, who was just 15.

“We only survived by the grace of God.”

Abraham said he buried more than 50 people that day, but estimates more than 100 died in the assault.

The conflict is the culmination of escalating tensions between the two sides, and the most dire of several recent ethno-nationalist clashes in Africa’s second-most populous country.

“They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers”

Rahwa

CNN has reached out for comment to Eritrea, which has yet to respond. On Friday, the government vehemently denied its soldiers had committed atrocities during another massacre in Tigray reported by Amnesty International.

Footage of the 2019 festival shows congregants celebrating outside the church. Credit: Bernadette Gilbertas

But, as congregants were celebrating mass around midday, shelling and gunfire erupted, sending people fleeing up mountain paths and into nearby homes.

We could see people running here and there … [the soldiers] were killing everyone who was coming from the church,” Desta said.

“I was holding Bini, he wasn’t dead … I thought he was going to survive, but he died [in my arms].

The couple had just been married in October. Marta found out after the massacre that she was pregnant.

Marta and other eyewitnesses described soldiers going house to house through Dengelat, dragging people outside, binding their hands or asking others to do so, and then shooting them.

Rahwa, who was part of the Sunday school group from Edaga Hamus and left Dengelat earlier than others, managing to escape being killed, said mothers were forced to tie up their sons.

“They were ordering their mothers to tie their sons’ hands. They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers,” Rahwa said eyewitnesses told her.

“… most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible”

Tedros

Correction: An on-screen title in an earlier version of the video in this story misstated the date of CNN-obtained footage from Tigray. It was filmed in 2021.

Eliza Mackintosh wrote and reported. Barbara Arvanitidis, Nima Elbagir, Bethlehem Feleke, Gianluca Mezzofiore and Katie Polglase reported.

Edited by Nick Thompson. Video and editorial supervised by Dan Wright. Design and visual editing by Peter Robertson, Henrik Pettersson, Brett Roegiers, Sarah Tilotta, Temujin Doran and Lauren Cook.

Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report from Washington, DC.

Source

#Africa #Tigray massacre: How an Ethiopian festival turned into a killing spree - CNN

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newstfionline · 6 years

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Gambia’s dictator ordered a witch hunt. This village is still haunted by it.

By Sally Hayden, Washington Post, May 28, 2018

SINTET, Gambia--Yahya Jammeh was 15 years into his tenure as Gambia’s autocratic leader in 2009 when, according to local media reports, he ordered security forces to round up hundreds of “sorcerers”--reportedly in retribution for the death of his aunt, who he said was killed by witchcraft.

Over the next seven years, Jammeh directed sporadic “witch hunts” across the West African country of 2 million, a practice confirmed by Gambia’s government. Armed soldiers targeted poor, elderly farmers, forcing them to drink a hallucinogenic liquid before pressuring them into confessing to murders by sorcery, according to victims.

Interviews with more than 20 victims and dozens of witnesses and local leaders in two rural villages revealed a pattern of kidnappings, beatings and forced confessions that have had lasting health implications on survivors and resulted in several deaths, according to surviving family members and neighbors.

Gambian Minister of Information Demba Jawo confirmed the “witch hunts” took place, both in Gambia’s countryside and in government offices in the area around the capital, Banjul. Jawo also confirmed he had heard reports that some victims had died. He called the witch hunts “yet another manifestation of [Jammeh’s] superstitious tendencies.”

No one really knows what Jammeh hoped to gain from the witch hunts. Once the soldiers gained the forced confessions, villagers said, the victims were released or left to be found by family and friends. The deaths that followed days, months and years later were mostly the result of health complications triggered by ingesting the hallucinogenic liquid.

Jammeh was in power for 22 years before being voted out as president at the end of 2016. Although he initially conceded defeat, Jammeh later changed his mind--only fleeing to Equatorial Guinea when the Economic Community of West African States threatened to send in troops to remove him.

But he continues to be a divisive figure among Gambian communities. Many villagers are still unwilling to speak about human rights abuses out of fear that Jammeh will return. Others say they still support the ex-president.

For the many illiterate residents of the farming village of Sintet, about 80 miles east of Banjul, dates and numbers are difficult to specify, and the years blend together. But one day nine years ago stands out.

Witnesses recall dozens of security forces arriving one afternoon in 2009, accompanied by men they describe as foreign “witch doctors,” dressed in red and wearing mirrors around their necks, who had come to cleanse the areas of witches. Jawo, the minister of information, said the figures were “sorcerers from Guinea.” Their attire is thought to play a role in witch hunting: The mirrors are used to identify targets, locals said.

Lamin K. Sanyang, a spokesman for the Gambian armed forces, said that while “officially there is no document or correspondence” that says the military was involved in witch hunts, “there have been incidences where some of our people have been used, escorting witch doctors going around.”

That would have been an “abuse of the armed forces,” he said.

Dembo Badjie, Sintet’s village chief of four years, said he remembered soldiers with guns. His wife was one of those taken, he said. She later died of health complications caused by the witch hunt, several neighbors said. Badjie confirmed that his wife died but refused to specify her cause of death.

In Sintet locals were rounded up, witnesses said. Soldiers filled one minibus and two trucks with people before driving them to Kanilai, Jammeh’s home town, according to multiple victims taken on the buses and witnesses who saw them leave.

There, victims said, they were held in a compound until, one by one, they were forced to drink a bitter liquid at gunpoint. They say it was kubejaro, a plant with hallucinogenic properties that grows in Gambia and is sometimes used by traditional healers. Several villagers recognized the effects of the plant after seeing teenagers consume it to become inebriated.

“Most of the people lost their senses. They peed themselves,” said Dubba, who was captured with her mother-in-law.

“It’s like if you get drunk, you become unconscious,” explained Fatou Darbo, a victim in her 60s. “We were terrified. I can’t remember anything. After drinking, they forced us to confess how many people we killed.”

Many Gambians say they believe in witchcraft. Faith healers and spiritual cures have devotees here. But Sintet’s residents say they were selected randomly and forced to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.

“One of my children passed away before that happened,” said Fadou Drammeh, 66. “I was forced to confess I killed my own child.” Drammeh said a soldier also poured urine on her head.

Fatou Camara remembers being surrounded by 10 men. After declaring she would rather die than say she practiced witchcraft, they made her swallow the liquid a second time. She fainted and hit her head, then lost the ability to speak for hours, she said.

“The only thing we knew was that Jammeh said we were witches,” said Matty Sanyang, a victim in her 50s. “After we were released, it took me awhile to even be able to walk.” Sanyang was later admitted to a hospital for medical treatment.

In 2009, Amnesty International reported two deaths from kidney failure during the witch hunts that year. But victims and others in Sintet say at least nine people died in the weeks and months that followed as a direct consequence of what happened.

One died of injuries from being heavily beaten during the village roundup, and eight others died of health complications that friends and relatives attributed to the liquid they were forced to drink.

Nine years after the first round of witch hunts, many survivors say they still suffer from health issues including stomach problems, weakness, body pains and anxiety. One woman hides whenever she sees a van approaching. Others still have nightmares.

“People still get upset,” said Darbo. “They threatened to come back.”

#Gambia #Gambia witch hunt #Yahya Jammeh

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mishpacha · 7 years

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This article is the story of Nadia Avraham, a trans Israeli Mizrahi woman who was born in Iraq and fled the country to escape antisemitism. Nadia paved the way for Israeli transgender people and her story is well-worth a read. As this is a premium Haaretz article, I will be posting the entire thing below.

It was the period of the War of Attrition, which followed hard on the heels of the '67 Six-Day War. Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, in Ramat Gan, was fully occupied, and the beds of the wounded spilled out into the corridors. Lying among the soldiers, on a bed at the end of a corridor, was a civilian, an alien in the military landscape, alive and hooked up to tubes, but completely covered by a blanket. The soldiers wondered who he was. Why doesn’t the man lying in the corner have any visitors, they asked the nurses. The odd figure became the main topic of conversation in the surgical ward, but the nurses refused to lift the veil of secrecy concealing his identity and the circumstances of his hospitalization.

Two weeks went by, and still no one came to visit. While soldiers continued to arrive steadily, the odd figure from the corridor left the hospital – the fourth person to undergo sex reassignment surgery in Israel.

That person is Nadia Avraham, who will celebrate her 85th birthday next month. “But I look good, still a bit sexy,” she says with a wink and a heavy Iraqi accent.

Avraham lives in the Hatikva neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, in a very small apartment. The bedroom also serves as the living room, and she shares her bed with a cat. On the walls are photographs from the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s – all showing a beautiful woman with big eyes and heavy makeup.

I recorded Nadia for the Hebrew version of “Israel Story,” a documentary podcast broadcast on Army Radio and online, of which I am one of the creators. (An English version is heard on a variety of NPR stations in the U.S., as well as on the website of Tablet magazine.)

Nadia opened all our meetings by saying, “It’s impossible to tell a whole life in a hour or two” – and then sat down on the edge of the bed, straightened up and, despite the constraints of time, started to tell her story.

She has blond hair, bright eyes, a piercing gaze and a singular style of speech that mixes words in Arabic with Hebrew, and in which one particular phrase is prominent: “Maybe yes, maybe no, only God knows.” That’s the essence of her complex worldview, rife with contradictions and an array of identities. Nadia is a “both one and the other” woman.

In one of our meetings, a moment before I turned on the recording device, she went over to the wardrobe and pulled out an old shoebox. In it were dozens of photos, some from a very different era, when she was still Naji, the son of an affluent Jewish family in Baghdad.

When Nadia remembers Naji, the boy she was, she speaks in the first person, but uses the masculine form of speech, adjusting the Hebrew to her biography. She talks about a boy from a large family, with an older sister followed by five brothers. Naji, the middle son, was very close to his mother.

When Naji was 5, a member of his close family started abusing him sexually. “I was afraid, I suffered, I was confused, I didn’t know what it was,” Nadia relates.

Naji did not tell anyone about what he was undergoing, and his psyche remained wounded. He fell ill, became withdrawn, and missed school. This went on for several years, and while his classmates advanced to primary school, he stayed behind, not learning how to read or write. He became a frightened boy, lacking self-confidence. According to Nadia, his worried parents took him to experts of different kinds and to psychiatrists across Iraq, but none of them understood what the child was going through – he refused to talk about it. “The secret stayed imprisoned within me,” Nadia says, “and life at home became unbearable.”

When he was 12, Naji ran away from home. He didn’t have a well thought-out plan, just took a bit of money and headed for the train station. He dreamed only of escaping to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, and starting life over. But shortly after he disappeared, one of his older brothers went to look for him and found the dreamy boy with a backpack at the entrance to the train station. He brought him home in angry and frightening silence. But Naji’s dream of leaving came true a few months later: His parents decided to smuggle him and his older sister far off, to pre-state Palestine.

A truck pulled up in the middle of the night, and Naji and his sister got into it, joining some 50 other people already crammed inside. The truck sped off toward its secret destination.

It wasn’t an orderly aliyah. Iraqi law prohibited Jews from leaving the country, but an escape route was created through neighboring Iran. Naji and his sister lived there with hundreds of Jewish migrants in crowded, dire conditions, slept in tents and made do with the minimal food that was distributed to them – bread with onion and tinned milk.

After a month in the Tehran camp, they were transported to Israel. Naji was happy to have the chance to turn over a new leaf. He was 14, his sister was 30. It took them time to adjust to their new life. They wandered from place to place, from Binyamina to Jerusalem and Rishon Letzion, before finally settling in Tel Aviv. They lived in a small home in the Hatikva neighborhood, which they purchased with money their mother sent.

Some months later, the rest of the family arrived in Israel. Naji, who had always been a mama’s boy, was thrilled to be back together with her. Within months of their reunion, however, his mother fell ill with cancer and died. Without her protection, Naji once more felt vulnerable and alone. Even today, when Nadia talks about her mother, she is visibly consumed with longing. She speaks of the loss as a kind of a “Sliding Doors” moment, and wonders whether her life would have been different if her mother had remained by her side.

After their mother’s death, Naji’s older brother, the same one who had forced him to return home from the train station in Baghdad, started to torment him. The house was no longer safe for Naji. “When I worked, he would take my money, or he would try to teach me to do bad things,” Nadia recalls. “He demanded that I distribute the drugs he sold, made me go to the homes of criminals. Once I tried to run away, but the police brought me back, because of my young age.”

At 16, Naji reported for a pre-induction army screening, thinking that perhaps the military would open the door to a better future.

“I tried, I wanted to go to the army,” Nadia explains. “When the day came, I entered a room filled with doctors and senior officers, and I asked, ‘When do I start serving in the Israel Defense Forces?’ But an officer said, ‘Go home, we don’t take people like you in the army.’ Maybe he meant that I had a feminine body,” she says. “I was as thin as a cue stick, and maybe they didn’t like my body. Maybe they didn’t like my behavior.”

As she tells the story of the event at the recruitment center, Nadia raises her voice and emphasizes the words, remembering the lean boy she was, and laughs. But between the lines and beyond the rolling laughter lurks the disappointment of a boy, somewhat different from other boys, facing a battery of officers, representatives of the establishment, alone. “To this day, I don’t know why they decided not to draft me,” she says.

The rejection by the IDF eliminated another possible route to an easier life as part of Israeli society, and heightened Naji’s distress. Once more he felt he had to escape – this time, for good. “At the age of 16 I ran away from home again,” Nadia relates. “I didn’t have anywhere to go. I lived on the street, slept on benches on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. To satisfy my hunger, I would look for pieces of bread that someone might have thrown into the garbage. And it was hot, a hamsin.”

Victor Victoria

Life on the street was hard, aggravated by a feeling of loneliness, fraught with danger, a battle to survive – and it was a life that set Naji up for exploitation.

Nadia: “I prayed to God that someone would come and take me. Let him do whatever he wants, only let me go inside to wash up and maybe eat something, in his home or in a hotel, the main thing was to get through the night.”

Naji spent a few months living a homeless life on a bench on Rothschild Boulevard. Still, alongside the tremendous difficulties, he began to experience a thrilling sense of freedom. A new world was revealed to him.

“There was a place on Rothschild Boulevard where all the homosexuals used to gather. In the morning I sat on a bench without anything to eat or drink, and in the evening, when the gays arrived, I would forget about food and forget myself – all I wanted was to look at them. One was named Merry-Man, another Poldina, and another Aunt Fanny, and they were from every ethnic group: Persians, Iraqis, Poles. They laughed and talked, and I was envious of them for having such a beautiful life and being able to live with their families, while for me it was hard, living on the street and sleeping on benches.”

On those Tel Aviv nights, Naji felt that he belonged for the first time in his life. “I met a gay guy who wandered around the parks, and he called me Nadia, he was the first to give me that name. I hooked up with him and he took me to his family in Or Yehuda.” From then on, Naji’s name was Nadia. The friend who gave him the name was Victor, who afterward became Victoria.

Victor lived with an elderly, childless Romanian couple who had informally adopted him and afterward did the same with Nadia. It was they who rescued him from the street. Nadia lived with them for eight years. “They were lovely, good people,” she says. “My life with them was the happiest I’d known, much more than with my family, whom I’d rid myself of.”

During those years, Nadia worked in a laundry, running a dry-cleaning machine that needed quite a bit of manual assistance. In the morning, she awoke happily to another day of work; in the evening she went out with her gay companions on the streets of Tel Aviv.

“In that period,” Nadia recalls, “Victoria and I met a dancer named Miko. He suggested that we go to Belgium, buy a wig and a dress, work as women and make a bundle of money. I don’t know whether I believed him or not, but I did it. I quit my job, got severance pay and went to Belgium with Victoria. We started to work as cross-dressers. At night I would dress up as a woman, and during the day I was a regular guy.”

Still not knowing how to read or write, but with acute street smarts, Nadia worked in Europe and met people from all classes of society. “I didn’t really know what to do with the money,” she notes. “For 15 years I lived in Europe, going from city to city, without knowing any languages other than Hebrew and Arabic. Trying to go deal with people who spoke Flemish, French, English, Turkish and Ladino. But I learned and I matured. I didn’t learn perfectly, but I started to get along. I would call to people, ‘Hello, come here, do you want to make love?’”

I try to ask Nadia about the hardships of night life, the world of clubs, the striptease acts and the prostitution, about the violence and exploitation that her life must have entailed. But she rebuffs the question even before I finish asking it. “There, I felt free and strong,” she asserts.

As we speak, it occurs to me that “freedom” is a relative term – elusive, era-dependent, biography-dependent, gender-dependent. The freedom she had in Europe was juxtaposed with her history, her past, the vulnerability, the secret and the rough life she had endured at home.

But as the years passed, Nadia’s attitude toward freedom and the “glamorous life” in Europe changed. After 15 years, she relates, “I felt that I couldn’t go on like that. I’d already started to become older, you could say, and I decided to return to Israel. I wanted to leave that way of life completely. I didn’t want it. I was revolted or despairing.”

The Surgery

Back in Israel, Nadia tried to start over. She found a job washing dishes in a Tel Aviv restaurant, but the regular hours and the minimum-wage work under a tough boss-woman was not for her. “The proprietress really tormented me,” she recalls, “until one day I took off the apron, threw it in her face and told her, ‘The salary I get from you in a month, I can earn alone in an hour.’”

She stalked out, and in the meantime moved in with Carol, a friend she’d known since the days on the boulevard bench. “I lived with him at the corner of Dizengoff and Ben-Gurion Avenue, on the top floor. One day, as we were talking, he suddenly says to me, ‘Nadia, if you want to have a sex-change operation, now’s the time. There’s an American doctor here, now.’”

Sex-reassignment surgery was almost unknown in Israel at the time, but it wasn’t a new concept to Nadia: “In the years when I worked in Europe, I met lady-men and also transvestites of all kinds.” Some of them had the surgery. She felt that this was what she had to do. Not hesitating for a moment, she met with the physician. As soon as he saw her, she says proudly, he agreed to operate. He explained the cost, told her about the process itself, the recovery period, and sent her for diagnosis by a psychiatrist, who also gave his immediate approval. A week later, she was in Sheba Medical Center among the wounded soldiers.

After the physical transformation, Nadia had to cope with the official, bureaucratic changes, including her gender classification in her ID card and passport. Unlike today, no orderly procedure for all this existed in early-1970s Israel. The Interior Ministry, flummoxed, sent her to the Health Ministry, which ruled that a person who wished to change his gender officially records had to go before a medical committee.

“I came to the committee, lay on the bed, opened my legs. I was examined by about 12 doctors, and they all said, ‘You are a woman in every respect, except that you can’t have children.’ I understood, and said, ‘Children there will definitely never be.’ I went back to the Interior Ministry and they immediately changed my ID and passport from ‘male’ to ‘female.’”

With her brand new passport, which bore the photograph of a woman, Nadia flew to Europe once more, this time to Berlin. “I was supposed to work next to a hotel, go up with each client, agree with him on a price of 30 or 50 marks, and then sleep with him And I wasn’t used to that kind of work. When I worked in the clubs, I would lure them with drinks, and I knew how to get more and more money from them without giving anything in return.”

In short order, however, Nadia returned to Tel Aviv – this time to stay. She worked in a nightclub on the seaside promenade. “Every client whom I could tell had plenty of money, I turned into my regular client. If I were to count the number of men I met in my life, it would be the length of a bridge from here to New York,” she says with resounding laughter. “All the rich guys, all the men who have inferiority feelings and are ashamed with their wives, they all came to me at whatever price I wanted.”

Eventually Nadia made enough money to buy an apartment in the upscale Bavli neighborhood in Tel Aviv’s Old North – a place she could call home, and which afforded her quiet and security.

One evening, a friend told her that she’d met a boy of 14 who’d run away from home and was sleeping in the street. Nadia felt that life had destined her to meet with this boy, whom she herself had been, sleeping on benches and hungry for bread. She asked her friend to bring the boy to her. Immediately she made a place for the boy, whose name she asks not to share, in her home and in her heart. Nadia, who had survived alone her whole life, raised him like a son.

At the age of 18, the youth was drafted into the air force. After his service he married and fathered children. Nadia remained by his side throughout, but the boy who matured into a man was unable to bear the difficult memories of his earlier life, and died suddenly and tragically. Nadia was shattered. It was the first time she had allowed herself to truly get close to someone, to create a family of her own.

“It was terribly hard for me,” she says now. “I couldn’t function anymore. He was the most precious thing in the world for me. No siblings and no family and no one else – only him.”

Nadia invited the widow and her two small children to move in with her. They lived together as a kind of family for 18 years, until the relations between them grew too complex and Nadia again felt that she had to leave home in order to preserve her freedom: “I really didn’t want to return to the kind of life I had lived with my family [growing up], to deal with difficult relationships, so I picked myself up and went, and left them the house, with no misgivings.”

The family of the adoptive son continued to live in Nadia’s spacious home in the Bavli neighborhood, while Nadia, who hadn’t been in touch with her own siblings and their families for years, returned to Hatikva. She moved into a one-room apartment that her father, who had since passed away, had left her in the family compound. She now lives in proximity to her brothers (her sister is no longer alive), but has no contact with them, she says. Time hasn’t dulled the pain. Nadia is unforgiving, but also unafraid, of them or of anyone.

“With all the suffering I went through, God always loved me and always looked after me, maybe he pitied me, I don’t know,” she says.

Donating a Torah

I’m in Nadia’s small room. We’re listening to the radio, to the very program we recorded in which Nadia is the star and tells her story in her voice. Occasionally she confirms what’s being broadcast, saying, “It’s all true, on my father’s grave.”

Photographs of Nadia in her youth peer out at us from the walls. She looks at them and says to me with a half-smile, “Old age will grab everyone in the end, there’s no one who won’t die.” Contemplating her death, she says with a wink that she deserves to be buried in Tel Aviv’s historical Trumpeldor cemetery, next to all of Israel’s founding fathers. But what’s truly important to her is to donate a Torah scroll in her name to the neighborhood synagogue. Nadia answers to no one but God and herself.

Now, at 85, Nadia has come full circle with her past, with the memories that well up and with the freedom she craved – and, finally, achieved: “I had it very good, and I loved my life. From the time I ran away from home and until I got to the cross-dressing and afterward the operation, and beyond, I was always happy in my life. I wanted and I chose and that’s the most beautiful and the best thing in life. I did what my heart demanded and what it wanted. That’s all. There’s nothing more beautiful than that. Live free in life and you have it good.”

#Nadia Avraham #Jewish #Israeli #Mizrahi #LGBTQ #trans #haaretz

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orbemnews · 4 years

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They can only hold hands, but for Britain's elderly, first touch with a relative 'means everything' “Hello my darling,” he says. “Do you know who I am? I’m David.” Before even putting down his bags, David sits on Sheila’s bed, next to her armchair, and holds her hand — for only the second time since the pandemic came to Britain. The response from Sheila, his wife of 55 years, is impossible to read. She has advanced dementia and she rarely speaks. “It’s a long time since I’ve seen you,” he tells her. “That’s because of this Covid thing.” Throughout the pandemic, Sheila was cut off from everyone who loved her because Britain’s nursing and care homes have largely remained closed to visitors. Now the UK’s vaccine rollout has made an incremental but significant change possible. Each resident in England is allowed one designated, indoor visitor. CNN received permission to observe some of the first moments where people in care were reunited with loved ones. David gives Sheila daffodils from their garden. He inspects her fingernails to see if they need to be trimmed. He tells her that their three sons love and miss her. Often, he just looks at her silently while stroking her forearm with a gloved hand. They met when they were both teachers at neighboring schools. Sheila is now 81. “She was always very sociable,” David recalls. “Outgoing and happy and fulfilled with home and her family.” David is satisfied there is no obvious decline in her condition but says he cannot know what she was thinking and feeling during their long time apart. Visitors must record a negative Covid-19 test result immediately before entering the home and wear personal protective equipment (PPE) throughout the visit. Hugging and kissing are forbidden. David says just being able to hold hands is a huge improvement for Sheila’s quality of life. “One of the few ways that she can show her feelings, really,” he says. “I think you’ve got to be grateful for what you’ve got.” One town over in Bexhill, in one of the many care homes along this stretch of England’s southern coast, Renee Dolan, 86, waits anxiously for her granddaughter. Suddenly Sara Agliata rounds the corner and two big smiles light up the room. “Nan! Ahhh!” cries Sara. “Oh, thank you darling,” Renee says, receiving a bouquet of flowers. “You’ve had to come in all this plastic.” “I know, I know,” Sara laughs. “You can hear me coming.” Her grandmother grips her hand tightly. With the other, she places a kiss on her cheek. “Oh, you’re not allowed to kiss me,” Sara says gently. For the next half hour their hands stay locked together, and a lively conversation flows from great grandkids to Harry and Meghan’s recent interview. At times, Renee is overwhelmed with emotion and struggles to explain how important this moment is. “It’s so nice seeing you. It’s [been] a long time,” she says, sobbing. Her granddaughter assures her: “I’m going to come back next week as well.” Renee’s husband died at 47. She spent decades living alone in central London and is now experiencing early dementia. “She’s an extremely independent person that does love her family, and likes to be around them,” Sara says. “She likes to be around people.” Renee is grateful for the comfort of holding hands — “it means everything to me, everything” — but she hopes for more. “It’s just a shame we can’t hug yet,” she says. “But it won’t be long, will it?” Outside Eastbourne’s Manor Hall Nursing Home, a group of residents is slowly but excitedly boarding a mini bus. This is the first time they are allowed to leave the building and its small courtyard since last summer. The excursion opens with a drive through the rolling, green hills of the South Downs National Park. “We’ve waited a long time for this, haven’t we? Beautiful,” says George Baulch, 87, smiling out of the window. The bus soon stops at a public garden by the seaside. The residents decamp to benches. Their carers hand out blankets, cups of tea and snacks. There are smiles and laughter and much grousing about the early spring chill. Someone makes a saucy joke about the size of a banana. This is the most freedom they’ve experienced in a long time. “You come here and you realize how big England is,” George says with a laugh. The elderly have sacrificed more freedoms than most during the pandemic, and more than half of Covid-19 deaths in England and Wales last year were from those over 80. They were prioritized in the UK’s vaccine rollout from December and first doses have now been delivered to 99.9% of England’s nursing and care homes, according to the country’s National Health Service. Around 23 million people in total across the UK have now received a first vaccine shot. That protection is allowing modest changes, the possibility of hope and glimpses of a post-Covid future. “We’ve been locked up for weeks and weeks and weeks,” George says. “[I] never thought it was going to happen again for us. And now we’re here.” CNN’s Darren Bull and Matt Brealey contributed to this report. Source link Orbem News #Britains #elderly #Hands #Hold #means #relative #touch

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cutsliceddiced · 4 years

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New top story from Time: All Your Coronavirus Questions, Answered

One of the worst symptoms of any plague is uncertainty—who it will strike, when it will end, why it began. Merely understanding a pandemic does not stop it, but an informed public can help curb its impact and slow its spread. It can also provide a certain ease of mind in a decidedly uneasy time. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about the COVID-19 pandemic from TIME’s readers, along with the best and most current answers science can provide.

A note about our sourcing: While there are many, many studies underway investigating COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-19, the novel coronavirus that causes the illness, it is still essentially brand new to science. As a result, while we’ve drawn primarily on peer-reviewed studies published in scientific journals, we have cited some yet-to-be-published research into important aspects of COVID-19 when appropriate.

Coronavirus FAQ

What are the symptoms of COVID-19? Who’s most at risk for COVID-19? Are children at risk? How long does COVID-19 last? How long is COVID-19 infectious in people? Can I get COVID-19 and the seasonal flu or common cold at the same time? What’s the treatment for COVID-19? How does a COVID-19 test work? Should I get tested? How does COVID-19 spread? Is COVID-19 airborne? Is there any difference between being indoors or outdoors when it comes to transmission? Do masks work for preventing the spread of COVID-19? How long does the COVID-19 virus survive on surfaces? Is there any risk of the COVID-19 virus living on mail & packages? Is there any risk with food delivery services? Does rain wash away the COVID-19 virus? What should I do to shop safely? Should I worry about my clothes after I’ve been outside? Can I get COVID-19 more than once? If I get COVID-19 and recover, am I immune and safe to be around/help out older family and neighbors? I’ve been social distancing for two weeks. When is it safe for me to go see family? Can my dog or cat get COVID-19? Can the COVID-19 virus live on my pet’s fur? Do flies, mosquitoes, or other insects carry or transmit the virus? Can cleaning products kill the COVID-19 virus? Does it matter what type of soap I use to wash my hands? What are the practices for doing laundry in a shared/public laundry room?

What are the symptoms of COVID-19?

Studies have shown that while some COVID-19 patients get only very mild symptoms or none at all, some can develop severe pneumonia and other health issues. A World Health Organization report from February found that around 80% of patients with laboratory confirmed cases “have mild disease and recover.” Researchers are not certain how many people infected with the virus are nearly or entirely asymptomatic. “There is not a single reliable study to determine the number of [asymptomatic sufferers],” says a metastudy conducted by scientists from Oxford University, and published online on April 6. “It is likely we will only learn the true extent once population-based antibody testing is undertaken,” write the study authors. (The metastudy, which looked at 21 earlier studies from around the world, has not been peer-reviewed.) The only way to know for sure if you are infected with SARS-CoV-19, the virus that causes COVID-19, is to get tested.

According to a study of nearly 56,000 laboratory confirmed cases cited in the WHO report, the most common symptom, experienced by 88% of confirmed patients, is a fever. The other most common symptoms according to that study are, in descending order:

Dry cough (68%)

Fatigue (38%)

Coughing up sputum/mucus production (33%)

Shortness of breath (19%)

Joint or muscle pain (15%)

Sore throat (14%)

Headache (14%)

Chills (11%)

Nausea or vomiting (5%)

Nasal congestion (5%)

Diarrhea (3%)

Coughing up blood (1%)

Eye discharge (1%)

One thing missing from this list is anosmia, or loss of sense of smell. Anecdotal reports suggest that people with milder cases of the disease could have telltale symptoms like the loss of their sense of smell and/or taste, however the WHO has not yet added those symptoms to its official list, as the data are not yet strong enough. But an analysis of a COVID-19 symptom-tracking app in the U.K. shows 59% of the 579 users who had tested positive for the disease reported a loss of smell and taste, compared to 18% who did not have the disease.—Billy Perrigo

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Who’s most at risk for COVID-19?

At this point, it seems people of all ages are susceptible to infection of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, those most at risk of severe cases of the illness are the elderly and people with underlying health conditions (like high blood pressure, heart disease, lung disease, cancer and diabetes) according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) clarifies further, stating that those most at risk for severe illness are:

adults 65 and older and people with chronic lung or heart disease

people who are immunocompromised (such as those with HIV)

the severely obese

people with chronic kidney disease undergoing dialysis

people with liver disease

In the U.S., 80% of COVID-19 related deaths have been adults 65 years and older, according to the CDC.

It is too early to tell if pregnant women are also at risk of severe illness caused by the coronavirus, according to the WHO. Some newborn babies have reportedly tested positive for the virus, but it is unclear how the transmission occurred.—Jasmine Aguilera

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Are children at risk?

Yes, but the good news is that their risk may be lower than that of most adults. Chinese doctors first reported that children did not seem to be getting infected as easily as adults, and that they also did not need to be hospitalized as frequently as adults did. That trend seems to be holding true in the U.S. as well. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that compared to adults, children under the age of 18 are less likely to experience the typical symptoms of infection, including fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and are also less likely to need hospitalization and less likely to die of COVID-19.

That’s unusual for a respiratory disease, since viruses like influenza often strike the very young and the very old more aggressively, given their more vulnerable immune systems. “I can’t think of another situation in which a respiratory infection only affects adults so severely,” says Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine and chair of the committee on infectious diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics. “This is not common at all; we just don’t know what is going on here.”

One theory is that the severest symptoms of COVID-19 in adults may be caused by an overactive immune response to the virus in the lungs, which can make breathing difficult. Children’s immune systems may not be developed enough to launch such an aggressive reaction, and that may spare them some of the infection’s worst consequences.

The data suggest that infants may be more likely to need hospitalization if they are infected compared to toddlers, but more studies are needed to better understand how the virus is affecting children overall. In the meantime, doctors recommend that parents consider children as vulnerable to infection as adults, and appreciate that young ones can spread the virus as effectively as adults too, even if they don’t have symptoms.—Alice Park

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How long does COVID-19 last?

That depends on the severity of infection. If it’s a mild infection, like most people get, symptoms will likely last for about seven to 10 days and will be similar to those caused by the seasonal flu, says Dr. Emily Landon, the chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine. But for roughly 20% of COVID-19 patients, infection can worsen after this initial period, and in some cases lead to hospitalization. For even people with moderate cases, symptoms can last for a month or more until they are fully recovered.

“You can have people who have very mild symptoms that last a couple of days and then you have other people who can really get quite sick and go to the intensive care unit and be there for a month or more,” says Dr. Albert Ko, department chair and professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Those who get so severely ill that they are battling pneumonia and potential respiratory failure in intensive care units could take over a month to recover, Ko says.

Mild symptoms are unlikely to last longer than three weeks. “The fatigue can linger, as can the loss of appetite and some people routinely have a nagging cough after a viral infection that can last for weeks,” Landon says. “So some people will have lengthy symptoms but those aren’t really from active viral infection. They are more of a recovery syndrome.”—Sanya Mansoor

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How long is COVID-19 infectious in people?

It’s unclear. We do know that people infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 can be “contagious a few days before they even show symptoms and some people never really have much in the way of symptoms but can definitely pass on the virus,” says Dr. Emily Landon, the chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine. “What we don’t know is how long they remain contagious.”

The general rule Landon and her colleagues use is that “you’re probably good” if a week has passed from when you first began feeling sick and you’ve had three full days of feeling completely well. That means no more cough and no more fever for at least three days. “You are probably contagious starting two to three days before you develop symptoms and until your fever is gone and your cough is pretty much resolved,” Landon says.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says more or less the same in its guidelines, but is more explicit, telling COVID-19 patients that they are free to break quarantine only if:

they have had no fever for at least 72 hours without the aid of fever-reducing medications

all other symptoms like coughing and shortness of breath have improved

and at least seven days have passed since they first became symptomatic

if a coronavirus test is available, they should have also had two negative tests 24 hours apart

(The full CDC guidelines are here.)

The World Health Organization offers similar guidance to the CDC, recommending that COVID-19 patients be released from the hospital, isolation or home care only after they have two negative tests at least 24 hours apart and have clinically recovered. If testing is not an option, the WHO advises keeping individuals isolated for another two weeks after the symptoms are gone because they may continue to “shed”(or emit from the body) the virus.—Sanya Mansoor

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Can I get COVID-19 and the seasonal flu or common cold at the same time?

Yes.

Flu and COVID-19 are caused by two different viruses and there is nothing preventing you from getting exposed, and infected with both at the same time. It’s unusual, but possible.—Alice Park

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What’s the treatment for COVID-19?

For those with mild cases of COVID-19, the key is to get plenty of rest and liquids, as well as to take vitamins and eat a healthy diet, says Dr. Emily Landon, the chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine.

For severe cases, “there’s no evidence, based on the typical scientific rigor that we demand, for any specific treatment at this point,” says Dr. Albert Ko, department chair and professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.

But there are trials underway testing some promising therapeutic options. One has been in the headlines recently: hydroxychloroquine. President Trump has repeatedly touted the drug (currently used primarily to treat malaria and some autoimmune diseases) as part of a possible cure for coronavirus even though experts, including Ko, say there is not enough evidence to currently recommend the treatment. “I have several concerns about the design of those trials,” Ko says, adding that while we know that hydroxychloroquine “suppresses viral growth in the test tube,” we “don’t know exactly why and if it’s going to work in people.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has said the research that produced the data so far “was not done in a controlled clinical trial. So you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”

Another promising option is remdesivir, an injectable drug developed to fight ebola. “[Remdesivir] is probably the most promising of the drugs that we have available,” says Dr. Emily Landon, the chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine, but the full scope of its effects won’t be known until further analysis is conducted. Trials for remdesivir are currently underway.

Repurposed drugs like remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine can skip several regulatory steps and go straight to late-stage trials assessing effectiveness whereas new drugs have to face many more regulatory hurdles. (Hydroxychloroquine has already been approved for a number of medical purposes, while remdesivir, though tested as an Ebola treatment, has not yet been approved for anything.) An Emergency Use Authorization issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration can speed up the process for newer drugs, though even then, approval typically takes at least six months.—Sanya Mansoor

For more on treatments:

What You Need to Know About Hydroxychloroquine

The Launch of the First COVID-19 Vaccine Study

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How does a COVID-19 test work?

The current gold standard is a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test, which detects the existence of the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in a person’s body. The test requires a sample of cells from the back of the nose and throat, and then uses chemical probes targeted to find the genes that code for the biggest feature of the virus, its spike proteins, which dot the surface the virus like a crown (hence the name “coronavirus”—corona is latin for crown). If someone is infected with SARS-CoV-2 and has traces of virus, this test will pick it up. It’s generally pretty sensitive, meaning it can pick up even relatively low levels of the virus.

But it has one key drawback: it may not find the virus if someone is tested very early after infection and there isn’t enough virus yet for the probe to spot.

The other type of test currently in use is a blood-based test that looks for antibodies to the virus. Antibodies are made by the body’s immune system to fight viral infection, so picking up antibodies is an indirect way of knowing that virus is present. This test also has drawbacks: it isn’t able to accurately identify people who are infected but haven’t yet generated enough antibodies for the test to detect.—Alice Park

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Should I get tested?

That depends on a number of different things. First, if you have a fever, cough and shortness of breath, you might consider getting tested since these are the hallmark symptoms of COVID-19.

If you aren’t sick, you still might need a test if you are at high risk of being infected. That category of people includes health care workers and anyone living with or caring for someone who is infected. Your exposure means you have a higher chance of getting the disease. Getting tested and knowing if you are positive means you can self-isolate and take other precautions in order to prevent spreading the virus to others.

Remember, however, that while you can ask for a COVID-19 test, you still need a doctor to authorize it. Even at-home test kits require you to connect with and answer questions with a telehealth doctor first, who will decide if you need the test.

At this point in time, due to limited availability of tests, the focus is on using testing to identify who is positive and in need of urgent medical care. It’s also important for knowing who is positive and therefore can spread the virus to others. As cases start to subside, the latter group will become more important as public health experts turn to testing as a way to control new infections. Testing will tell them who can return to work once shelter-in-place orders are lifted, and who, if they are positive, still need to self-isolate at home.—Alice Park

For more on testing:

Why Can’t I Get a Coronavirus Test?

An At-Home Coronavirus Test Is On the Way

A Two-Hour Test Has Been Submitted to the FDA for Review

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How does COVID-19 spread?

The prevailing means of transmission is via virus-containing microdroplets expelled when someone who is infected either sneezes or coughs. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, genetic material of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, has been found in fluids in both the upper and lower respiratory tract, meaning that the saliva and mucus of an infected person is likely to contain the virus.

Less is known about other body fluids and products. One recent study from Sun-Yat Sen University in China found that genetic material from the virus is present in fecal samples from infected individuals. The CDC agrees that fecal transmission is possible and also reports that infectious SARS-CoV-2 has been found in blood. Even less is known about other bodily fluids, including urine, vomit, breast milk and semen. But CDC guidance for people who are sick and not hospitalized is nonetheless to “clean and disinfect all surfaces that may have blood, stool or other body fluids on them.”—Jeffrey Kluger

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Is COVID-19 airborne?

The virus that causes COVID-19 is an airborne pathogen, and humans are its primary delivery vehicle. Coughing, sneezing and even just speaking release droplets on the order of 100 microns in size (or 1/100th of a centimeter) into the air. “Your larynx is vibrating as you speak and it acts as a little nebulizer,” says Dr. Christopher Gill, associate professor of global disease at the Boston University School of Public Health. (A nebulizer turns a liquid into a mist.)

The half-life of the aerosol droplets is about an hour, according to Gill, which is short, but still leaves plenty of time after which the fluids released by an infected person’s cough or sneeze are infectious. It’s unclear to scientists if a viral particle continues to be infectious when the micro-droplet that contains it evaporates.

Even in a time of social distancing, enclosed public spaces like grocery stores remain problematic, Gill says, since a great many people may pass through an infected space within the hours the virus lingers in the air. “You should worry more about the air you breathe in a grocery store than about whether someone touched the broccoli,” he says.—Jeffrey Kluger

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Is there any difference between being indoors or outdoors when it comes to transmission?

Staying home and social distancing remain the best way to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus, but if you must come into contact with other people, you’re safer outdoors than indoors. We all occupy an area in three dimensional space, and as we move away from one another, the volume of air space on which we have an impact expands enormously. “If you go from a 10-ft. sphere to a 20-ft. sphere you dilute the concentration [of contaminated air] 1,000-fold,” says Dr. Christopher Gill, associate professor of global health at Boston University School of Public Health. That’s important because a single sneeze can project particles a distance of 9 meters, or about 27 feet. The less concentrated those particles are in the air, the less danger they present. “Within seconds [a virus] can be blown away,” Gill says.

Sunlight may also act as a sterilizer, Gill says. Ultraviolet wavelengths can be murder—literally—on bacteria and viruses, though there hasn’t yet been enough research to establish what exactly the impact of sun exposure is on SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.

That’s not to say there’s no risk outdoors. People can still cough, sneeze or speak particles into their air space, and especially in a city, the distance between individuals is not always 20 or even 10 feet. In general though, being outdoors in the vicinity of an infected person is safer than being indoors with that person.—Jeffrey Kluger

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Do face masks work for preventing the spread of COVID-19?

When the new coronavirus first hit the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told people not to wear face masks unless they were sick or caring for someone who was. Masks help capture some of a sick person’s respiratory droplets, which might otherwise spread the virus. In early April, however, the CDC began advising all people to wear non-medical “masks”—any fabric that covers the nose and mouth—when they leave home. The reason for the shift? Scientists now know that many people who are infected with the coronavirus show no symptoms yet can still spread it to others. There’s no way to tell who’s sick and who’s not.

But the efficacy of homemade masks is not scientifically settled. Studies do find that masks can help prevent a sick person from spreading some viruses to others—and may even marginally protect healthy people from becoming ill. “Across these studies, it’s quite consistent that there’s some small effect and there’s no risk associated with wearing masks,” says Allison Aiello, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.

But this research is on surgical masks: loose-fitting masks designed to protect the wearer from outside virus-containing splashes and droplets, and to catch infected droplets that escape the wearer’s mouth or nose.

Neither these nor N95 respirators—tight-fitting facial devices that filter out small particles from the air—are recommended for the general public due to a shortage for health care workers.

It’s unclear if the research on masks would also apply to homemade face coverings, but Aiello and others believe that physical facial barriers are worth wearing during the pandemic even in the absence of strong evidence. As the authors of an analysis published April 9 in the BMJ put it, “In the face of a pandemic the search for perfect evidence may be the enemy of good policy. As with parachutes for jumping out of aeroplanes, it is time to act without waiting for randomised controlled trial evidence.”

Few studies have tested homemade masks. One published in 2013 found that T-shirt masks were about a third as effective as surgical masks at filtering small infectious particles. That’s “better than nothing,” says study author Anna Davies, a research coordinator at the University of Cambridge, but “there’s so much inherent variability in a homemade mask.” Other research found that homemade masks may actually increase the risk of infection if they’re not washed often enough, since damp fabric can breed pathogens.

The bottom line is that wearing a mask is probably a sensible move—as long as you clean it often, wash your hands, refrain from touching your face and continue to keep a safe distance from other people. But there’s not robust evidence that the DIY kind will definitely stop you or others from getting sick.—Mandy Oaklander

For more on masks:

Should Healthy People Wear Masks to Prevent Coronavirus?

How to Make a DIY Face Mask

The Ethics of Wearing (or Not Wearing) a Face Mask

Why Wearing a Face Mask Is Encouraged in Asia, but Shunned in the U.S.

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How long does the COVID-19 virus survive on surfaces?

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on March 17 found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, could last up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard, and two to three days on plastic and stainless steel. Another study published in The Lancet on April 2 found the virus could last for three hours on printing and tissue paper, and up to one day on treated wood or cloth. It also found that the virus lasted three days on glass and banknotes and six days on stainless steel and plastic—far longer than the New England Journal of Medicine study found. Lastly, The Lancet study also found the virus remained on the outside of a surgical mask for seven days.

However, keep in mind these results were produced in a lab. The virus likely breaks down much more quickly in the environment due to its sensitivity to sunlight and temperature, says Dr. Albert Ko, department chair and professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Yale School of Public Health.

It’s also important to remember that scientists don’t know yet how much of the virus someone has to be exposed to in order to become infected, says Jared Evans, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. While a certain amount of infectious virus could be on a subway pole, it’s unclear if it would be enough to get a person sick.

Still, experts say wiping down objects as they enter your home, including delivery food containers, is a good way to mitigate risk of exposure.—Madeleine Carlisle

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Is there any risk of the COVID-19 virus living on mail & packages?

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on March 17 found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, could live up to 24 hours on cardboard. A study published in The Lancet on April 2 found that it could last up to three hours on paper. But keep in mind that the virus will likely break down more quickly outside of a laboratory, due to real-world exposures like sunlight, wind and temperature, experts say.

So yes, there is likely some risk that the virus could be on your mail, but it’s a small one. “A letter that’s been mailed to you and been traveling through the postal service for a couple of days, the virus will be off of that,” says Jared Baeten, professor of global health, medicine and epidemiology at the University of Washington. The risk comes when the carrier handles your mail and brings it to your door, potentially exposing it to the virus again.

The infectious dose of the virus—the amount a person has to be exposed to in order to become infected—is still unknown, says Jared Evans, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. So even if the virus is on a package, it might not be enough to get you sick.

Still, out of an abundance of caution, Matthew Freeman, an associate professor of environmental health, epidemiology and global health at Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, recommends opening your package or mail outside your house, disposing of the box or envelope, coming back inside and immediately washing your hands. If you want to be even more thorough, you can also wipe down the contents of a package and then wash your hands again, although it’s quite unlikely the virus will have survived. Crucially, you should make sure to stay at least 6 feet away from the mail carrier at all times.—Madeleine Carlisle

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What should I do to shop safely?

When shopping, the safest thing you can do is stay 6 feet away from other people at all times, experts tell TIME. Be patient. If you see a crowded aisle, wait or come back later. While there’s a chance the virus could be transmitted on a surface, “you’re most likely to get this from another person,” says Dr. Lauren Sauer, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Try to shop somewhere that already enforces social distancing, such as making people stand 6 feet apart in line. Also try to go to the store at “off-peak hours” and be respectful of the hours set aside for high-risk individuals. Ordering groceries online can also be a good option, especially if you’re in a high-risk category, experts say.

But if you must go to the store, a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends cleaning your shopping cart or basket—specifically the handles and other surface areas—with disinfectant wipes. Sauer also recommends using a paper shopping list, rather than your phone, while you’re in the store, because “the less you can touch your personal items in public spaces, the better.”

Once you’ve touched an item in the store, assume your hands may have been contaminated, experts say. Touch as few things as possible and don’t touch your eyes, nose or mouth. Bring hand sanitizer and use it often. You don’t need to wear gloves, because they don’t stop you from spreading the virus to your face. However, the CDC does recommend wearing a non-medical mask to reduce the risk of inadvertently spreading the virus to others.

When you go to pay, try to have as little contact with the cashier as possible. As soon as you can, make sure to wash your hands using soap and water for at least 20 seconds.

The CDC spokesperson says that “[currently] there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 associated with food or food packaging.” Still, if you want to reduce your risk of exposure even more, you can wipe down your groceries when you get home. Make sure to avoid getting hazardous chemicals on food; just wash your fruits and vegetables like you normally would. Once you unload your groceries, the CDC recommends washing your hands again and cleaning kitchen surfaces like countertops, cabinet handles and light switches.—Madeleine Carlisle

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Is there any risk with food delivery services?

The dangers posed by food delivery do seem to be minimal. A spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told TIME on March 27 that “[currently] there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 associated with food or food packaging.”

That said, the same precautions you would take for a package delivered to your home should be applied with food deliveries. John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, recommends first bringing the container inside, washing your hands, wiping the container down with soap and water or a disinfectant, washing your hands again and only then then putting the contents of the the container onto your plate. Also, don’t make the precautions you take a danger by themselves: Make sure to avoid getting cleaning chemicals on anything you eat. He also stressed you should make sure to stay at least 6 feet away from the delivery person, and recommends having them set the food down at the door and leave before you come out and get your delivery.—Madeleine Carlisle

For more on food delivery and shopping:

‘Is Ordering Takeout Unethical?’ A Medical Ethicist Answers

How Can You Safely Grocery Shop in the Time of Coronavirus?

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Should I worry about my clothes after I’ve been outside?

That depends on where you go and whether you’re in contact with other people. Recent studies have found that the virus that causes COVID-19 can live in the air and on different types of surfaces for between four hours and 72 hours. An April 2 study from The Lancet shows that the virus can live on cloth fabric for up to two days; on surfaces like steel or plastic, it can be detected for up to seven days.

That said, it’s unlikely that you’ll get sick from not changing your shirt after returning home from the grocery store, says Dr. Irfan Hafiz, an infectious disease specialist at Northwestern Medicine. You’re more likely to get it through respiratory droplets from another person than contracting it from a surface.

If you are caring for someone who is sick, you should be careful and protect yourself while handling their belongings. “Their personal environment may be more contaminated,” says Hafiz. It’s okay to mix their clothes with your dirty laundry before washing them; just make sure to wear gloves during or wash your hands after doing the laundry.—Mahita Gajanan

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Does rain wash away the COVID-19 virus?

Rain dilutes the virus and can also physically wash it off a surface just like “dirt can wash away,” says Jared Baeten, professor of global health, medicine and epidemiology at the University of Washington. However, experts don’t believe rain deactivates the virus or disinfects surfaces the way soap and water does.

Scientists don’t yet know how much of the virus you have to be exposed to in order to be infected, says Jared Evans, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. So it’s unclear whether the already limited impact rain would have on viruses living on the surface of, say, the bannister of your front steps, would make a difference in whether or not the bannister is safe to touch.—Madeleine Carlisle

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Can I get COVID-19 more than once?

News reports out of East Asia have said that some patients in China, Japan and South Korea who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and seemingly recovered then tested positive again days or weeks later. One study—not peer-reviewed—on recovered COVID-19 patients in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, found that 38 out of 262, or almost 15% of the patients, tested positive after they were discharged.

However, experts say that these are likely not instances of re-infection. Instead, it’s most likely the case that the post-recovery positive tests simply found lingering infections that were not detected by earlier tests. A positive test after recovery could be detecting the residual viral RNA that has remained in the body, but not in high enough amounts to cause disease, says Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

Experts say the body’s antibody response, triggered by the onset of a virus, means it is unlikely that patients who have recovered from COVID-19 can get re-infected so soon after contracting the virus, suggesting at least short-term immunity, though as with so much about COVID-19, this is not yet settled science, but rather the best current guess. Menachery estimates that COVID-19 antibodies will remain in a patient’s system for “two to three years,” based on what’s known about other coronaviruses. (One Taiwanese study on the 2003 outbreak of SARS, which is caused by a virus that is similar to the one that causes COVID-19, found that survivors had antibodies that lasted for up to three years.)

“We would expect that if you have antibodies that neutralize the virus, you will have immunity,” Menachery says. “How long the antibodies last is still in question.”—Hillary Leung

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If I get COVID-19 and recover, am I immune and safe to be around/help out older family and neighbors?

The messages are mixed on this one. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for COVID-19 patients who have recovered clears them to break quarantine if all of the following conditions have been met:

they have had no fever for at least 72 hours without the aid of fever-reducing medications

all other symptoms like coughing and shortness of breath have cleared up completely

at least seven days have passed since they first became symptomatic

if a coronavirus test is available, they should have also had two negative tests 24 hours apart

(The full CDC guidelines are here.)

But the science is still unsettled on whether recovering from the virus confers immunity. As TIME has reported, there have been cases in Japan, China and South Korea in which patients who seemingly recovered were readmitted to the hospital with a COVID-19 relapse. Some of these presumably recovered patients tested positive again, but it is unclear whether they were actually reinfected or if apparently negative tests simply failed to detect low, lingering levels of the virus. Until more is known with certainty, it is thus best for recovered patients to continue avoiding elderly people or other numbers of susceptible groups.—Jeffrey Kluger

I’ve been social distancing for two weeks. When is it safe for me to go see family?

No one knows exactly how long it will take, but experts say not yet, at least in the U.S.

As of April 13, forty-two states and the District of Columbia (covering about 97% of the U.S. population) had imposed shutdowns and stay-at-home guidelines. Millions of Americans have been social distancing since mid-March, and, as of early April, the national infection curve has not yet flattened. The rules on social distancing are, for now, open-ended, with policies likely to remain in place in one form or another for months, not weeks or days.—Jeffrey Kluger

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Can my dog or cat get COVID-19?

At the moment, it appears there’s little-to-no risk of pets transmitting the virus to humans, with no specific evidence showing this type of transmission has ever happened. Globally, only two dogs and two cats have tested positive for the virus, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). In the U.S., there hasn’t been a single case of a pet diagnosed with the virus, at least according to the country’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “That’s why in the U.S. we’re really not pushing hard to test pets at all,” says William Sander, assistant professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Illinois’ College of Veterinary Medicine.

A tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans, but, says Karen Terio, chief of the Zoological Pathology Program at the University of Illinois’ College of Veterinary Medicine, “A tiger is not a domestic cat, they are a completely different species of cats. To date we have no evidence of the virus being transmitted from a pet to their owners. It’s much, much more likely that an owner could potentially transmit it to their pet.”

Terio adds that there is still much that is unknown. If your pet, for example, did contract the virus, it is not clear whether signs of infection would show themselves in the way they do in humans. Out of caution, the CDC and AVMA recommend that sick humans stay away from their animal companions. “Just like you’re keeping your distance from other people, try to have somebody else in your house take care of your pet, just to be overly cautious,” Sander says. If you are sick or showing symptoms and you have to take care of your pet, the CDC recommends avoiding snuggles or touching your pet, and washing your hands thoroughly before and after feeding.—Jasmine Aguilera

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Can the COVID-19 virus live on my pet’s fur?

Studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can live on a variety of surfaces for several hours or days. But none have tested dog or cat fur.

In an email to TIME, the American Veterinary Medical Association stated that while the virus can be transmitted by touching a contaminated surface or object and then touching your nose, mouth or eyes, “this appears to be a secondary route. In addition, smooth, non-porous surfaces such as countertops and doorknobs transmit viruses better than porous materials; because your pet’s hair is porous and also fibrous, it is very unlikely that you would contract COVID-19 by petting or playing with your pet. However, it’s always a good idea to practice good hygiene around animals, including washing your hands before and after interacting with them.”—Jasmine Aguilera

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Do flies, mosquitoes, or other insects carry or transmit the virus?

Short answer: no, you cannot get COVID-19 though insect bites. “There are viruses that are transmitted by mosquitoes; this is not one of those,” says Karen Terio, chief of the Zoological Pathology Program at the University of Illinois’ College of Veterinary Medicine.

William Sander, assistant professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Illinois’ College of Veterinary Medicine, adds that previous studies of other types of coronaviruses determined that insects are not a viable mode of transmission.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, is primarily spread from person to person by coming in contact with an infected individual’s respiratory droplets, for example saliva or mucus.—Jasmine Aguilera

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Can cleaning products kill the COVID-19 virus?

Probably, as long as you use them right. Household cleaning products designed to fight viruses—i.e., not those labeled exclusively “antibacterial”—typically work against known coronaviruses, like strains that cause the common cold. So while most household products haven’t been tested specifically against the novel coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19, it’s safe to assume standard wipes and sprays will work pretty well against it, says Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious disease at Mount Sinai South Nassau in New York.

But cleaning properly takes a little patience. “Some of these [products] don’t work by contact,” Glatt says. “They work by being on the surface for a while and drying via air.” For peak efficacy, use enough of a product to leave a surface wet for up to several minutes, then let it dry on its own. Read each product’s label to make sure you’re using enough.

Don’t feel like you need to clean your home obsessively, though; if you’re social-distancing properly and washing your hands often, you don’t need to deep clean all the time, experts say. Regular upkeep, and periodically wiping down high-touch objects like light switches and doorknobs, should keep your home sufficiently clean.—Jamie Ducharme

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Does it matter what type of soap I use to wash my hands?

Probably not. Any kind of soap, used properly with water for the recommended 20 seconds of handwashing, will work to remove SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, from your hands. And since we’re dealing with a virus, antibacterial soap doesn’t do anything extra to help.

Soap has a hydrophobic end (meaning it repels and doesn’t mix with water) that binds with oils, and breaks down the oily lipid molecules that make up the membrane of SARS-CoV-2, according to Dr. Mary Stevenson, an assistant professor of dermatology at NYU Langone Health. The virus breaks apart and becomes trapped in the soap bubbles, which wash away in the water.

Stevenson recommends washing your hands in lukewarm water. Extremely hot water is more likely to harm your skin, and doesn’t do anything extra to kill the virus. A lukewarm temperature will keep your hands comfortable and strip away less moisture. Once you’re done washing, it is important to dry your hands on a clean towel. Cloth or paper towels both work well; if you’re at home, Stevenson advises keeping a rotation of clean hand towels that are traded out and washed at least once a day to avoid wasting disposable towels. If you’re washing your hands in a public restroom, use a clean and dry paper towel.—Mahita Gajanan

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What’s the safest way to do laundry in a shared/public laundry room?

If you’re not ill, continue doing your laundry as you normally would. For some people, that means taking loads of dirty clothes to a laundromat or shared laundry room, leading to potential exposure to the coronavirus or the risk of infecting others.

In these situations, stick with your typical laundry routine but also be sure to follow guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to prevent the spread of COVID-19: keep a distance of at least six feet from others in the laundry facility, wash your hands after touching any surfaces, and wear a cloth face mask. When doing your laundry, avoid shaking out your dirty clothes; if your clothes do have any of the virus on them, shaking them could disperse the virus into the air.

If you’re taking care of someone who is sick, it’s safe to mix their dirty clothing with yours before washing, per the CDC; just make sure to wear gloves or immediately wash your hands with soap after handling the laundry.

Ideally, you can drop your laundry into the washer and leave the facility (like go for a walk or wait in your car) until your clothes are ready to go into the dryer, says Dr. Irfan Hafiz, an infectious disease specialist at Northwestern Medicine. Be sure to dry your clothes thoroughly; the heat from the hot water and dryer should “clear off any of the virus that’s there,” says Hafiz.

And once your clothes are dry, fold them at home; avoid using communal folding tables in shared spaces since you don’t know if dirty clothes have been on those surfaces previously.

The CDC also advises that people clean and disinfect their clothing hampers, or to place a disposable bag liner in the laundry baskets to further prevent the spread of COVID-19.—Mahita Gajanan

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via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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womenofcolor15 · 5 years

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‘The Real’s’ Jeannie Mai On Elderly Asian Man Attacked On Viral Video – ‘Racism Does NOT End Racism’

“The Real’s” Jeannie Mai spoke out against racism after an elderly Asian man in San Francisco was attacked. Footage from attack made its way online and has gone viral. See Jeannie’s passionate speech about the racially charged attack and more inside…

A video of an Asian man being attacked in San Francisco has gone viral and “The Real” co-host Jeannie Mai is speaking out about it. Over the weekend, an elderly Asian man was captured on video being attacked as bystanders looked on and hurled racial slurs.

According to police, the man was collecting recyclables in the city before he was robbed and attacked. Police are now investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Peep the clip below - WARNING - It's hard to watch:

Racially charged attack on elderly Asian man.

This Asian man was just trying to make ends meet for his family by collecting cans. Then he got attacked, he didn’t deserve this. this is ignorant, inhumane, & disgusting.

Heartbroken

Retweet. pic.twitter.com/1Ea1e3GCj2

— Deniiise (@RogueCharisma) February 25, 2020

It's reported there were security guards outside who witnessed the attack and did nothing. The security company issued a statement about it, writing, "Our Investigation's Unit is currently investigating this matter," Daniel Francom, the president and CEO of that security company, Critical Intervention Patrol, said. "While this investigation is underway, it would be premature and unfair to make any statements at this time. We assure you and the community that once our investigation is completed, we will give further details with transparency regarding this incident."

“The Real” co-host Jeannie Mai (who has a Vietnamese mother and a Chinese father) was pissed after seeing the video and aired out her frustrations on a recent episode of the daytime talk show.

#SFPD Requesting Public Assistance

San Francisco Police are asking for your help in identifying the victim in a viral video -> https://t.co/zw1bcM4Gy5. Please contact us if you have any information at 1-415-575-4444. Thank you all for your continued assistance. #SF #BayArea pic.twitter.com/MCFwts405D

— San Francisco Police (@SFPD) February 26, 2020

”I’m not talking about racism against Asians. This is racism…period,” she said during the show. “This is minorities against minorities. We all know what it’s like to struggle living in our skin, why are we doing this to each other? Racism is not going to end racism,” she said.

Jeannie encouraged people to talk to their friends from all races about racism. She also asked viewers to send her any information they have about the attack, so she could get the ball rolling on an investigation against the people who attacked the man.

View this post on Instagram

Minorities cannot be against minorities. Racism does NOT end racism. Today we spoke about the viral video of an Asian man being attacked in San Francisco, who has yet to be identified. If anyone has ANY information as to who this victim, PLS DM me so that I can directly support this man. (Video in IG story.) You can also text ANY info to the SFPD tipline at TIP411 and begin the text message with SFPD. As always, tips can be made anonymously. And if ever you are in the position to witness something so grotesque, PLEASE SPEAK UP. **UPDATE** Victim has been found. He is OK. And is thankful for the kind neighbors around the same area he was attacked. See IG story for more.

A post shared by Jeannie Mai (@thejeanniemai) on Feb 26, 2020 at 5:41pm PST

Hours after putting her post, she hopped on IG Stories to announce the victim had been found.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a Community Unity and Healing rally that will go down today on the same street the man was attacked:

now that the victim has been identified— @shamannwalton x @LondonBreed are holding this event where the elderly man was attacked in the Bayview pic.twitter.com/5kIYwxvlvl

— Dion Lim (@DionLimTV) February 26, 2020

UPDATE-1: Employees at this recycling center in #SanFrancisco say they haven’t seen the elderly #Asian man, who usually comes once a week, since he was attacked in the #Bayview #neighborhood. #SF #racerelations #community https://t.co/nBpFgPTqen pic.twitter.com/VKWsy9XsdF

— Anser Hassan (@AnserHassan) February 26, 2020

At the time of this post, no arrests have been made. This is really sick and disgusting, and the people in the video need to be prosecuted for this uncalled for behavior. This man was trying to collect cans to make some extra money for his family and, apparently, can't even do that in peace.

Photo: DFree/Shutterstock.com

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/02/27/%E2%80%98the-real%E2%80%99s%E2%80%99-jeannie-mai-on-elderly-asian-man-attacked-on-viral-video-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%98racism-does-not-

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sciencespies · 5 years

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Indonesian capital reels from floods that leave 47 dead

https://sciencespies.com/environment/indonesian-capital-reels-from-floods-that-leave-47-dead/

Indonesian capital reels from floods that leave 47 dead

Rescuers search for victims at a village heavily affected by a landslide in Cigudeg, West Java, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Monsoon rains and rising rivers submerged hundreds of neighborhoods in greater Jakarta and caused landslides in the neighboring districts, which buried a number of people. (AP Photo/Kozer)

Tens of thousands of Indonesians were crammed in emergency shelters Saturday waiting for floodwaters to recede in and around the capital, Jakarta, as the death toll from massive New Year’s flooding reached 47, officials said.

Monsoon rains and rising rivers submerged a dozen districts in greater Jakarta and caused landslides in the Bogor and Depok districts on the city’s outskirts as well as in neighboring Lebak, which buried a dozen people.

National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Agus Wibowo said the fatalities also included those who had drowned or been electrocuted since rivers broke their banks early Wednesday after extreme torrential rains throughout New Year’s Eve. Three elderly people died of hypothermia.

It was the worst flooding since 2007, when 80 people were killed over 10 days.

“The waters came very fast, suddenly everything in my house was swept away,” said Dian Puspitasari, a mother of 2, who looked overwhelmed trying to sweep piles of mud out of her home. “To clean up this thick mud is another disaster for us.”

Four days after the region of 30 million people was struck by flashfloods, waters have receded in many middle-class districts, but conditions remained grim in narrow riverside alleys where the city’s poor live.

Men prepare to clean their flooded neighborhood in Tanggerang outside Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

At the peak of the flooding, about 397,000 people sought refuge in shelters across the greater metropolitan area as floodwaters reached up to 6 meters (19 feet) in some places, Wibowo said. Data released by his agency showed some 173,000 people were still unable to return home, mostly in the hardest-hit area of Bekasi.

More than 152,000 people remain crammed at 98 emergency shelters with sufficient supplies in Jakarta’s satellite city of Bekasi, where rivers burst their banks. Much of the city was still submerged in muddy waters up to 2 meters (6.5 feet) high, according to the agency.

Those returning to their homes found streets covered in mud and debris. Cars that had been parked in driveways were swept away, landing upside down in parks or piled up in narrow alleys. Sidewalks were strewn with sandals, pots and pans and old photographs. Authorities took advantage of the receding waters to clear away mud and remove piles of wet garbage from the streets.

Residents move the wreckage of cars that were swept away by flood in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

Residents walk near the wreckage of cars that were swept away by flood in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

Residents try to move the wreckage of cars that were swept away by flood in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

Residents move the wreckage of cars that were swept away by flood in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

Residents stand near the wreckage of cars that were swept away by flood in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

A women stands near the wreckage of cars that were swept away by flood in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

Residents walk near the wreckage of cars that were swept away by flood in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

People rest at a temporary shelter for those affected by the floods in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in the capital as residents celebrated the new year has killed dozens of people and displaced hundreds of thousands others. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

A woman holds a balloon at a temporary shelter for those affected by the flood in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in the capital as residents celebrated the new year has killed dozens of people and displaced hundreds of thousands others. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

A man collects a water to clean his flooded house in Tanggerang on the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Residents carry a mattresses from their flooded homes in Tanggerang on the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020. Severe flooding in greater Jakarta has killed scores of people and displaced tens of thousands others, the country’s disaster management agency said. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Electricity was restored to tens of thousands of residences and businesses.

Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma domestic airport reopened Thursday after its runway was submerged.

The head of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency Dwikorita Karnawati said more downpours were forecast for the capital in coming days and the potential for extreme rainfall will continue until next month across Indonesia.

The government on Friday kicked off cloud seeding in an attempt to divert rain clouds from reaching greater Jakarta. Authorities warned that more flooding was possible until the rainy season ends in April.

The flooding has highlighted Indonesia’s infrastructure problems.

Jakarta is home to 10 million people, or 30 million including those in its greater metropolitan area. It is prone to earthquakes and flooding and is rapidly sinking due to uncontrolled extraction of ground water. Congestion is also estimated to cost the economy $6.5 billion a year.

President Joko Widodo announced in August that the capital will move to a site in sparsely populated East Kalimantan province on Borneo island, known for rainforests and orangutans.

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Indonesia capital floods leave 43 dead, 397,000 displaced

Citation: Indonesian capital reels from floods that leave 47 dead (2020, January 4) retrieved 4 January 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-01-indonesian-capital-reels-dead.html

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