all for logging in from wherever you are. This is just to let you know that the session is being recorded. We will hopefully use the recording to make the recording available to people who couldn't log in in real time. My name is Rahul Rao. I'm a lecturer in politics at SOAS, University of London, and I also have an affiliation to the Centre for Gender Studies, which is organising curating this set of conversations that we're calling the Transnational Dialogues on COVID as part of the SOAS Festival of Ideals. I'd like to get started straight away. I'm going to briefly introduce our speakers, and then I'll just set out some basic ground rules for how we hope to have the conversation. And hopefully we can also... I have to apologise for all my neighbourhood sounds.  Was that an ice cream jar? That was the ice cream van, as you probably guessed from the jingle. One of the delights slash hazards of working from home as we're all learning is that the environment in which we work is not controllable in the ways that we might be used to when it comes to work or professional context or what have you. Okay, so my three guests today are... And you know, usually when you do a live event, you've got a panel and you have people sitting on the panel and you say from right to left or my right or my left. Obviously I can't do that. So I'm going to go from east to west. I'm making some assumptions about where people are geographically. I'm actually not even sure where people are with any exactness, but on the basis of where their life and work is situated. We have today with us Vidya Krishnan. Vidya is a writer and journalist focusing on health, human rights and gender in South Asia. Her pieces have appeared in a number of places, including the caravan, which is where I first encountered her work, but also the Atlantic, LA Times, Hindu, Al Jazeera and elsewhere. Her first book, Phantom Plague, the untold story of how tuberculosis shaped our history, will be published by Public Affairs in 2021. And I'm also very excited to tell people that Vidya is a SOAS alumnus from 2010-2011. My next guest based in South Africa is Phoebe Kisubi Mambasalaki. Phoebe is a post-doctoral research fellow on the Global Race Project, which is housed at the Africa Gender Institute and the Centre for Theatrical Science and Performance Studies in the University of Cape Brown, as well as the NGO SWEPT. She's also a lecturer in the Gender Studies Program at the Africa Gender Institute at the University of Cape Brown. She has a doctorate in gender media and culture from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research interests are in critical race, gender, class, sexuality, public health and deep colonial thought and praxis, and she's worked in various fields, including those involving gender, HIV and public health with agencies such as UNDP, UNAS and WHO. And then in the US, we have Donna Patterson, PhD, who's chair of the Department of History, Political Science and Philosophy, and the director of Africana Studies at Delaware State University. Professor Patterson is the inaugural editor of the new book series, Routledge, Research and Health and Healing in Africa and the African Diaspora. She's the author of Pharmacy in Senegal, Gender, Healing and Entrepreneurship. She's written scholarly articles on pharmaceutical markets, African women, public health, Ebola and COVID-19. She's currently working on two larger projects, one entitled Transnational Drug Trafficking, Drug Conviction and Health, and a second entitled Ebola, West Africa and the World. Her media commentary has appeared in various places, including Slate, Washington Post, Vox, Huffington Post, Foreign Policy, Delaware Public Media, The Appeal Pacific and Other Outlets, and you can follow her on Twitter at PharmacySemegal. Okay, Phoebe, just checking that the audio was clear for you. Great. Okay, brilliant. So thanks very much to Vidya, Phoebe and Donna for finding us. For the audience, the way we're going to do this is we are going to have a conversation among the four of us for about half an hour, 14 minutes, we'll see how we go. And then we'll have a Q&A session where people in the audience are invited to ask questions. We have a chat room which we can use for the questioning. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to see how many participants we have when the Q&A begins and I will then either invite you to enter your question in the chat room and pick a few questions or I'll simply ask you to use the raised hands icon at the bottom of the screen and I will then name a participant and I'll invite you to ask a question. So I'm going to make a decision on that based on numbers and how easy it is to handle the question. So what I was hoping is that we could structure this as a conversation from the very outset. So we're not going to do a kind of set these presentations from the panelists but I did want to open by giving you all a chance to just maybe reflect for a few minutes on what your most immediate connections or preoccupations in so far as go with our concern. Obviously, this is a global moment. The globality of the moment has been has sort of come through in the way global connection has shut down in various ways but the way in which it's experienced is very different. The kinds of issues we might be thinking about might be very different based on where we are and what our particular context and preoccupations are. So I wonder if maybe you could just bring us up to speed on what you've been thinking about most recently. Let's start with Vidya and then I'll ask Phoebe and then Longan to talk to us. So I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I love coming back to Soares. This is not how I imagined to be there but thank you for having me over. So my immediate connection, well around the time the pandemic was surging in Wuhan, I was working on my book which is also on respiratory infectious disease which India is the epicentre of which is tuberculosis and the last four months have been this slow-moving train wreck and you watch this come closer and closer and I've been reporting on the pandemic from India and at this moment after I've been reporting for around 20 years and nothing in my journalistic career has equipped me to deal with this assignment. It's exhausting and then on top of India's response in particular has been we had a right-wing government in power and the context within which the pandemic came to India was January and February. There was a lot of civil unrest which was protesting a new citizenship amendment law which regarded Muslims as secondary citizens and while our civil liberties were being curtailed and scholars were being arrested, students were being attacked inside libraries in colleges in our national capital in the midst of all of that coronavirus made landfall and there has unfortunately been a seamless I've argued I've written about this in the Atlantic and in Karawan and multiple places that India's response has seamlessly kind of intricately been woven with the kind of police brutality and the civil unrest that we were seeing through January and February and now we are in the midst of 56 days into the world's harsh lockdown and there has been a migrant crisis the parallels of which these are photos the photos evoke a memory of books in which books I've read about the partition when Pakistan and India were created but more recently in my experience I've seen this while covering the rookie crisis where villages would just walk for days pregnant women will give birth and pick up the kids and keep walking and those are the kind of things that are happening in our big cities it's happening in Mumbai it's happening in Delhi and it's been overwhelming and exhausting and we are learning on the job as journalists so that's where I met we can't hear you sorry thanks for that as you see I'm not a consummate or organizer of online events this is very new in my life experience so I will probably be quite a few glitches Phoebe I hope you caught everything that we are said okay yeah so what I'm asking everyone is just to say something about what your most immediate preoccupations have been in relation to the COVID crisis thank you for that Robert I'm really pleased to be part of this important conversation and indeed being preoccupied by a number of things but I'll stick to one particular one about the conversation and that is the title I sent to you in the abstract in relation to this conversation that's the right to eat and I say that because I'm closely working in my research project with a group of six workers who have been hit the hardest with this pandemic now in South Africa the first COVID-19 case was recorded on the 5th of March and on the 23rd of March the president announced a state of national disaster and that lockdown would be imminent and the 27th of March had lockdown was implemented where character year day 65 of the lockdown had been going a little down from level five which was the highest level of lockdown where only central work was needed to level four with a few liberties provided in there and with such a mode being implemented in South Africa where it's not one of the most unequal societies in the world it means marginal bodies are left to think for themselves even with implementation of because who are in the former sector the margins of labor it means they completely left out in the cold with this regard to more access to the income but also more access to the foreign support from the state so that's why we're preoccupied by that thank you thank you um Donna over to you um I've had a number of uh preoccupations I think um kind of going back to the beginning uh like video did when it first when I first saw it in Wuhan I knew that it was going to spill out of China I knew that it was going to go throughout the world you know where it ends up who knows how many numbers who knows but I knew it was going to come out so looking at it from the perspective of living in the United States and looking at the response I want to say lack of response but we'll get to that um looking at the response you know the slow response I mean one of the first decisions that the president of the United States made was to ban flights from China or ban Chinese from coming on flights from China and I was thinking this is not going to help it's still going to come we have to prepare we have to do something kind of real and sustained we have to think about you know what we're going to do because this is going to definitely be some sort of pandemic very likely um and so the slow response again um both with testing for certain because once we knew that there was pockets along the west coast particularly in Washington state in California they couldn't get tested very few people were being tested um the the nursing homes as you all probably remember in Washington state where they tested a few people but you had 30 40 people either living in these nursing homes or working in these nursing homes who clearly were also infected they couldn't get tested for weeks took them two or three weeks to even get tested then then you have to wait for the results and subsequently some people also died so I think I've been really preoccupied with the response slow response above testing the lack of contact tracing this country is only starting to contact trace um and even now that need really needs to be scaled up um also I think we had a really good chance in this country early on to contain it in the west coast at least that part I don't think they knew that they had the cases that they had in the east coast um but if they responded in the west coast that would have cut some of the numbers down and now my new preoccupation is this reopening um as of yesterday the last state declared they were going to reopen Connecticut they're reopening to different degrees and I'm thinking of how can you reopen when you don't have these other things in place and you don't have basic protective gear such as masks available to everyone to wear yeah a lot of those preoccupations resonate I think with uh what people in the UK where I'm currently situated are experiencing and this is the country with the highest death toll in Europe second highest in the world um it never had a lockdown as draconian as anything that India and South Africa experienced um and yet it's already in the process of opening up and that opening up has been fiercely contested we're seeing arguments every day about whether schools are ready to open whether um anything like normal life is ready to resume so I think those concerns will resonate in a lot of different places already in this conversation we've started talking about different states and I have here you know a really basic question we in this conversation about COVID and how the pandemic is progressing states are measuring themselves against each other there's some there's a kind of implicit or explicit comparison going on how do we know how well a state is doing and I asked that question because I think it was yesterday or day before uh when Donald Trump was asked about why the US had you know whether the fact that the US had so many cases uh was a sign that it was doing the worst his response was no it's a sign that we're doing the most testing which of course we know is not true because on a per capita basis the US is not testing as much as say South Korea but you know these numbers that we keep hearing every day how do we how do we compare or is its comparison even important I'm curious about your thoughts on on on that how do we know how well a state is doing any anybody but I think you might be on mute I thought the question was for Donna but it's for anyone really because I think it's a global that's how you look like you were going to speak so I was waiting so we had you're right there's there in India we have uh state governments and today we had a media briefing uh first of all India's only country in the world uh where neither our prime minister nor our health minister has addressed the media even once and after our 10 day break uh we had a media briefing today and to show that India is doing better are the bureaucrats in the health ministry pulled out a graph of the 10 worst performing countries in the world and they said you know India's population is so high and we still have a hundred thousand cases which only means we are doing very well but the truth is pretty much everything Donna said applies to India where we are testing the least per capita we do not have PPE we did not stockpile for our health care workers and then there is this layer of six years of having a government which is completely science denialist so we had a background when the cases started coming we had the ruling party saying how cow down and cow urine can help and then it was homeopathy or ayurveda and in the middle of all of this uh the numbers that we are getting uh in today's press conference we were told that uh the recovery rates in India the mortality rates in India as well as the testing rates in India are the best in the world and uh uh I I don't even know what to say to that because it's clean as they clear that our hospitals have shut down opiities and emergency care and not only are people with coronavirus coming people without coronavirus with say tuberculosis or uh cancer and dialysis just they everyone is therapeutically destitute right now in this country and then there is a humanitarian crisis which uh there is no parallel to uh but then but then we are dealing with the government uh I personally do not think that um I personally do not think that uh this numbers that are being shown in public uh firstly are extremely open I don't trust the numbers as a journalist and secondly how the numbers are being interpreted is in a very self-serving way but even with the lockdown uh the lockdown is not a public health measure it's a police uh law and order instrument and uh over and over again we've had epidemics uh I I last remember the slums of Monrovia uh where there were police uh it was caught on off as a public health measures do not work but you will bring in police to enforce it and we are currently stuck in a place where we have a government that does not believe in slimes and uh there is uh it's it's just unfolding how it's unfolding uh so uh Phoebe did you have any any thoughts on this question of how do we know how well the state is doing especially because South Africa is getting a lot of praise elsewhere but not so within um um so when um the state of disaster was announced and the lockdown was implemented what was announced as well was um a massive screening and testing um a process that would go alongside um that and indeed now we're seeing that uh nearly half a million uh tests conducted in South Africa and um according to um our department of health um stats that come out every evening and in the last 24-hour cycle they were able to test about um so in 2005 great um people so um uh they're priding themselves um uh in um massive testing and screening and they say you know um the numbers we're seeing at the moment are as a result of that especially in take time particularly which is the epicenter of this um uh they're taking pride in um a massive screening and testing process that's quite rapidly done that's why um we've seen a true picture um but yeah along um alongside that uh what we've seen as well as um you know from within so that's from the outside and the praise a lot and indeed when um the lockdown was fast implemented there was praise from um moving that uh the president acted decisively and that was the right thing to do especially uh because we're seeing we were seeing then what was coming out of Italy and Spain and you know um the rhetoric was we don't want to um have a repetition of Italy or Spain and South Africa so um so that was a work move but now um uh within but now there's um a lot of question whether that hard lockdown was really necessary um or even relevant for a context uh like South Africa where and then um uh sort of uh development times it's uh um now I'm emerging economy with high um uh levels of inequality and not enough reserves um in the process to cover everybody if you know such a hard lockdown um as such that was implemented in China could really work in a context like this and of course this is where um uh what falls through in relation to um uh those when the margins of the economy would be uh completely falling off you know you know uh domestic workers cleaners um tech workers of course fall within that mix yeah thank you yeah I think you've helped us unpack some of that complexity um Donna any thoughts on this comparison numbers game data um I'll add a few um I think it's difficult um to determine you know who's doing the best I mean definitely if you look at the state level governments are going to try to spin it to you know to look good wherever you are in the world um but I mean we have examples like New Zealand which basically I think still has no cases okay that looks really good I think a lot of the the the um countries in East Asia um that had some of the earlier cases a lot of them were able to really reduce their numbers really quickly and manage it better where you are seeing a resurgence in some of the countries but overall the numbers are still fairly low and once they see the numbers they're testing very widely to try to you know contact trace contain it and not have it um blow out of control um but I think you know really when you're looking at this at the level of a pandemic or an or an epidemic a lot of states just just didn't do basic you know things that you should do in terms of you know really scaling the testing up quickly kind of going back to what I was saying earlier in the contact tracing and these sorts of things and so I think a lot of them had a lot of problems um if we look at it like that so you know if we grade them you definitely see problems throughout a lot of the world so my next question is for anyone who wants to take it really and this is again a sort of comparison question but it's something that's come up in social media commentary quite a lot and it's this idea that states that have been led by these toxic masculine figures like Trump and Johnson and Modi both Sonar and Brazil you know people who as individuals imagine themselves to be invulnerable and tough etc etc have also sort of translated that attitude into the way they view their own populations and these figures have tended to be contrasted with more prudent approaches that people like Jacinda Arhan have taken or the health minister and Kerala, Shailesh, our teacher there's other examples as well now on the one hand I'm a little bit wary of the gender essentialism and this kind of commentary but there does seem to be some something to it so I was curious about how you think about the question of gender and leadership style and whether this is something relevant to to consider um this is really a an open question for anyone who wants to pick up on this do you agree? Yeah okay and if we have our leader it's one of the very few billionaires from black billionaires in South Africa and so his interests are aligned differently from you know your domestic worker or god so to speak and we saw this gender and class line play out very early on for instance one thing that has really surprised me and have been surprised by is the detail to which the regulations put in place during the lockdown have been made out and indeed given its you know main of masculinity mostly these leadership roles of course and ways of life around women and femininity were excluded to begin with and the example here it's uh financial goods it was called when Ayesha had those groceries some food and medicines and the like but what was missing and that was you know in like sanitary tiles and diapers and the like these the conflict was uh uh increasingly revised and the other thing that was a that was a paid attention too much when um our lockdown was initially limited in South Africa was uh you know we are um this is um not to reduce it in any shape or so one um but a society that's crippling with high levels of rejected I wanted to if I could just follow up on that ask you what what does how that what does social distancing mean from the perspective of a sex worker what happened is to life and work in that kind of situation mostly working with street based sex work most of having painted a picture of South Africa being an equal you know minority population most street based um are homeless housing of homeless people in makeshift cap in designated areas that all homeless people are collected and put uh in these spaces but these spaces were possible uh in those spaces um but not only that which are geographical locations that are in the modes of accommodation are in the form of you know a shack and nine people living possible there as well we're observing in these spaces um in the townships I think Mitchell's Lane or Kailisha and Cape Town which are some of the biggest townships that's where a lot of what you're saying resonates quite a lot with the stories coming out of India particularly around migrant labor uh Vidya you were talking about the pictures of migrant labor reminding us of almost partition like in their scale in the scale of movement that's happening at the moment um I wonder if you could maybe speak to that uh it seems to me that it's highlighting issues that we've always already had homelessness precariousness um and so this is just making it more visible more obvious yeah um when the when the lockdown was enforced on the 24th we got a full hour notice and almost immediately the journalists knew that this is going to be trouble but uh we definitely did not see the scale of there are 100 million migrants on the streets of India 56 days after the lockdown and we have uh oh progressively again you cannot with this government you can't isolate uh just the pandemic from its other agenda which has been to which is all kinds of minorities but in this case Muslim minorities have been blamed for spreading the pandemic and then came uh then then came this wave of series of 94 decisions and uh frankly politically speaking Modi has emerged uh he calls himself a chaiwala he calls himself a son of the soil and he has consistently taken these decisions in fact I was reading the edit piece today saying how despite all of this his popularity is soaring in India and there are people who say that even today if we are contested in election he would he would win and um is that because people are grateful for the protection of a strong man in a situation like this and so they just need somebody anybody or what's the logic of that frankly I frankly I can't make sense of that logic because the people I go out to report and people are angry they don't have food to eat every day we have been waking up to migrants dying and uh India has uh en masse just kind of done away with labor laws because uh and now we are thinking about easing restrictions but then the labor movement started from the big cities and they wanted to get to their villages but midway through uh our corporate India our businessmen realized that if these labor laborers get back to their villages they cannot open their factories so wherever they were they were just they uh block the state borders and they set the police on them and they did not give them transport so uh as to what you were saying is like a lot of while while South Africa keeps repeatedly getting the shame for their park ideas and it keeps bringing that in the conversation of how they have arrived at this moment in history India has never reconciled with its history of very insidious casteism and patriarchy uh then there is him Islamophobia and the pandemic has basically seen all of it and there is no hiding I feel like a lot of decent people who are now out on the streets helping feel that there's no hiding away from how uh how ugly um I was reading Arun Thiru's column where she was saying that India has revealed herself in all her ugliness and I agree because the pandemic also comes to India in a genocidal atmosphere and then there are there is a this is class warfare what's happening in India there is no other way to sum it up but to call it class warfare because the poor have nowhere to go they have no food they have no shelter the government has not given them a stimulus there has not been a financial packet there has not even been transport arranged we are we are not counting the debts that we are seeing and for all the questions that you asked we eat about gender or we eat about whether it's coming from toxic masculinity or whether some states are doing better I kind of keep coming back to this thing that I feel we are in the fog of war and whatever we can make sense of maybe a year from now we will be able to make sense of what we live through because at this point in India I'm not even able to go out and report properly all I'm all I'm believing is people I can reach out on the phone or just in driving distance I cannot uh I've never reported like this on the story before where you're just logged inside state borders so we are all I'm talking on the on the basis of the best information available to me but even the best information available to me is just not reliable at this point so I want to come back to that phrase you use fog of wall I think it's something that could be important for us to think about Donna in the US and UK obviously we're living under these white supremacist regimes and it's quite striking in light of that also to think about how black and ethnic minority people have been affected by covid and the distressing behind rates of deaths that have been reported in in black and ethnic minority communities in both the US and the UK can you at first make sense with that um yes I've been following the numbers closer in the in the US in this respect um but I do have some kind of broad I guess ideas about it um definitely in the US we're seeing this we're seeing this we saw this in New Orleans we're seeing this in Detroit um St. Louis different parts of the country even if you look at the numbers in New York most of the people who die from covid were black and brown people um and you know the infection rates you did have white people die you did have them get infected um but what we're seeing both there and in other in other parts of the country is that um black and brown people tend to be dying more um and in the UK I know definitely in terms of healthcare workers because I follow this a bit that a lot of the the healthcare workers of color are tending to die you know at a higher number per capita than white healthcare workers are um in the UK and I think definitely the US and I think this could be some of this you could probably find in the UK to some degree too um when you look at life expectancy in the US um I'm just going to look black and white right now if you look everything all things being equal someone with the same level of education someone with the same economic strata everything black people tend to die much earlier than white people um so they could be you know medical doctors but just the average they're going to die maybe 10 years 10 15 years before just because they're black and so a lot of that is stress what's how stress manifests in the body just being a black person or even a brown person navigating living in the US and I think you can probably see some of this in the UK too um but definitely there have been a lot of studies in the US and they show this they look at for instance someone who maybe has migrated let's say from Nigeria for instance um and a first generation person will have health outcomes similar to where they come from um from whatever country they come from but someone who second generation will already have health outcomes that look like african-american that look like people who have been living here for generations um so I think that definitely is part of it but you also have other things you also have issues in terms of health access where do you live what is your zip code do you have a good hospital uh is that hospital uh over capacity for instance um so I think there are a number of variables to think about when we're thinking about this thank you thank you um um there's a lot of echo I hope you can hear me all of you have studied other epidemics and pandemics and other diseases for that matter whether tuberculosis or HIV AIDS or Ebola or Zika and one of the things I'm wondering in light of that is how does this compare and have those previous experiences taught us anything any lessons that have been useful have they left behind any legacies that maybe this pandemic has had to pick up on um what are your thoughts on comparisons between diseases and again this is an open question for anyone who wants to pick up on it I just I just finished writing a book on India's the epicenter of the drug resistance drug resistance chains of tuberculosis infections and while I was researching that I was reading a lot of play literature uh over the last couple of years I've been back and uh to answer your question uh there are there are just so many lessons especially uh throughout medical history uh as as way back as the Justinian Empire you have examples where the traders who were taking ships and coming to the cities were being blamed because they were richer and happened to be Jews and public health is always so closely tied with uh outcomes that are political especially in cases where they have been genocides there's this uh I covered the Rohingya genocide uh two years ago three years ago now and before the genocide happened and I spoke in the Indian context we saw a program in in February and there is such a close uh relationship with public health where you name uh bring the community for being one hygienic we have our home minister who's calling the Bangladeshis especially Bengali-speaking Muslims or Tomites and all of this was already happening before coronavirus came into India and over and over again what pandemics have shown in history is whenever there is a new pathogen uh the majority community creates uh to create some distance of safety that they want to perceive that this is happening to those people they either say they are dirty or they're outsiders during the HIV community it was the homosexual community who were uh more at risk and what then happens is the full force of the uh biases of the mainstream community is brought to bear upon the worst affected communities uh during the HIV epidemic uh not only was the homosexual community affected very badly they needed more budgets for research and development but then you had homophobic government almost in every part of the world and whereas in the first world uh there were people like Yari Krimer there were issues like ACT UP that that did uh institutions eventually did kick in uh but then in Asian and African nations it took longer it was slower uh and I feel like at least in countries like India in low resource settings where populations are not entitlement literate or we have not learned any of those lessons and by the time this pandemic is over I I actually worry about a lot of collateral damage that the minorities in India which could be sexual minorities or religious minorities or just social minorities Dalits and caste minorities uh it's it's going to be uh the toll is already heavy we are already I I I frankly try to make sense of it and again I keep coming back that we are just three months into this um and we are still racing for impact in India um and our lockdowns are going to be lifted so uh I worry about everything that you're raising and there are no there are no answers at this point that I I have I wish we looked at history more but then again we have a government which is just intellectual in every way so there is that uh and that is sorry very sobering because the the Indian toll in 100 years ago in the in the Spanish flu so-called Spanish flu pandemic was incredibly high so it was the highest yeah yeah Donna sorry you want um yes um so yeah definitely if you think about the the 1918 flu pandemic I mean went all over the world I mean uh Philadelphia which is close to me you know had also had some high rates they had this big parade you know in the middle of the pandemic and so all of these people were affected um but I was thinking more about Ebola and thinking about the 2014 2016 Ebola epidemic uh and a lot of the lessons that that came out of there um so some of the lessons were you know very quick response needing fast response needing um large scale um coordination um and you know coordination of stuff coordination of um of um healthcare but also coordinating different medical professionals in this sort of thing but also um in terms of that um you know just kind of getting back to the basic pieces of epidemiology you know the contact tracing um you know containing disease and these sorts of things and so we learned a lot of that or at least I thought we learned a lot of that in the world for instance the U.S. government started a whole pandemic um office at the White House after that so that was then Obama's administration in 2017 soon after Trump becomes president he dismantles this particular office um so kind of moving back and I know Vidya talked about this a little bit earlier kind of this idea of anti-science and I think that's what we're seeing you know in some of these states that have been sore in responding and we can think of a lot of them in different parts of the world but we've definitely been seeing some of that here so what does that look like you know should you do these things I mean the U.S. one of the reasons that the testing was so slow was because that they had they created their own tests they didn't want to create use the who's test so CDC created a test that had some problems and then it had to go through approvals from the FDA and others and so one of the reasons it took so long to roll out was that um but going back um to Ebola um I'm also thinking about what is happening now um in two countries that had some instances of Ebola but not tons Senegal that had one case in 2014 and Nigeria that ended up having 20 cases in 2014 and in those cases um because you know the three hardest hit had been Guinea Liberia and Sierra Leone and so they were after the fact and so they had more time to prepare and they use their time very well so Senegal had one case that was someone who had migrated from Guinea and in Nigeria they also had one initial case someone who had come from Liberia now it did spread more particularly since he purposely infected some medical professionals who were trying to treat him and also keep him in the hospital um but again 20 in the whole country which was amazing he was in Lagos which has a population of about 20 million so imagine it wouldn't take much for that to really blow up in the country also when this was happening in Nigeria the public doctors were on strike so I was looking and I was thinking oh my god this is going to be a nightmare but they still handled it very well and one of the reasons they handled it well because they were really good with contact tracing they really traced they traced very quickly they checked in on everybody that they were looking at every day you know to see if they exhibited symptoms should they go to the hospitals should they be quarantined and these sorts of things so they did that every day in fact one nurse actually escaped who was on quarantine in Nigeria she left the hospital she went to a village where she had family they went they took an ambulance and they picked her up and then brought her back to Lagos so they were very quick Senegal the same thing so you had the one person Senegal ends up contact tracing I think they were looking at 74 people um by the end they did not only check on those people once a day they checked on them twice a day you know because they'd seen what happened in Nigeria and they were like we want to really make sure no one's moving um that one person like I said was infected they sent him back to Guinea the the minister of health she made a statement saying you know we've taken care of him but don't think that you can come here to get treatment you should get treated in your own country and that was their only case now now with COVID Senegal definitely the numbers are much higher than one but they've been responding fairly well and you may have seen some press on Senegal they're developing a rapid test testing is widespread PPE is fairly widely available and so that these sorts of things are happening also the the president made some very quick measures in terms of you know closing schools closing certain stores but even mosque and other religious institutions which was a really major deal in Senegal given the power of Islam in the country it's a predominantly Muslim country about 93 94 percent in the power of those religious leaders now they're they're kind of gradually reopening the mosque they just started the past week with social distancing but this was a major now Nigeria is not faring as well officially the numbers look better than they appear to be but there there's definitely some bit of undercounting that's happening because the numbers of people dying the funerals the moors and these sorts of things so the reporting that you're getting there you know that the numbers again are much higher than the official numbers thank you oh Phoebe I was thinking about South Africa's previous well ongoing experience with HIV AIDS and whether that has any parallels with the present moment indeed I mean South Africa will go down in the history books and think small to react to HIV and AIDS in fact things that goes on that make legacy discussion now to the audience and just to remind you the way to do this so we'll do it we'll do it verbally because I think it would be nice to actually hear our audience voices so the way to do this is to use the icons at the bottom of your screen if you just click the raise hand icon then I will see that you want to ask a question and I will call you by name and then our moderator will enable your audio so maybe while people are thinking about questions I just put a last question for this round to really to Phoebe and Donna I was quite struck by Vidya's phrase about the fall of war the kind of confusion that we're all in and I'm curious how do we as researchers and writers and people trying to do interventions of various kinds how do we do that in a situation like this where we're all stuck in our houses and we're relying on information the credibility of which you know is not always certain what do you see as the potential for knowledge production or intervention in this kind of situation I think it's challenging for certain there is the fog of sense it could be a war could just be living through a pandemic I mean frankly I think there's fog that comes with that the trauma that comes with the trauma that people that I don't even think that they know that they're experiencing what is this going to look like you know what are people going to see five ten years from now in terms of that so definitely in terms of producing it's it's challenging and I think in terms of what Vidya was saying in terms of just gathering research you know because I write on epidemics and global health and how do you get research you know you can call and then you know I'm keeping you know these bit of archives but it is different than being able to go to a place because even you know for instance if you're looking at a yellow fever outbreak or Zika outbreak or Ebola it's usually even if it's beyond one country it's usually fairly contained to a number of countries at most and so you can travel you can go in or you can come back out but this is basically has encompassed the entire world and so you can't really escape it even if you'd like to so that's definitely challenging and also in just in terms of being a professor and researcher I'm chair of my department right now which means that I work full-time I don't have summers off at least where I work and so what does that look like as I'm thinking about what can I do this summer in terms of writing some things I was able to get one short article off that's under review now but it was really hard to write it both in terms of the time with my full-time job but also being able to focus I think it is difficult to be able to produce in the ways that we might have been able to produce at least a lot of people at least I know I'm experienced and everybody's here is it but you know six months ago it felt very different than it feels now see did you have any thoughts on these of being a researcher writer in this moment indeed very much purified by that as well me myself as a researcher but also teaching a research course with students who are caught up in this as well I'm anxious about writing the thesis so different research relations to be a thesis at this time some having to change direction in terms of research question all together but in relation to my own research I research I mean I'm not a theater performance scholar or expert but the kind of work I'm doing is exceptional and completing the time in that and this is a field where work and medium of engagement is highly embodied and my colleagues that are much re-imagining yeah I can imagine it must take so much thinking and creativity to transform as you say embodied and collective production in the circumstances of this disembodied and individualized life that we're all you know trying to live I'm waiting for audience members to raise their hands but maybe just while you think of your question maybe I can sneak in one more the day I remember reading an interview you gave to I can't remember which you doubted it was but it was about the sheer harassment that you were encountering as you were reporting this story and I wonder if you could maybe tell us a bit about what's happening why you think it's happening and how you're dealing with it anyone who's reporting on the pandemic again with this government never in the history of independent India have we had a government this very and this vindictive but that's where we are now and we we've never had such kind of division within journalists so there is a right which is well funded and I'm a freelance journalist and then on top of that I'm a woman and on top of that I'm opinionated so all of these are things that do not work well with the current administration so when you challenge the government which my reporting has repeatedly done and the biggest problem they have is I write for international outlets if I write for the Atlantic or the LA Times it's seen as you're a traitor because you go abroad and you complain about India so there have been death threats and there has been threats of rape and we young journalists have been living with those kind of things in India for a while but I like to say every day is overwhelming and nothing in my almost 20 years of reporting career has prepared me for for the kind of just every day is overwhelming I got in touch with reporters they're based in Paris and they were like we can help you educate or we can send you security systems and I was like you don't understand the context we are in the kind of lockdown that there is nothing possible and this year we had at least seven of my colleagues my beach colleagues are in jail three of them are facing police harassment and we have to continue reporting in this circumstance because we are in a social I really hope few years from now when the dust settles there are a bunch of people who will leave a record of what happened closer to the context for when there are researchers who pick up and want to get a version of what the migrants were going through which is not just the government's point of view and that's what we are trying to do and I feel like that's what I should focus on because the minute you get involved in how much abuse you're getting that's a downward spiral and it's already so stressful to produce written work at this point of time I'm just focusing on the harassment I have had to hire a lawyer now I've never had to do that but now that's but that's that's the new normal of our reporting so I think that's the job that's really sobering um there are some comments here yeah okay so that's maybe wow these are long comments it's a bit difficult to can I encourage participants to raise your question verbally because that will allow you to maybe enter into the conversation as a participant so Ray Giong if you'd like to raise your question please go ahead if you're still online yeah yeah go ahead if you can could you enable uh audio for Ray Giong please oh hello hi hi can you guys hear me okay yes we can hear you go ahead yeah thank you so much for these panel talks and these are really inspiring me um I'm I'm South Korean and I'm living in Ann Arbor Michigan I'm studying here and um I'm researching about the inequality and social injustice in America and um after having the pandemic I've been witnessing about like people stare at me in a weird way um because I'm I'm Asian and even though I'm having a lot of conversations and um these kind of talks with my cohort um what is the mean what is the meaning of the having some allies over to overcome this kind of pandemic but still we have a lot of um we we are revealing a lot of social injustice and the people like they're showing unshamely unshamably um the hate the hatred and horror towards Asian and I'm really wondering how have you ever changed your perspectives or some kind of like um I don't know like um perspectives towards Asian and how do you see how can we overcome this kind of yeah social injustice thank you thank you thanks so I guess the question and this is to any of the panelists um maybe I also it's one about what are the possibilities for resistance and solidarity in a time where people are facing discrimination in the context of the situation Berlin anyone who wants to take a go well jump in because I don't know if I have any really clear thought ideas about it I think it's going to be challenging in the midst of a pandemic but I think there are ways to do this you know kind of through the internet creating maybe forums social media creating groups to talk about these things I think some of the issues that she raised we're definitely seeing now in the US I know that there have been some instances of this in other parts of the country and I think in the US it's kind of more complicated particularly since you see it a lot too at kind of the highest level of governments some of the rhetoric that is coming out and I think that makes it even more troubling in some ways versus just kind of you know everyday um interactions and I think that's helping to reduce reproduce what people are thinking some people are thinking and how they're responding because I know early on when I first started doing um a lot of interviews about this I'd say um sometime probably in late February this was one of the main issues that came up people would ask me questions like you know is it a Chinese disease and I remember being on one radio station uh and basically pushing back um on the anchor saying you know the disease from what we know because we don't know everything because it was still very early you know it appears that started in China but it's not a Chinese disease and so you know because he was talking about travel bands and Chinese people spreading it and I said you know there's an American businessman and I was implying a white American businessman in our conversation if he's in China and he comes back and he has been infected you know with COVID-19 I don't even know if they had if it was called COVID-19 yet or not I can't remember I think by this time it was I can't remember the trajectory of the naming of it um but you know that he could steal you know then infect someone else so this idea that it can you know it doesn't need it could anyone can be a host effectively it's not race-based um you know so I talked about other types of diseases and how anybody can have them so a lot of this was kind of just basic educating and kind of pushing against stereotypes so I guess that's one way of solidarity um but I think you know people need to educate themselves and also just being open open to you know different possibilities and I mean I see there's a lot that we see that um definitely is um somewhat troubling um anyone else feel free to jump in but I would just like to tell her I'm really sorry that this is happening and she gets scared and and that's that's not okay but in India coronavirus is a Muslim Muslims are being blamed for right so the issue is not the disease here the issue is how people react to threats and how people react to things they don't understand and they always react to that to fear and that cannot define unfortunately the people who are in power who should not stigmatize communities and we've seen this over and over again public health experience with examples of how that does not help it's not an effective measure it's not a kind it's not a kind way to live um but then I I'm sorry this is the word we live in at this point and I feel like there is there is so there are so many people who are introspecting at this point there is so much good work that's also being done and um again there are no easy solutions to any of this I have not faced uh I'm not Muslim so I'm not faced back in India but then we all have to be strong at this point for very many reasons and we cannot let what someone else uh the hate that you've seen someone else's eyes for you cannot be the one that defines you at this point uh Phoebe because I can't see you just jump in whenever you want to answer a question okay okay um there was a question from Shreya Banerjee whose microphone is not working so I'm going to read it out um it's and Shreya asks given where the speakers are in the world what are your thoughts or visions on transitioning and recovering from the pandemic and all the wide-scale issues and inequalities that you spoke about so I guess it's a question about what does an exit from this situation look like um what kinds of practical changes and ideological progress are needed given a lesson learned from this crisis how does the pandemic end slowly um Donna I think the professor should take this one I should take this one how does it end um I think we all laughed um I mean it's difficult to say and I think it's going to end in stages frankly um because of you know the way it impacted different countries differently and in some countries it's really only starting now um in some parts of this country it's only starting now so what is you know what does that look like when does it end I mean what we saw in China very early on China really was able to um really contain it in about two months which I thought was amazing given the numbers that we saw coming out of the Hubei province and you know Wuhan and the Hubei province and all of this and I mean look at how China protected its big cities you know Beijing and Shanghai I mean they had very very low numbers um I looked at them I can't I'm not going to quote them right now but very very low I mean no more than a few hundred if that so imagine that and having cities that size now what China is seeing now is that most of their cases are coming from people flying in from other countries now bringing it you know to China and so that's what they're seeing now but they're responding very swiftly in terms of testing contact tracing and trying not to have it explode um and so you know that's that looks good I guess um but you know I mean it's hard to answer because I think what we're I think because it's so widespread that's very likely that it's going to be very difficult for it to fully end without a vaccine and widespread use of the vaccine because one of the things I've been saying is everyone's not going to take a vaccine so what is that going to look like um so I think maybe getting to this certain point where you have low transmission rates uh lower death rates but also really having supplies in in place both having health care facilities in in place and this is something that I teach about in something I've been screaming about for years you know in terms of global health superiority and you know state's not being prepared not putting the money and um you know into these these facilities and we really see that so both facilities but also now what we're seeing probably even more to some degree more than facilities is protected here even mask you know in a lot of states in the u.s right now you're supposed to wear a mask if you go out mask it's very difficult to buy a mask if you want to wear a mask because I also have to say everybody does not want to wear them or wear them even though they're supposed to even though it's been mandated but it's difficult to buy a mask and if you can buy a mask it's probably a surgical mask um and a surgical mask is not going to protect the wearer per se there's a little protection but the protection is much lower than a n95 or kn95 or ppp a ppf2 or something like this and so what does that look like so I think um having those more of those things available um to help maybe stem it also in terms of the u.s I think it's been so pervasive in terms of the spread throughout the country um and it's still spreading out the new parts of the country um I think we're gonna be not only are we the epicenter I guess you know closely followed by um UK and um Brazil now I think it's number three in terms of the numbers in the world and I mean we've all just well eclipsed you know China at this point I mean the u.s I don't even know what the numbers are now but over a million and a half people have been infected um and I think it was was it 80 something the last time I looked in terms of the number of people who had died because the numbers shift so so quickly that I can't even keep up with them anymore but it's been so pervasive in this country that there's no way I don't think that it's gonna end in this country without a vaccine and widespread use of the vaccine and I think the other impact of that is what does that look like globally Europe while some countries have high numbers a lot of those with higher numbers you can see that you know they're kind of they're trending downward um and so I think they've responded better they have protected protected gear is more available in most places I know you can buy a mask in France at a pharmacy at most of the grocery store chain just everywhere where here you can't even find them you haven't been able to find them in months and if they put if they stock them they're basically gonna sell out in a few hours um and so that's very that's gonna be challenging so the u.s now um after kind of trying to keep everybody out in the beginning you know stopping flights from China doing the ban for people from Europe and this sort of thing is probably going to be one of the places that are going to start spreading it back out into the world um and so I think I can't imagine the end right now that's what I'll say um but I think it's going to take probably two or three years before we see something that is seemingly an end I don't know if that helped that but that's kind of what I'm pondering yeah go ahead baby um there was a question from Kiat Makonem please go ahead and ask your question Aki if you could enable audio please oh yeah okay please click on the microphone button towards the bottom of your screen Kiat you need to enable your audio so if you just look at the icons at the bottom of your screen just make sure your audio is working um anybody else in the meanwhile okay yeah I see you as a yeah you want to go ahead and ask your question please okay while we figure that out if anybody else has a question do feel free to raise your hand no Kiat can you can you yeah can you ask your question now is your audio enabled Valentina hi can you guys hear me yes great thank you this has been um really good um perhaps a question to the panel about how they think can sort of build that herd immunity without losing you know individual privacy rights and the sort of issues that have been emerging around contact tracing and the role of sort of big tech within those um is there anyone who wanted to sort of comment on that yeah thank you so any thoughts on contact tracing apps technology so uh I think uh I'll take that one because uh I'll start with that India has a contact tracing app which is extremely uh intrusive it uses geo location and again this government has used geo location to the after muslim minority neighborhoods so everyone is nervous um my my the minute everyone talks about herd immunity the first question I have in my mind is what's implicit in that when you say you want herd immunity what is in fact into that question is that you're willing to say that if you are if there are 100 people and for you to reach herd immunity say 95 people uh have to be exposed to something are you as a society we need to accept collateral damage which would be many people who will just die because we want to we are impatient and we want to end this quickly so anyone who has a commodity or anyone who's for or anyone for for a variety of reasons is not at the best of his health or her health I feel like countries civilized nations cannot look at herd immunity as a solution just as now we as a society we've dealt with polio vaccines and we've had many instances impact the bizarre thing I was reading today from the u.s is the anti-vax movement is actually gaining momentum in the middle of politics so what are we talking about when you say herd immunity is that question just stemming from we can't sit at home anymore and this new normal doesn't work for us and so it's okay that the x amount of people would just have to be sacrificed and again there are no clear answers but then the minute you begin to engage with herd immunity it already looks like a very kind way to look at the solution for a problem that's affecting the entire world right now I agree with you absolutely on the herd immunity um I want to say one thing because I've been talking about contact tracing I'm talking about old-fashioned contact tracing where you have people who go and check on people who you know maybe someone got sick so not apps if they're not using apps I don't know of at least in this country even though there is talk of other surveillance definitely saw a lot of surveillance in China and not only with that but with the lockdown I don't know if you all saw this but even in some of the apartment buildings they had cameras so if you're going to leave the building they would know who was even leaving and entering the building you know as a part of the lockdown so very kind of strict surveillance PP did you want to comment on that or should I take another question well in terms of perhaps not in terms of surveillance we're increasingly seeing that in South Africa I mean when the state of national disaster was declared and it was deployed I long find that answers of military um in relation to enforcing that as well as security forces level four lockdown uh anyone who titled to work I think is an essential work during Do you want to get your question in now I see your hand is still up so hopefully yeah problem okay can you hear me yes concern is since the lockdown or since the coronavirus problem started in China I mean there has been thousands and thousands of discussions between scientists government activists and journalists you name it with every professional group I find that in most cases in most problems we were never um we never try to involve the people who are the victims of every conflict and every illnesses or an epidemic you know it's the people what matters it's not you know discussing amongst professionals or journalists it seems like you know the last since 1900 the same discussion the same group of people you know at different age at different stages would be discussing about the problem of the mass where are the people coming and this virus also is not something uh ordinary you know globally the whole life has been shut down to the extent you know where we had no say and we just had to obey so the discussion is not should should not be about finding vaccine even if you find vaccine how many people are you going to say the poor will always die the poor will always starve the poor will always be out of the agenda out of any kind of discussion so really what I'm asking is everyone who've had the privilege and also the uh fortune of having good education good life they should start you know discussing about the people to involve the mass because now the only the only way we can win it's not because of vaccine it's not because of lockdown it is once the people rise up and stop government scientists playing around with people like professionals media all these privilege people we need to get discussion about the ordinary people which is the majority I want to I want to try and get in a few more questions because we're we're getting towards the end of the event so at this point I'd like to gather maybe a couple more questions before turning back to the panelists I think I saw Sabrina Sabrina did you have your hand up earlier Sabrina can you just make sure to enable your audio and then you can ask your question Sabrina okay maybe while Sabrina gets uh audio working um the the previous question was I guess about people and maybe patients patients rights uh we've not heard that much in any of the news I mean obviously we we see stories of people falling ill and going into hospital in very serious cases but in the context of other diseases we often have quite a lot of discussion about patients rights and families rights and is that a meaningful uh is that a meaningful concept when we're talking about a pandemic where the whole population is in a sense vulnerable um are you are you asking me yeah anybody anybody who wants to take that on again all of my answers have the same caveat it's too early to say anything but the patient rights uh issue I feel like unlike say uh cancer uh patient or someone diagnosed with HIV there is a community there is a support group and there are networks that already exist um they they don't function very well in most parts of the world but then they at least exist so there is a very basic starting point now a little is known about this virus uh at this point and uh it's too early uh maybe in countries with better uh institutional uh support uh maybe that can be done but in low resource countries in Asia and Africa we are in India fighting who are actively fighting the government and taking it to court to admit that it has local community transmission uh so yeah there isn't enough data the people who have COVID are stigmatized and do not want to come out uh landlords have evicted them and uh I kind of feel it's it's too early to uh to see the kind of patient rights movement that is led by patients uh I speak strictly as a journalist so the calls that I give are from uh researchers who be working on ctv or HIV or something else and then they come um uh to this but uh I I I think it's too early it'll be welcome to have a group of COVID patients fighting for their rights but sick people it's very difficult to expect sick people to also take on the system while they are sick so yeah um any other thoughts on ma we have a question from ellie which I think would be um a good note on which to maybe draw our conversation to a close it's um I'm conscious of time because it's very early where Donna is and it's quite late where the guy is so we should uh I'm mindful of that but so I think maybe ellie's question would be our last uh and the question is and the mic isn't working for ellie so I'll give her the question the question is do you envisage any long-term social changes as a result of this pandemic are we going to go back to normal and back to normal is an inverted commons in the question or to a better different normal once this is over um I would just throw that question out to everyone and maybe I would just tack on to that a question about the geopolitics of COVID and whether you think something about the globe or about globalization is changing in this moment um is that change going to be a temporary blip or is it going to rewrite in a sense the architecture of the world well I'll jump in um I think in terms of social change I think it's difficult to gauge how things will change um I'll start by uh talking about her pancaterina because I thought of this earlier one of my answers and I didn't get to it so I was teaching actually New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina happened um and looking at New Orleans and I think having lived through that experience I can draw a lot from that and kind of living through a pandemic and what that looks like um but again that was just New Orleans parts of Louisiana parts of Mississippi so it was in this localized space um so it wasn't the whole country just as we seen in a lot of other particularly epidemics but what happened in New Orleans was the city didn't become something else um initially of course um a lot of you probably saw you know you've read about it you've seen the media while a lot of the um the city sat in water for weeks uh particularly the first two weeks most of it was in water but parts of the city was under water for several weeks uh and so what does this look like when you have a fairly uh large U.S. city that is basically under water and you have so much structural damage but also most people are also displaced uh and many people never returned but also now a lot of New Orleans has been rebuilt but it doesn't look like it looked before and kind of a lot of the cultural essence isn't there because a lot of the people who carry that now live all over the country um and so they're no longer there um but also it changed it uh New Orleans was one of the few cities uh in the U.S. it didn't have like a large kind of corporate chain field in terms of restaurants and you know stores and boutiques and this sort of thing it was mostly local and now you see more of the chain you know you see more whole foods they now have Trader Joe's and these sorts of things that they never had before so I think we're probably I hope that we're going to see something different from this um from a public health perspective I hope that people will finally really take this seriously but it's hard to think that they will take this seriously so I'll bring in the geopolitics for a minute one of the things that I've been somewhat preoccupied with is what is happening with the world health organization right now um and how it's been used is being used as a pond basically in the middle of a global a global pandemic um and so a lot of you've probably seen some of this some of the early comments from some of the French medical professionals uh Dr. Tedros response to that talking about ending colonial mentality very soon after he made these remarks just a week after so uh Donald Trump says that he's going to end U.S. funding to the world health organization which is very interesting because the comments weren't directed at Trump for instance um but also Trump used it to say that the world health organization in China basically had impacted U.S. response and so in response to a question that he received about social response and so this has been going on for about six weeks now on and off and so just this week um the world health organization held its annual world health assembly it was virtual of course because we're in a pandemic it was 18th and the 19th uh Trump sent a letter uh to uh the organization basically talking about why he wasn't getting funding you know kind of doubling down on what he was saying um at the same time you see leaders from around the world uh from Europe from Africa from the Caribbean from other parts of the world who are there who are really actively participating in the meeting and really thinking about what this pandemic looks like of what also what other health issues look like um and so during that meeting uh China players two billion dollars for the next two years to the world health organization now the amount of the money that uh Trump was sending was 400 million dollars so this really eclipses this um but I think this is something for us to think about um is this something that we want to happen in the middle of the pandemic I'm not saying that the world health organization is perfect but this is not the time to fight over these sorts of things so really thinking about investing in facilities investing in here investing in people to be able to protect your populations from a public health perspective I think this is one of the things that people hopefully now will take from this but given what we see happening right now with this kind of fight over the world health organization will that really happen? Yeah I can go next yeah so I I've been thinking obviously listening to this lecture by Professor Snowden at Yale and he was giving an interview to someone who asked who the the journalist asked him the question how come we don't remember the 19th pandemic and how come or we did not see what the health focus did and this is all happening and globally there was this moment of respect for doctors and nurses and Professor Snowden said because we don't memorialize them the way we do war heroes we use a lot of war metaphors but you don't build statues to nurses and you don't you know the essential workers who are now out there and as someone who just writes these stories I kind of have a glass half full outlook here people forget people forget all the time we've forgotten pandemics we don't learn lessons until the education system by himself and then teaches it to the next generation what I don't know is the people who do like to have intergenerational trauma from having survived family so you don't have a lot of negative impact that stays in and a lot of positive learnings don't get absorbed into these superstructures of society which is the courts and the governments and the hospitals and public health does not get so it's a mixed bag I kind of knowing Indian society and knowing some of Asian society are slightly better I feel like they remember the nasty words and the good good bits the lessons that you should learn and you should come together in healthcare and we do need a World Health Organization which is a little more independent but I do I again it's too early to say these things but I'm generally I'm not I don't think very optimistic view of this aspect of it okay Phoebe any last thoughts from you a responsive question and it is a bust I really think the cut to mine but I'll speak to you in terms of social change changes as a result of the pandemic so on the one hand I see the chasms of inequality widening I mean those especially in South Africa or on the continent as general when I speak to friends and acquaintances across the continent I'll speak yesterday to a friend in Ghana who's expressing similar sentiments you know those who are on economically on level one if you like you know barely surviving have now been dropped into the negatives so rebuilding back to that I will take time so the chasms of inequality widen that way and on the other hand what has come out of here is or I've seen and witnessed numerous occasions at the various modes of community and solidarity and food feeding programs supermarket workers who have become the heroes but the heroes now thank you I'm afraid we run out of time but I think it's been a really interesting conversation I'm just reflecting on the answers that all three of you gave the last question a lot will remember a lot will depend I guess on what we remember and forget what we choose to preserve from this moment and what we perhaps fail to the lessons we fail to learn or the legacies we fail to preserve one thing that struck me somewhere in the middle of the conversation was we're having a conversation here across four continents which is not something that I've done very much in my academic career actually and it's astonishing that it took a moment like this to produce a conversation you know that should be happening all the time around all of the issues that we think and talk about but I'm really very grateful that you all said yes to the conversation and have brought such interesting diverse perspectives to it from your respective vantage points and have also been thinking you know at different levels the global the local and everything in between so thank you to all our speakers I hope you know Vidya one of your messages to me said I hope things are better where you are and it sounds it seems to me like an appropriate greeting for the moment we're living in I hope things are better where you are so thank you thank you again and I hope we meet in better times as well thank you thank you for having me over, thank you so much for coming to my TV bye, it was a pleasure being on the panel yeah thanks for bearing up with the technology TV I hope it wasn't too torturous to be on the other end of what's up called thank you yes yeah yeah it's been a funny experience