Workers and day laborers in India

From: J Birch <Birch403@outlook.com> Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020, 9:10 PM To: justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca; Chrystia.Freeland@parl.gc.ca; dujarric@un.org; GlobalOttawa@globalnews.ca; news@skynews.com; tips@GlobalTVBC.com; contact.nbcnews@nbcuni.com; Secretary@HHS.gov; eurohealthycities@who.int; Sky.Today; newsonline@ctv.ca; ctvottawa@ctv.ca; media@sputniknews.com; media@gatesfoundation.org; nytnews@nytimes.com; montrealcommunity@ctv.ca; Info@PMOindia.gov.in; Info@narendramod.in Subject: Workers and day laborers in India (Opinion) Hey everyone, I was reading a story about how India is extending its quarantine measures and some are concerned about resources and income. I was thinking about day laborers and those at home and I have a few ideas about home based income for those who are not able to access social programs or who are away from home. Perhaps the government can hire them to sew surgical masks and go door to door in PPE and collect the masks they make and sterilize them. In addition, you can provide them with food and supplies with a fair income and when you pickup the masks you can deliver fabric for more masks to be made. This way you are creating home based incomes and supporting the medical drive to contain the virus. To help combat the spread, all residents and workers should wear masks in public or at work to reduce outside contamination. Additionally, shoes and footwear have been shown to spread the virus so perhaps outside shoes and indoor slippers can be provided in communal indoor areas like temples and such. Some hospitals are also giving patients surgical masks to reduce the risk to the hospital staff and it might be a prudent measure. In relation to testing we need to determine whom are immune to the virus and whom have the virus so that we will be able to formulate a proper plan for all areas of the planet. Doctors and nurses should be given the test to determine how many doctors are operational now and in weeks time. In addition, doctors and nurses should wear face shields and gowns if not already to further reduce the risk. Perhaps setup temporary testing labs to increase national testing capacity. Each city or region should have its own testing labs to increase testing capacity and to increase response time for contact tracing. Perhaps then we can start door to door testing where medical personnel are able to take test samples building by building to test the city while under quarantine. Perhaps you can coordinate these with pickup and deliveries for the above noted home income option. Then you can ensure your hospitals are stocked with medications and PPE for any currently ill patients and have the common areas for any essential services be sanitized regularly. Once you have the test data it can help determine how the hospital situation might develop and you can plan accordingly. You also need to ensure that you have teams setup to trace any infections and contacts in an area to ensure if someone gets ill you can reduce the hot spot and manage it immediately with quarantine and testing measures. Then once the infection rate is down and with the guidance of the WHO we can slowly start returning in a safe and healthy manner. During this time where we must stay at home with business owners and workers unemployed at this moment we have to ensure that everyone is fed, supported and healed. From there we can then plan each level of testing, contact tracing, PPE supply chains and national virus response teams to support and watch for viral outbreaks in real time using hospital data and contact tracing information. In relation to PPE supply you can use local resources to ensure that farmers are supported to ensure the continuity of the food supply. They would use all PPE and social distancing guidelines with support and quarantine options for the workers. Housing, medical, supply and transportation. Then the manufacturers would return in a home based or smaller capacity location with full safeguards and PPE. They would manufacture any needed PPE based on hospital information and contact tracing projections and send the supply to the medical centres. Once food and medical supply have been organized then you would supplement your hospitals if needed with overflow temporary locations and additional staff in the form of medical students and volunteers. They would have medical training and be able to help support the nurses and doctors. Once the infection rate has started to decrease you can start to slowly reopen months at a time to give you more data on infections. Then if they spike, you can stop and institute more measures like sanitation and distancing improvements area by area so that you can react to single hotspots instead of multiple ones.

It might also be prudent to redesign your spaces to be better equipped to handle social distancing requirements and have your sanitation engineers clean all surfaces of a building or area that will be opening and coupled with testing and social distancing there should be a decrease in cases. Then we can start collaborating on a vaccine once we have stabilized the infection rate and eliminated the mortality rate. Once a vaccine is in place we can return to more normal conditions with more pandemic ready infrastructure. This will not only help us manage during this crisis but even the common flu season to ensure better health conditions for us and our institutions. There may be additional considerations based on geography, population centres and infrastructure but a similar framework might be helpful in reducing the infection rate. Each city need to have a virus command centre to coordinate testing, contact tracing and supply chain management at the local level. Viral quarantine and management is about local level onwards as it will only be effective if we quell the community spread. We have to ensure safeguards for everyone coupled with testing and contact tracing. This will ensure the population is protected to reduce the strain on the hospital network until a cure is ready. Stay Safe, Stay Sanitized and Stay Supportive, John Ames Birch @johneames2