FROM OTHER SOURCES: NEWS AND FEATURES FOR AND ABOUT AMHERST (#19)

Editor’s Note: “From Other Sources” (FOS) returns after a nine-week hiatus. FOS offers links to selected articles that might be of interest to Amherst readers. We will update this section every other week, emphasizing different timely topics. While so much of the news has focused on the COVID-19 emergency, there are lots of other things of going on might be of interest to Amherst readers. While we will continue to provide a daily rundown of pandemic news here, we will also present this roundup of other news and features, as well as a listing of our top five COVID-19 articles from the last two weeks. 

COVID-19 TOP FIVE FROM THE DAILY COVID-19 REPORT
The New Politics of Care: The Right Response to COVID-19 is a Massive Jobs Program Putting People to Work to Secure Public Health by Greg Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski (4/27/20) . The right response to COVID-19 is to rebuild our economy from the ground up, putting people to work in a massive jobs program to secure public health for all. (Boston Review)

Seven Lessons From Abroad That American Governors Should Not Ignore as They Prepare to Re-open Their Economies by Stephen Engleberg, Caroline Chen, and Sebastian Rotella (4/18/20). While they differ on the details, the co-authors’ views formed a startlingly united consensus of what’s needed:

• massive, ongoing testing to detect where the disease is spreading;
• a real-time ability to trace and isolate contacts of those infected;
• willingness of people to wear masks in crowded public spaces;
• reserves of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other equipment for hospital workers to handle any surge in cases;
• reliable, easily administered blood tests to find out how many people have been infected and, eventually, to identify people with immunity who could work at higher-risk jobs. (Propublica)

Simulation Suggests 12 More Weeks of Closure Needed in MA to Protect Against Late Summer Surge by Nik DeCosta Klipa (4/27/20). According to the simulator used by Massachusetts General Hospital, the state’s business-closure order and stay-at-home advisory should remain in place for another 12 weeks—or until roughly July 20—to ensure against a late-summer surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and to keep the number of statewide deaths due to the disease under 5,000 through the end of August. As of Monday, the COVID-19 death toll in Massachusetts stood at just over 3,000. (Boston.com)

What The COVID-19 Crisis Reveals About American Medicine by Siddhartha Mukherjee. (4/27/20). Medicine is a system for delivering care and support; it’s also a system of information, quality control, and lab science. All need fixing. (The New Yorker)

We Are Living In A Failed State by George Packer, (June 2020).  When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. (The Atlantic)

CLIMATE/ENVIRONMENT/ENERGY
Want to Rebuild the Climate With Clean Energy.? Germany Offers 20 Years of Lessons by Dan Gearino (4/30/20). Twenty years ago, before climate change was as widely seen as the existential threat it is today, Germany embarked on an ambitious program to transform the way it produced electric power. Over the next two decades, it became a model for countries around the world, showing how renewable energy could replace fossil fuels in a way that drew wide public buy-in by passing on the benefits—and much of the control—to local communities. The steps Germany took on this journey, and the missteps it made along the way, provide critical lessons for other countries seeking to fight climate change. (Inside Climate News)

Massachusetts Communities With Dirty Air Are Coronavirus Hotspots by Zoe Greenberg (4/29/30). When Massachusetts released town-by-town coronavirus infection rates earlier this month, those that topped the list made alarming sense to environmental activists and public health experts. That’s because the six communities that have been hardest hit by the virus—Chelsea, Brockton, Everett, Lynn, Randolph, and Lawrence—were all previously designated by the state as “environmental justice” communities. Each has a high percentage of minority, low-income residents, and each has high rates of asthma and other environmentally-related respiratory diseases, in part because of pollution. (Boston Globe)

ECONOMY
Amherst’s Library Endowment Plummets 9% In One Month by Jim Russell (4/29/20). The Amherst public library system’s endowment recently decreased by 9 percent, director Sharon Sharry told the Town Council during Monday’s meeting. On February 29, it stood at $7.9 million; as of March 31, it had decreased to $7.2 million, she said. (MassLive)

Essential Workers Plan May Day Strikes. by Scott Neuman (5/1/20). Employees at many online retailers, grocery store chains, and package-delivery services are planning labor actions on May 1 to protest what they describe as unsafe working conditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, while others, put out of work by the disease, are using May Day to demand an end to stay-at-home orders they say are ruining livelihoods and irreparably harming the economy. Meanwhile, nurses at scores of hospitals across the country plan to take to the streets to protest a lack of personal protective equipment. And independent truckers, fed up with low freight rates, plan a congestion-inducing “slow roll” in their rigs through parts of Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other major cities. (NPR) 

Jobless Claims In Mass. Top 893,000, Or 24% Of The Labor Force, Amid Coronavirus Crisis by Larry Edelman (4/30/20). Nearly one in four Massachusetts workers have lost their jobs during the coronavirus shutdown, a harrowing gutting of the workforce in a state where just two months ago employers were having a hard time filling open positions. In the weeks since COVID-19 restrictions closed stores, restaurants, and thousands of other businesses, the state has fielded more than 893,600 claims for unemployment pay, or 24 percent of the pre-pandemic labor force, the Baker administration said Thursday. The jobless ranks were swelled by gig workers, freelancers, and others who were newly eligible for benefits. (Boston Globe)

EDUCATION
UMass Plans for Uncertain Fall With Hiring Freeze and Voluntary Executive Pay Cuts by Jacqueline Voghel (5/1/20). The University of Massachusetts/Amherst is preparing for the fall semester with contingency plans for bringing students back to campus, a hiring freeze, and voluntary pay cuts for executive leadership. The University is committed to resuming classes in the fall, Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy wrote in a letter sent to accepted students on in late April, though university officials have yet to determine whether the classes will be held on campus, remotely, or somewhere in between. The University is working with state and local health officials to “determine when we can resume in-person instruction either at full strength or under lower population density conditions,” Subbaswamy wrote. “At this time we don’t have an estimated date on when we will make this announcement, but we are preparing for all contingencies.” (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

What It Might Look Like to Safely Reopen Schools by Anya Kamenetz (4/24/20). Three-quarters of U.S. states have now officially closed their schools for the rest of the academic year. While remote learning continues, summer is a question mark, and attention is already starting to turn to next fall. (NPR)

Amherst Braces For Service Cuts At Elementary Schools by Scott Merzbach (4/28/20). Amherst school officials will likely have to make a series of service cuts at the town’s three elementary schools as a result of reduced funding caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A budget prepared in March had the current year’s $23.84 million budget rising by $667,488 to $24.51 million, and preserving all existing programs and staff and expanding the dual-language program, but that spending plan no longer reflects reality, according to school officials.  (Amherst Bulletin)

UMass Students Display Their Generosity As Study Abroad In Cuba Is Cut Short by Lauren N. Vandenberg (4/27/20). Many UMass students were disappointed to have their study abroad experiences cut short this semester, after the spread of Covid-19 required students to return home in March. Sixteen Public Health students participating in the UMass Study Abroad program in Havana, Cuba found their twelve-week program cut in half. But this did not stop the students from making generous and kind gestures as they departed. (UMass News)

Photo Diary: What Socially Distanced Schools Look Like In Denmark by Meaghan Gallagher (4/27/20). Younger-grade school students in Denmark returned to campuses earlier this month, as the country begins to ease its lockdown restrictions; the children must adhere to strict guidelines concerning hygiene and social distance. As classes returned to session at Ringsted Lilleskole, a private school about 50 miles southwest of Copenhagen, photographer Ole Jensen shadowed students to capture a photo diary of what school looks like amid a pandemic. Here’s a brief glimpse of how education looks now across several schools in Denmark. (The 74)

GOOD NEWS
Pakistan Hires Thousands of Newly Unemployed Laborers for Ambitious 10 Billion Tree-Planting Initiative by McKinley Corbley (4/30/20). Although the novel coronavirus pandemic has driven thousands of workers into unemployment, the Pakistani government has found a way to provide jobs to their citizens while also reforesting the nation. According to Reuters, Pakistan has created more than 63,000 jobs for unemployed day laborers by relaunching the nation’s ambitious 10 Billion Tree Tsunami campaign. (Good News Network)

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HISTORY
On The 50th Anniversary, America’s Still Not Fully Recovered From The Wounds Of Kent State by Will Bunch (4/30/20). We live in a moment of terrible crisis and economic want, but also a time when real change feels possible. And we’ve seen now what kind of havoc is wreaked from 50 years of working to stifle dissent and turn our campuses away from idealism and into machines geared toward churning out cubicle farmers. If we didn’t know then, we know now. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Kent State And The War that Never Ended by Jill Lepore (4/27/20). This spring marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Kent State shootings, an occasion explored in Derf Backderf’s deeply researched and gut-wrenching graphic nonfiction novel, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (forthcoming from Abrams ComicArts). (The New Yorker)

HOUSING
Ode to North Village: The Street We All Lived On by Nabil Ayers (4/28/20). When the sprawling collection of inexpensive family housing units known as North Village in Amherst is demolished in July by the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, a private developer will build new housing on the property. The demolition will mark the end of a unique, half-century-long social experiment that provided to me, as a kid growing up, a foundation of diversity and community. (Amherst Bulletin)

More Than One Third of New Englanders May Be Unable to Pay Rent Due to Coronavirus by Michelle Williams (4/23/20). As weekly joblessness claims hit all-time highs, more than a third of renters across the region are at risk of being unable to pay come the first of the month. In a new report from the New England Public Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, researchers found an estimated 36 percent of renters and 18 percent of homeowners in New England might be unable to make their housing payments.The projected value of the combined rent and mortgage payments add up to an estimated $1.5 billion in monthly payments. (MassLive)