COVID Place making

In the Bad News Good News Department, the City of Sydney Australia is finally getting automated pedestrian crossing in their major downtown intersections, because of the Covid-19 virus crisis.

If you are unfamiliar with Australian politics, the State and the City do not get along and have different agendas when it comes to cities. The State has control of the highway network and is still in the 20th century model of moving vehicles quickly and efficiently, with secondary thought to pedestrians. You would think with 90 percent of movement in the downtown being by pedestrians that they would have priority at intersections. But no. Pedestrians have long waits, and automation of crossings only during the day. Other times there are push buttons that still don’t activate crossing in a timely fashion and there’s no standardized automatically set intervals for crossing.

Until now.

In this article by News 7 Sydney,  Mayor Clover Moore said pedestrian buttons “would not need to be pushed for the foreseeable future”, as the state government , which has control of major arterials in the city has made the signal changes for pedestrians and cyclists.

Physical distancing for the Covid-19 virus has been an issue in the impoverished Downtown Eastside of Vancouver where the street functions as the community’s living room.  Many residents of this area live in the SROs’ (single room occupant) hotels in the area. These offer a room with a shared bathroom for the entire floor.

CBC’s Angela Jung has written this article indicating that the City of Vancouver is reserving hotel rooms for individuals who are homeless or using shelters that may need physical isolation  because of the Covid-19 virus.

The City has been working with Vancouver Coastal Health and BC Housing to co-ordinate care and support for the downtown eastside community.

Existing services have been sharply curtailed because of the Covid-19 virus, including places where people could get food or use the washroom. While the City has added 12 handwashing stations in the area, they have not provided any toilets for local residents to use.  Of the handwashing stations, four have already been stolen, and three have been recovered.

I was talking with Gordon Price who is just finishing his Australian tour in Melbourne. We were discussing the AIDS epidemic where we first met. We  both worked on policy supporting people with AIDS and their families~I worked for Dr. John Blatherwick as a health planner and was on the Mayor’s Task Force on AIDS.

Gordon Campbell was mayor and he formed a committee of  business leaders to bring the epidemic front and center  to Vancouver’s work community. This group travelled to San Francisco and experienced first hand the need for immediate specialized services, triage, housing and hospice.   In the early days of AIDS no one really knew how it was spread, causing a lot of fear and panic in the community.  AIDS also was a disease that did a zoonotic jump, from chimps to humans. Globally 32 million people have died from AIDS since the virus was first discovered.

AIDs had a different course in Vancouver than other major cities. The gay community came forward and formed several organizations to get the message out about how the virus was transmitted, and worked tirelessly to create specialized services and follow up. It was this active advocacy and continued strong consistent messaging that meant the disease was more contained in Vancouver. In the 1980’s AIDS  did not spread rapidly to other risk groups as other cities experienced.

The COVID-19 virus is also a zoonotic introduction, most probably from horseshoe bats. Like AIDS was perceived forty years ago, there is as of this date no known way to stop the course of the COVID-19  virus other than having a community agree to physically distance from each other. That seems to be challenging for many people.

Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart expressed frustration with the fact that citizens were still clustering and crowding in public spaces. Mayor Stewart stated on Sunday that people had to  “Shut down, stay put, save lives.”

The alternative would be an order that required people to stay in their residences. That would be all the time except for essential trips.

It’s not “social distancing” it is “physical distancing” to have a bubble of  1.5 metres or six feet around you that is your safety zone during the COVID-19 crisis.

And there is a difference~physical distancing means that you can still walk around the neighbourhood, see if you can buy groceries for a neighbour,  and contact family and friends through technology.  It may make you communicate in ways that are unexpected, but there is still a social bond with people around you.

There are some remarkable stories coming out of physical distancing.  At 7 p.m every night residents in the west end come out on their balconies to cheer for the doctors and health care workers. This is part of a global initiative with its own hashtag #clapfordoctors.

There’s also the little home made lending  book  kiosks in neighbourhoods where people who leave a book can take a book; in some cases, residents have chosen to leave canned tins and food in these mini libraries so that everyone can be fed.

There are ads on CraigsList and Facebook Marketplace of volunteers willing to shop for and pick up groceries or go to the drugstore for people. Here’s an opportunity for the City of Vancouver to have staff remotely assist in the match up of  people that cannot get groceries and services with those that can. That can provide assistance at the neighbourhood level, and would be a well valued initiative.

Parents and families are also using the street differently too. In my neighbourhood the parents come out with lawn chairs and drinks every sunny afternoon. With the respect of necessary physical distance they  set up on the sun splashed part of the road.

With the current level of minimal traffic, kids in the neighbourhood can bike right around their block, something seen as unattainable when there was the normal heavier volume of vehicles at speed.

This image is being circulated on social media as the artist Henri Matisse in bed with the flu. That may have been a bending of the truth to reflect the current Covid-19 Crisis, as Matisse who lived from 1869 to 1954 had an operation for  stomach cancer later in life that left him confined to bed or a chair. No longer able to stand to paint, he started to draw murals on his walls from his bed, and used that concept to have assistants make cut-outs that had a “distinct and dimensional complexity”.

With the colour, shape and form, those images are instantly recognizable as Matisse’s work today. There’s another message too~in the face of adversity and not being able to do the painting work that had been his passion, Matisse adapted to what he could do and created a new art form.

As Matisse said “There are always flowers for those who want to see them”.

There are two places where COVID-19 has come and mostly gone, with minimal economic impacts. As reported by Tom Blackwell in  MSN.com Singapore and Taiwan approached COVID-19 in a different way. Singapore’s city state houses six million people, but as of last week had only 435 cases and zero mortalities. Taiwan has over 23 million people but only has 135 cases and 2 deaths. Schools and workplaces remained open during the crisis, meaning the economy did not take the kind of hit that the Canadian economy is experiencing.

How did they do this? Singapore and Taiwan achieved virus control by isolating people who may “have COVID-19, tightly controlling international travel and zealously pursuing those who had contact with the infected.”

Singapore used police officers to find potential COVID-19 contacts, and gave people in quarantine government issued cell phones for monitoring. Quarantined persons were required to send photos of their surroundings so that authorities knew they were staying in place.

Singapore also commenced health status screenings of all passengers arriving from Wuhan on January 3, and extended the screening to all passengers by February They also tested almost 2,200 people a day.

Taiwan allowed doctors and pharmacists access to the population’s recent travel histories as well as digital health files, allowing the tracing of potential carriers.  Anyone in quarantine risked heavy fines if they did not abide by it.

The difference appears to be attitudinal and also structural. Right from the beginning the COVID-19 pandemic was treated very seriously, as both countries were heavily impacted by the 2003 SARS outbreaks. Both countries set up national command centres, stockpiled medical supplies, and could quickly set up screening centres at shopping malls.

Both Singapore and Taiwan have a centralized government that provides universal health care, unlike Canada where there are thirteen different jurisdictions.