The government has announced direct cash transfers to poorer households, but major challenges remain in providing for the 500 million employed in the informal economy.
Makeshift hospital beds at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne during the influenza pandemic of 1919.
Museum Victoria
Gullibility, cynicism, pride, closed mindedness, negligence and wishful thinking. If you can use any of these to describe your reasoning, it’s likely you’re committing a sin of thought.
A tattoo parlour in Toronto remains closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
(michael_swan/flickr)
Businesses are struggling in these difficult times — but there is a shimmer of hope in the incredible creativity, ingenuity and resilience that we see from around the globe.
Government officers seize civets in a wildlife market in Guangzhou, China to prevent the spread of SARS in 2004.
Dustin Shum/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
Wild animals and animal parts are bought and sold worldwide, often illegally. This multibillion-dollar industry is pushing species to extinction, fueling crime and spreading disease.
A building damaged during anti-Asian riots in Vancouver in 1907.
(UBC Archives, JCPC_ 36_017)
Fear of COVID-19 has sparked some to react with violent racism towards Asian Americans and Canadians. This is not the first time fear of disease has led to outbreaks of violent anti-Asian racism.
It’s time the EU turned its rhetoric about Africa into more tangible action.
epa
In reacting to the pandemic, architecture can reclaim its impact by conceding its loss of connection with public health, looking beyond Western thinking for its references.
To support precarious households that can’t access existing relief during lockdown and its aftermath, the government should implement a temporary increase in the value of the child support grant.
The Black Death inspired medieval writers to document their era of plague. Their anxieties and fears are starkly reminiscent of our own even if their solutions differ.
(Shutterstock)
During the Black Death of the 1300s, medieval writers struggled to make sense of the disease just as we are now during the COVID-19 pandemic
Two Steve Martin banjo video tweets have been viewed more than 10 million times since March 21, 2020. Here, stills from the ‘Banjo Calm’ video.
(@SteveMartinToGo/Twitter)
Through social media experiences, both professional and amateur musicians-in-isolation offer community expressions of human spirit, and audiences appreciate their gifts.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.
Wikimedia Commons
From the bird masks of plague doctors and large voluminous skirts to hat pins and face masks, this video provides a quick tour through the history of protective fashion.
Shutdown in Seattle to slow the spread of coronavirus empties the streets, March 26, 2020. Less economic activity means less revenue for utilities.
AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand