Dear ADN Community,
Since the launch of our first Avoidable Deaths Newsletter in December 2019, a lot has changed.
Our second Newsletter is not due until August 2020, but due to the global pandemic COVID-19 (the novel ‘coronavirus’), I am releasing a special bulletin on behalf of the ADN Community.
I hope this Bulletin finds you and your family safe and healthy.
Although disasters (natural, technological and biological) are no black swans or surprises, we are seeing an unprecedented scale of public health interventions to contain COVID-19 through restrictions on our movements, national lockdowns, and surprising levels of poor disaster risk governance and planning.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has already declared global economic recession, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is predicting global food shortages. In addition to this, the monsoon and cyclone seasons are likely to exacerbate the impact of the lockdown and COVID-19 in the developing world.
Most of us face unprecedented times, now and ahead.
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Global Cases of COVID-19, snap shot taken at 12:04 on 08/04/2020
© Johns Hopkins University, 2020
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The ADN is a global community, and our members are working hard on the frontline to save lives and to help local and national governments and practitioners to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. We are regularly featuring voices of our practitioners on the ADN’s Blog Page.
To support our ADN-Bangladesh partners (e.g. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University – among others), we have launched a Repository of COVID-19 Information on ADN’s resource page. The Repository Page is available to the public, and provides web links and reports only from reliable sources (e.g. UNDRR, WHO, UNFPA and John Hopkins University).
Upon request from our ADN junior champion Arkoneil Ghosh based in Mumbai, India, we have launched the ADN YouTube channel to feature stories from the ADN community. We welcome short films (no more than five minutes) on any topic related to avoidable deaths.
The ADN’s Operation Manager, Mrs Denise Corsel has launched an Art Project on ‘Hope’ against the COVID-19 pandemic. We would like to thank everyone who has already submitted images. We are still welcoming other images/pictures.
Due to the national lockdown in India, we have seen deaths of migrant workers, and these deaths are largely due to their needs not being accounted for in the planning and response phase. In the UK, we have seen that the health and safety of the frontline workers are being put at ‘high risk’ due to a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE).
Some deaths from the COVID-19 are unavoidable. However, deaths due to poor disaster risk governance are avoidable. Avoidable deaths are a gross injustice, and they must be avoided at any cost.
I urge the ADN Community: wherever you are and in whatever means (in print or social media), voice your opinion, lobby your opinion, and stand up to the injustice against avoidable deaths.
I conclude by saying: stay safe, stay healthy, stay at home, and save lives. But keep your agencies active because we are ‘citizens of change’.
Yours sincerely,
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