Anyone who breaks coronavirus quarantine should be executed, says Chechnya leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
The president of the Russian republic – who oversaw a brutal crackdown on LGBT+ people in Chechnya – made the claim on March 24 at a government meeting as the region confirmed its first three coronavirus cases.
“If you ask me, anyone who creates this problem for himself should be killed,” he said.
“Not only does he get sick, [but he also infects] his family, his sisters, brothers, neighbours,” the regional Caucasian Knot news agency quoted Kadyrov as saying.
Ramzan Kadyrov recommends Chechens drink water with lemon and honey to combat coronavirus.
Kadyrov added that people spreading fake information about the deadly but delicate virus should be punished with community service.
His comments came as the president ordered all restaurants, cafés and “crowded places” in the republic to shutter doors in an effort to curb the caseload steadily crawling upwards.
Ramzan Kadyrov takes an oath during the ceremony of his inauguration as the head of Russia’s Caucasus region of Chechnya for a third term, in Grozny on October 5, 2016. (ELENA FITKULINA/AFP/Getty Images)
But such measures also eclipsed comments made by Kadyrov that the pandemic paralysing the world is not to be feared. Earlier this month, he simply advised citizens to drink water with lemon and honey to strengthen immune systems.
Alongside consuming garlic for “pure blood”, BBC Russia reported.
Chechnya, a mostly Muslim region in southern Russia that fought two wars for independence, is now under Moscow’s control.
Regional leader Kadyrov operates a vastly carte blanche rule in exchange for devotion to the Kremlin.
Mugs decorated with images of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin and Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov are seen on sale among other items at a gift shop in Moscow. (DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images)
Being gay is taboo in Chechnya, which pushed the lives of many queer folk into private online chat rooms and darkened alleyways.
But one day, this all changed.
In 2017, images and anecdotes of queer men who suffered weeks of torture and brutal beatings in a targeted pogrom were exposed by local journalists, in a horrifying turn in the country’s long history of human rights abuses.
Local authorities denied the sweeps ever happened, but journalist Elena Milashina and human rights lawyer Marina Dubrovina hurled countless cases of kidnapped gay men into the public eye.
Witnesses have painted a brutal playbook of Chechen regional authorities bundling gay men into cars, thrown into basements of police stations or thrown into facilities where they were tormented and starved.
“I’m OK,” gay nurse Kious Kelly told his sister March 18, “don’t tell mum and dad. They’ll worry.”
These were his last words.
Kelly has become a headline dreaded by New Yorkers – front-line healthcare providers especially – the first state nurse to die of coronavirus.
The 48-year-old assistant nurse manager at Mount Sinai West tested positive for the novel virus and breathed with the help of a ventilator in the ICU. He died Tuesday, the New York Post reported.
Kious Kelly’s sister: ‘His death could have been prevented.’
Countless fellow staffers, friends, family and LGBT+ community leaders mourned his death online, with some setting up a GoFundMe page to support his loved ones. The page is threaded with reverent messages lauding his life.
His death, which his sister Marya raged “could have been prevented” on Facebook Wednesday, has become a horrifying glimpse into weeks to come for America’s overstrained health system.
“Please help get our healthcare workers the protection they need,” she wrote, adding that although her brother had asthma, he was otherwise healthy.
A story of missteps and mixed messages, US president Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus has outraged medical chiefs. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The US now has the highest coronavirus caseload in the world and missteps from the Trump administration, advocates warn, have threatened the lives of Americans.
Moreover, New York City has become a petri dish for the deadly but delicate virus, hoarding almost a quarter of the country’s COVID-191 cases.
Gay nurse dies of coronavirus, and outraged staffers say hospital’s lack of protection is to blame.
Dwimdling supplies in US hospitals did not exclude the one Kelly clocked-in day-to-day.
He had worked nonstop for weeks as fellow staffers wore gowns made of trash bags not enough to protect them from the wave of hacking, feverish patients pelting the hospital.
Kelly’s colleagues are frightened. Terrified that the scarcity of protective kits for staff – such as masks and gowns – contributed to Kelly’s death and they, too, might be next.
“Kious didn’t deserve this,” an anonymous nurse told the paper.
“The hospital should be held responsible. The hospital killed him.”
“I’m also very angry with the Mount Sinai Health System for not protecting him,”registered nurse Bevon Bloise posted to Facebook.
A view of Mount Sinai Hospital West amid the coronavirus outbreak on March 26, 2020 in New York City. (John Nacion/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“We do not have enough PPE, we do not have the correct [personal protective equipment], and we do not have the appropriate staffing to handle this pandemic.
“And I do not appreciate representatives of this health system saying otherwise on the news.”
Mount Sinai West representatives denied the staff claims when approached for comment by the New York Times, saying: “While we do — and have had — enough protective equipment for our staff, we will all need more in the weeks ahead.”
Kious Kelly yearned to become a dancer, but found himself applying for nursing school.
“He used to carry around a thick notepad holder that hides a box full of chocolates and candies so he can have it handy to give out to miserable/grumbly nurses and doctors who are more likely than not ‘hangry,’” Joanne Loo, a fellow nurse at Mount Sinai West, wrote on Facebook.
“He spreads joy and love exactly like how the world needs it. He is a nurse hero to the patients and nurses who he crossed path with.
“His death hit home… and it hurts.”
His family is now trying to bring his body back to Michigan.
“We know we can’t have a service anytime soon, but we want him home,” Sherron said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued a statewide moratorium on eviction orders for residents affected by the COVID-19 crisis.
The order lasts through May 31, and requires tenants to declare in writing they cannot pay parts or all of their rent. Tenants will still be required to pay their rent “in a timely manner” at a later date, and could still face eviction once the order expires.
As households across the United States start to receive their 2020 census packets, LGBTQ advocacy groups are ramping up efforts to ensure lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people living in the country are counted and understand what’s at stake when it comes to the decennial survey.
“We want LGBTQ folks to know that census data are used to allocate political power,” said Meghan Maury, policy director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, which runs the Queer the Census campaign. The drive, formed just before the 2010 census, works to raise LGBTQ awareness and participation in the population count.
The organization’s efforts are increasingly important as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the globe and upends the daily lives of people across the U.S. and beyond. This public health crisis has complicated the Census Bureau’s plans to deliver by year-end an accurate count of every person living in the country.
How are LGBTQ people counted?
As required by the Constitution, the census every 10 years will count all people living in the United States on April 1, 2020, and for the first time, same-sex couples are being explicitly counted.
The 2020 census asks respondents about their relationship to the person with whom they share their home, and now includes “‘opposite-sex husband/wife/spouse,” “same-sex husband/wife/spouse,” “opposite-sex unmarried partner” and “same-sex unmarried partner.” In previous surveys, the options were “husband and wife” or “unmarried partner.”
Data on same-sex cohabiting couples, however, only provides a partial snapshot of the country’s LGBTQ community, as many individuals do not live with a same-sex partner.
“The data we get from the census won’t be representative of everyone in our community,” Maury said, who along with her organization has been advocating for higher LGBTQ participation in the count.
According to NBC News’ reporting from 2017, LGBTQ advocates pushed to add an explicit question about sexual orientation and gender identity, and they briefly rejoiced when a draft of the census was leaked in 2017 showing such a question. But soon after, the Census Bureau issued a statement saying that the question had been a “mistake.”
Even so, the LGBTQ data the 2020 census does collect will be useful, according to advocacy groups. Knowledge about the “number of same-sex couples that are raising kids, the geography of where same-sex couples live, and the race and ethnicity of people in same-sex couples” will all help policymakers better understand at least the cohabiting part of the LGBTQ community, Queer the Census said in a statement.
What’s at stake?
Census data is used to help allocate more than $675 billion in federal funding each year on everything from infrastructure to job training services, according to the Census Bureau. The data also helps determine a community’s emergency readiness needs and how many seats each state has in the House of Representatives.
This information is also used to disburse funds for programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid and public housing, all of which Maury said “LGBTQ people are disproportionately likely to use.”
Maury said one of her organization’s biggest efforts revolves around educating LGBTQ people about the census. She said at-risk communities — including LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants, those experiencing homelessness and people with low incomes — are “overwhelmingly undercounted in the census.”
The National LGBTQ Task Force has found that not only are at-risk communities undercounted, but also “privileged” and wealthy people are overcounted, which “reinforce[s] systems of power and oppression in this country.”
Where can I fill out the 2020 census?
All home addresses in the U.S. should soon receive a packet that contains a private code, which can be used to fill out the survey online at my2020census.gov. Those who are unable to fill out the questionnaire online, which the Census Bureau says will take 10 minutes on average, can request a paper questionnaire.
Households that do not fill out the census as required by law will be visited by an in-person census taker. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, however, the Census Bureau is delaying certain aspects of its survey collection and counting process. While online and mail collections are proceeding normally, census takers won’t go out into the field until May to knock on doors of homes whose residents haven’t yet filled out the survey. And the deadline for counting everyone in the U.S. has been delayed by two weeks, moving from the end of July to mid-August.
Data from the 2020 census is expected to be available to the public beginning in December 2021.
Amid concerns a lack of federal protections leaves LGBTQ people open to discrimination, a group of 87 House Democrats are calling on Dr. Deborah Birx to affirm anti-LGBTQ discrimination will be prohibited in coronavirus relief efforts.
The March 26 letter, coordinated by Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kansas) and the LGBTQ Equality Caucus, draws on the assertion LGBTQ people are disproportionately vulnerable to the coronavirus.
“We call on you to keep these considerations in mind as you develop solutions and we ask you to be proactive by publicly asserting that any programs or initiatives that assist the American people during this crisis must be conducted without discrimination against any community, including the LGBTQ community, and that there are no grounds by which this type of discrimination is acceptable,” the letter says.
LGBTQ people are disproportionately vulnerable to the coronavirus, the letter says, because that have high reported rates of discrimination in the health care system; have greater rates of smoking, cancer and depression; and are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS, which can depress immune systems and make patients vulnerable to disease.
Older people are vulnerable to the coronavirus, and LGBTQ elders even more so, the letter says, because they “grew up in an era where asserting an LGBTQ identity was difficult to impossible” and now have limited social support.
Birx, named the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, has become a rising star as result of her diplomatic approach to answering questions during the daily White House briefings on the pandemic.
As the House Democrats’ letter notes, Birx also has a history in fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since 2014, she has served as ambassador-at-large and U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator since 2014, which makes her responsible for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
“Based on your many years of service in the fight against HIV/AIDS, we take comfort knowing that you are in this leadership position and have been, and will continue to be, an ally to the LGBTQ community,” the letter states.
Birx has compared the coronavirus pandemic to the fight against HIV/AIDS in the early days of the epidemic during a White House briefing in the Rose Garden earlier this month.
“We had another silent epidemic: HIV,” Birx said. “And I just want to recognize the HIV epidemic was solved by the community: the HIV advocates, and activists who stood up when no one was listening and got everyone’s attention. We’re asking that same sense of community to come together and stand up against this virus.”
House Democrats write the letter in the aftermath of the Trump administration declaring it will refuse to enforce an Obama-era rule barring anti-LGBTQ discrimination among federal grantees, such as taxpayer-funded adoption agencies and medical care providers. The Department of Health & Human Services had implemented the rule in December 2016 just before Obama left the White House and Trump took office.
Faced with calls to lift the rule from religious-affiliated non-profits, including Catholic Social Services, the Trump administration announced late last year it would not only the start the rule-making process to lift the regulation, but cease enforcing it immediately.
Earlier this month, a trio of LGBTQ legal advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the decisionto stop enforcing the rule in court, citing the discrimination LGBTQ people may face in social services, such as meals on wheels, without the implementation of the rule.
Although House Democrats don’t explicitly mention the rule or the lawsuit, they cite many of the same concerns expressed in the lawsuit against the Trump administration.
“For every community impacted by coronavirus, you will often see ways in which the LGBTQ populations within those communities face harsh realities,” the letter says. “Young people whose colleges are closing may not have supportive families who will take them in. LGBTQ people who lose their jobs may have a harder time finding new work based on pre-existing patterns of discrimination against LGBTQ job-seekers. Those LGBTQ people in prison or who are navigating the immigration system already face unique challenges, including vulnerability to violence, which can be made worse during a crisis such as this.”
When Rocio Marquez lost her job cleaning offices about two years ago, she took a leap of faith and started her own business.
A former Monterey County strawberry picker who moved to Sonoma County six years ago, Marquez had always dreamed of being her own boss and wanted to see if her entrepreneurial skills could mean a boost in income, she said.
Over the course of several months, she and her husband scraped together enough money to open Pupusas y Tacos “Marquez,” a green food cart parked on the Whiskey Tip lot at the edge of Santa Rosa’s Roseland neighborhood. Marquez put in long hours to keep it running, slowly building her business with the patronage of hungry workers who stopped at her Stony Point Road location for a bite to eat before work or for lunch.
But the coronavirus pandemic and county and state orders for people to stay at home have upended her business, depleting the steady stream of customers that once frequented her cart as more are out of work and strapped for cash, Marquez said.
“I’m going to wait to see what happens but right now I’m not making enough to pay rent, to cover the cost of food,” Marquez said, though she remained hopeful. “Really, there’s nothing to do. We’re just in the hands of God.”
The slowdown has meant one or two customers every few hours, spoiled meat that she’s had to throw away and lingering fears about how she’ll pay for the small group of employees that help run her business.
Marquez is not alone. Latino entrepreneurs across Sonoma County are struggling to keep their businesses afloat as a local order for residents to stay at home that went into effect March 18 has curtailed or halted most economic activity for the sake of minimizing the virus’ spread, said Herman J. Hernandez, the president of the Sonoma County Latino leadership group Los Cien.
The order has sent shock waves throughout the local Latino community, particularly among undocumented workers and low-income families — two groups who are more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck and who can have a hard time recovering from financial and psychological blows, he said.
“It’s kind of a shock and unbelievable that you’re in a situation like that,” Hernandez said. “When you look at the Latino community, at times at the top of the list is ‘How am I going to continue to support my family?’ ”
Answers to those immediate concerns were a primary focus for Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore, who volunteered to work as the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors’ liaison to the Latino community during the pandemic because of his ability to speak Spanish and his prior collaboration with the community during the Tubbs and Kincade fires, he said.
Conversations with dozens of local Latino-serving nonprofits and organizations made it clear that basic necessities like food, housing and cash, as well as accurate information about the virus, was in high demand, he said.
To address that information gap, Sonoma County supervisors have set aside over $25,000 to boost the public awareness of the coronavirus within Spanish-speaking communities, a strategy intended to make sure the community understands the threat of the virus and local stay-at-home orders, Gore said. The campaign includes paid radio public service announcements that launched Monday and Tuesday across six local stations after starting on one station last week. How frequently the radio station plays the announcements, and during which hours, varies from station to station, county spokeswoman Melissa Valle said.
Supermarkets across Sonoma County last week began playing informational video or audio messages about the virus as part of the outreach plan. Gore and a team of Spanish-speaking county officials on Tuesday also went live on KBBF, a local bilingual radio station, to take questions from Sonoma County residents about the virus. The radio station hosted a similar segment with Gore last week.
“It requires an intentional effort,” Gore said of the county’s outreach to Spanish-speaking residents. “You can’t just put out translated documents and expect it’s going to hit folks in a targeted way.”
The timing of the county’s efforts received some criticism among some local Latino group leaders, who said the county waited too long to actively inform the community about the virus. That included Zeke Guzman, president of the nonprofit group Latinos Unidos del Condado de Sonoma County, who last weekend spoke to a handful of farmworkers who described the virus as nothing more than a cough, Guzman said. He and another community organizer also witnessed several Latino families at local parks who weren’t following social-distancing guidelines required by the county’s order.
“I don’t want to knock on anyone, this is a crisis,” said Guzman, who hopes to secure grants that will allow KBBF to launch more in-depth announcements about the coronavirus. “But we also want to look at how effective what we’re doing is and who it’s going to reach.” Gore acknowledged the frustration over the timing of the county’s effort, but added that county staff members are tasked with dealing with solutions to both short and long-term problems that will arise from the pandemic.
“We have to attend to the present, but we also have to reach into the future to think about how we’re going to get ahead of this,” Gore said.
At the Graton Day Labor Center, recent phone check-ins with the center’s roughly 200 members show only about 10% are working, most of them farmworkers whose employers aren’t covered by the shelter-in-place order that restricts or bans all but nonessential businesses including agriculture, said the center’s executive director, Christy Lubin
The rest of the members, whose jobs range from day laborers to domestic workers and nannies, are struggling to find work. Some are single parents who can’t leave their homes because schools stopped classroom instruction and there’s no one else to care for their childen, Lubin said.
Confirmed coronavirus cases are increasing faster than initially expected, California officials said, indicating the much-anticipated surge may be on the way.
“We originally thought that it would be doubling every six to seven days. We see cases doubling every three to four days,” California Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly said at a news conference Wednesday. Ghaly said at that rate, he expects hospitals will see a surge in one to two weeks.
As of Thursday morning, California has over 3,000 confirmed cases, far behind the U.S. coronavirus epicenter of New York. New York City alone has over 21,000 cases and the state is reporting nearly 400 deaths as hospitals reportedly face “apocalyptic” conditions. Ghaly said, at this rate, California now is on pace to match New York’s numbers.
Preparing for the worst-case scenario is on the minds of California politicians, who are warning residents to stay vigilant.
“The worst days are still ahead,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said on Wednesday.
In a press conference yesterday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Dr. Grant Colfax, the city’s public health director, said San Francisco hospitals need 1,500 more ventilators and 5,000 additional hospital beds to prepare for a potential influx of serious coronavirus cases in the city.
Breed said she reached out to Vice President Mike Pence and the Trump administration about securing additional resources.
“I hope they will deliver for the people of this state and the people of this country,” she said. “Time cannot be wasted on interactions that don’t lead to the kinds of results we need.”
Colfax spoke to the measures San Francisco has already taken, noting that the city has hired 80 new nurses, begun preparing non-hospital locations for patients, continued to obtain additional personal protective equipment supplies, and decreased the number of in-hospital visits for non-critical cases.
The city is preparing for “a scenario like what is playing out in New York this very day,” Colfax said.
The record-setting $2 trillion deal Congress reached on Wednesday to stimulate the economy amid the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic contains $155 million to bolster HIV programs serving the nexus of communities affected by both diseases.
For the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, the deal includes $90 million for existing contracts under the law and the Public Health Service Act. At the same time, the deal appropriates $65 million for the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS, or HOPWA, to maintain operations and provide rental assistance amid the coronavirus crisis.
In both cases, the money must be used by Sept. 30, 2022, although appropriations for HOPWA afford some additional flexibility. The money is on top of the $330 million Congress appropriated in December 2019 for Ryan White and other initiatives in fiscal year 2020 as part of the Trump administration’s initiative to beat HIV by 2030.
The money for the HIV programs is geared toward ensuring recipients — which include cities, states and community health centers — can continue and expand those services as the coronavirus pandemic complicates efforts to address HIV.
Rachel Klein, deputy executive director of the AIDS Institute, said the additional money for Ryan White programs, which provides care to low income people with HIV, is essential for HIV-positive people trying to obtain services amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“The program itself needs to be able to adapt to provide care in different ways,” Klein said. “People are trying to avoid sitting in public meeting rooms unnecessarily right because they don’t want to be exposing themselves potentially to a new virus. The programs are going to need to be able to be flexible, to find creative ways to ensure that people are able to still get the care that they need, and that’s going to come with some costs.”
There are mixed opinions about whether people with HIV are more at risk for COVID-19. On one hand, HIV if left untreated will depress a patient’s immune system and make them more susceptible to disease, but Dr. Susan Henn, chief medical officer for the D.C.-based Whitman-Walker Health, has told the Blade for people with well-managed HIV, the increased risk would only be “very slight.”
Lauren Killelea, director of public policy of the National AIDS Housing Coalition, said money for HOPWA is needed because people with HIV without access to housing “are less likely to be virally suppressed and therefore more susceptible to COVID-19.”
“HOPWA is uniquely situated to be a great, flexible resource for low-income people living with HIV during the coronavirus pandemic,” Killelea said. “HOPWA can not only provide permanent housing but also short-term assistance as well as critical supports like access to transportation and nutrition services.”
After failed votes in the U.S. Senate and negotiations throughout the week, congressional leaders had announced Wednesday morning they had reached a deal on Stage 3 for congressional action in response to the coronavirus crisis.
A vote was expected earlier Wednesday after the Senate returned from recess, but proceedings were halted over objections from a small cadre of Republicans — including Sens. Tim Scott (S.C.), Ben Sasse (Neb.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) — over language they say could lead to the exploitation of unemployment benefits. After leaders agreed to an amendment to appease these lawmakers, the Senate voted to approve the measure 96-0.
The next step is House approval for the stimulus package and President Trump signing the package into law, both of which were expected to happen expeditiously.
A number of parties had pressed Congress for the HIV funds in the stimulus package. Last week, AIDS United and a coalition of 90 HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ groups, including GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, Whitman-Walker Health, NMAC, NASTAD, NCSD and the AIDS Institute, sent a letter to every member of Congress urging them to consider people with HIV and “craft a relief package that takes the unique needs of this population into account.”
In a letter to Congress dated March 17 and obtained by the Blade, the White House Office of Management & Budget sought money in the stimulus package for Ryan White and other health programs to the tune of $1.336 billion. An attached request from Health Resources & Services Administration makes that request for “health centers to expand triage and treatment capacity and telehealth, rural hospital technical assistance and the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, in response to coronavirus.”
The request, however, makes no mention of HOPWA funds, which the Trump administration sought to cut earlier this month in its budget request for fiscal year 2021. OMB didn’t respond to the Blade’s request to comment on whether it welcomes the HIV money appropriated in the stimulus package.
Killelea said the HOPWA money was inserted by the Transportation and Housing & Urban Development Act appropriations staff headed by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Reps. David Price (D-N.C.) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.). (Diaz-Balart was the first member of Congress confirmed to test positive for the coronavirus.)
Congress makes the appropriations at the same time the Trump administration has made a pledge to beat HIV in the United States with a PrEP-centric plan that aims at reducing new infections by 75 percent in five years and 90 percent by 2030.
Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV & Hepatitis Policy Institute and co-chair of Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, told the Blade the extra money is needed because the coronavirus threw a “monkey wrench” in the HIV plan.
“I was just talking today to someone at the CDC that several people from the center for that are working on HIV are being used to address COVID-19, and it’s a significant amount of their staff, because they all have the expertise in infectious diseases, and the doctors, too, in the field,” Schmid said. “That’s why I can see a lot of this 90 million being used to, for the doctors in the workforce.”
As Congress advances the deal, the Health Resources & Services Administration’s HIV/AIDS Bureau was set to have a phone conference with grant recipients and stakeholders across the country on Thursday at 3:30 p.m., according to a notice shared with the Washington Blade.
Around two in 10 queer people would consider hooking-up with someone even as measures to curb the coronavirus pandemic includes strict social distancing.
While the virus’ death toll bears down on all, around 28 per cent of LGBT+ people would still consider going out on dates, according to a report published Tuesday by Queer Voices Heard.
Queer community ‘pessimistic’ about how coronavirus pandemic will impact them, researchers say.
Survey takers for the social enterprise group described the “genuine fear” the community feels about the viral outbreak, with 57 per cent of participants feeling their lives will be worse off in six months time as a result.1 Simple Trick To Cut Your Electric Bill By 90%Promoted by Okowatt
“COVID-19 poses a real threat to our physical health, mental health, the relationships that we have with others, and our way of life,” lead researcher Max Willson said, reiterating the fears of LGBT+ people.
Around 72 per cent reported being concerned about the coronavirus’ impact on their lives, with a third fearing the outbreak will have a negative impact on their physical health due to existing mental health conditions.
“This sense of pessimism about the future is consistent across all gender and sexual identities,” the report stated.
Three-quarters of LGBT+ support Pride events being cancelled, but yearn for alternatives.
LGBT+ health authorities have echoed the government in urging queer people to practise social distancing, coming as countless Pride organisers cancel their parades, leaving summertime calendars barren.
Indeed, queer folk themselves overwhelmingly support such waves of cancellations, the findings suggest, as three quarters believe organisers were right to cancel or postpone.
Nevertheless, nearly one in four LGBT+ people would consider swinging by a queer event or social function in order to meet and see other people.
“At a time where the UK government continues to call for stringent social distancing and are exploring stronger ways to enforce this,” the report stated, “it’s clear more needs to be done to communicate the importance of social distancing measures to support the efforts of flattening the curve.”
Pride in London parade in 2017 (Jack Taylor/Getty)
But it is this gap left in queer people lives that, researchers suggest, is leading to LGBT+ people to still consider going out and hooking-up.
Survey participants said that Pride organisers should offer alternative ways for the community to, even in the midst of the throws of the pandemic, still feel connected.
Online, televised or a series of streamed activities were suggested by participants.
Queer Voices Heard co-founder Stu Hosker said: “When mental health and social isolation already disproportionately affects our community than the general population, it’s vital that we listen to the voices in our community who are most vulnerable – physically, mentally, and socially – and address how we keep their best interests in mind during this unprecedented health emergency.”
LATEST, March 25, 9:10 a.m. San Francisco County reported 26 new cases of COVID-19 Wednesday morning, bringing the county total to 178. The county reported the first death in a resident on Tuesday night. Read the full story.
March 25, 8:15 a.m. The number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the Bay Area continues to climb, with now more than 1,000 cases in the nine-county region.
San Mateo County announced Wednesday morning four more deaths, bringing the county total to five. Health officials haven’t released details on the patients. In San Mateo, 165 individuals have tested positive for the respiratory illness.
San Francisco County health officials reported the county’s first death of a resident with COVID-19 on Tuesday evening. The patient who passed away was a man in his 40s with “multiple, significant” underlying health conditions, officials said in a statement.
March 25, 8:10 a.m. San Francisco-headquartered Gap Inc. announced Wednesday that the company “is pivoting resources so that factory partners can make masks, gowns and scrubs for healthcare workers on the frontlines and is connecting some of the largest hospitals in California with its vendors to deliver PPE [personal protective equipment] supplies.”
March 25, 8 a.m. To prevent crowds from gathering at beaches, the City of Pacifica announced Wednesday it is closing the parking lots and some facilitiesat its city beaches.
Those include north and south lots at Pacifica State Beach (Linda Mar Beach); parking lots at the Pacifica Community Center; north and south lots at the Rockaway Beach; Council Chambers lot on Beach Boulevard; Beach Boulevard parking south of the Council Chambers and Fisherman’s Lot in 800 block of Palmetto Avenue.
The Pacifica Pier is also closed.
Half Moon Bay say it’s also closing parking lots at beaches.
March 25, 7:30 a.m. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti said there have been reports of so-called nonessential businesses ignoring orders to shut down.
While he hopes for voluntary compliance, those ignoring warnings could face misdemeanor charges and the city could shut off the business’s water and electricity, Garcetti warned.
Such businesses are “irresponsible and selfish … it will put all of us at risk,” Garcetti said.
