Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) Updates
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Actually who pays for the stay in the dorms? The FWs or their employers?
Who is responsible for the living conditions of the dorm?
If it is the dorm operators, why the authority not charge them?
The undesirable living conditions is not the main causes but is one of them which led to the outbreak. -
I thought this was a good write up. Reading between the lines, it seems that the top did not set acceptable living conditions in the first place. And even then, a shocking 50% of the operators were still flouting those miserable conditions.
Todayonline commentary:
“The Big Read: Solving S’pore’s foreign workers problem requires serious soul searching, from top to bottom”
https://bit.ly/2xLIL0g -
Free Online Mindfulness and Self-Care Talks Amidst Covid-19 for Wellness
https://www.eventbrite.sg/e/free-online-mindfulness-and-self-care-talks-amidst-covid-19-for-wellness-tickets-104238018720 -
.zeit\" post_id=\"1971770\" time=\"1587267413\" user_id=\"171271:
It's been a while since I last checked the status in the Gulf States. No. of confirmed cases have tripled like SG.
Had a quick glance at Worldometer to see where SG stands right now. Interestingly, two other very busy regional Aviation Hubs, UAE (Emirates) and Qatar (Qatar Airways), are also in the same dire situation as SG - 5,000 - 6,000+.
For those who had been to the Gulf states, you'd hv noticed millions of migrant workers from South Indian countries walking around everywhere on weekends too. This is becos both UAE and Qatar (and RSA too) have several large-scale, never-ending construction going on all year round like Singapore, which depends heavily on foreign labour. Their local Arabs do not work in blue-collar jobs just like SCs. They also do not work in frontline service sectors, which are dominated by the Filipino and PRC workforce. Their MW dorms look the same as those in SG too - equally packed like sardines.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/mar/20/covid-19-lockdown-turns-qatars-largest-migrant-camp-into-virtual-prison
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/exclusive-kerala-cm-uae-quarantine-facilities-inadequate-200413191412483.html
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/04/04/migrant-workers-in-gulf-region-face-heightened-risk-amid-covid-19-outbreak/
Virus Forces Persian Gulf States to Reckon With Migrant Labor
The Mideast’s wealthiest countries depend on foreigners to do jobs their citizens won’t. But the virus has hobbled the arrangement and drawn attention to its inequities.
Foreign workers at a construction site in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Thursday. The Mideast’s wealthiest countries rely on millions of migrant workers.
By Vivian Yee
May 9, 2020, 10:48 a.m. ET
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Kuwaiti talk show panelists were holding forth on an issue that the coronavirus has pushed to the forefront of national debate: whether their tiny, oil-rich monarchy should rely as heavily as it does on foreign laborers, who have suffered most of the country’s infections and borne much of the cost of its lockdown.
“Go to malls in Kuwait — would you ever see a Kuwaiti working there?” said one guest, Ahmad Baqer. “No. They’re all different nationalities.”
Not long after, a South Asian man slipped into the camera frame, serving tea to each panelist from a tray. He appeared three times during the program, his presence unacknowledged except by one panelist who waved away a fresh cup.
In the Middle East’s wealthiest societies, the machinery of daily life depends on migrant laborers from Asia, Africa and poorer Arab countries — millions of “tea boys,” housemaids, doctors, construction workers, deliverymen, chefs, garbage men, guards, hairdressers, hoteliers and more, who often outnumber the native population.
They support families back home by doing the jobs citizens cannot or will not take. But as oil revenues plummet, migrant labor camps become coronavirus hot spots and citizens demand that their governments protect them first, the pandemic has prompted a reckoning with the status quo.
Hostility toward foreigners is growing louder. So are questions about how to replace migrants with citizens and calls for reforming the way foreign labor is imported and treated.
“The two things that Gulf countries depend on the most, oil prices and foreign workers, these two have been hard hit with the coronavirus,” said Eman Alhussein, a fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “The coronavirus has unleashed all these issues that have been put on the back burner for a long time.”
For many of the Arab states’ foreign workers, who sent more than $124 billion to their home countries in 2017, the coronavirus’s fallout is bleakly straightforward.
Tens of thousands have lost their jobs during government-ordered lockdowns, leaving them to ration dwindling food supplies while their families struggle without their remittances. Others have fallen sick as the coronavirus tears through their meager, crowded dormitory-style housing.
“There are no people, no work,” said Muhammad, 39, a taxi driver in Dubai who has had to stop sending money to his family in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “In three months, if it’s the same as this, I’ll go home.”
Globally, the World Bank estimates that remittances will fall by about a fifth this year, from $714 billion last year to $572 billion.
With oil prices slashed and tourism gone, host countries in the Persian Gulf, which account for more than a tenth of the world’s migrants, may have to revise their relationship with foreign labor.
“Before, there was enough to go around,” said Karen Young, a Gulf specialist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “But now states are working with half of what they had three months ago, and the cuts are coming. There’ll be more discussion about what the state provides to citizens and non-citizens.”
Even fantastically rich Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where legions of foreigners serve tiny local populations and build government mega dreams like Qatar’s World Cup stadiums, are likely to shed hospitality and construction workers as tourism evaporates and development slows.
Oil-dependent countries with many middle-class or poor citizens, like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman, can no longer guarantee the high living standards and subsidies that their citizens take for granted.
Analysts said Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s lofty plans for diversifying Saudi Arabia’s economy with tourism and flashy concerts will shrink, with the Saudi finance minister warning last week of “painful” spending cuts.
Across the Gulf, much of that spending goes to employing citizens in steady, well-paid government jobs that double as a social safety net. Roughly two-thirds of all Gulf nationals work for their governments, despite state efforts to push them into the private sector by offering companies perks to hire locally and charging expatriates extra taxes.
Saudis already check in hotel guests, sell perfume at Riyadh malls and welcome restaurant diners, occupations foreigners dominated a few years ago. There and in Oman, local taxi drivers are now common. The coronavirus could accelerate those trends.
Still, analysts doubted locals would take low-paid, low-status work such as housecleaning.
“Saudis won’t want to take jobs they perceive as being below their qualifications,” said Yasmine Farouk, a Middle East fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting that many businesses still prefer to hire foreigners, seeing them as cheaper and more productive, with fewer labor rights.
Whatever its long-term impact, the coronavirus has spotlighted the lopsided way their societies work. At the mercy of their visa sponsors, laborers have few protections, working long hours for little pay, often in scorching heat. Employers can withhold or delay wages with impunity. The crowded shanties and dormitories where many live bred coronavirus outbreaks that advocates say could have been minimized if conditions were better.
“What this crisis has really exposed is the systematic discrimination in the Gulf,” said Hiba Zayadin, a Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It’s shown how terrible it can be for the society as a whole.”
In Kuwait, where political discourse is freer than in other Gulf countries, debates have erupted on social media over how to reduce the quantity and increase the quality of migrant labor.
Commentators and politicians are urging the government to overhaul the politically connected visa brokers who traffic laborers into the country, creating an unregulated shadow economy. And Saudis on social media have criticized businessmen over migrants’ overcrowded housing.
“These people are almost starving now that life has stopped in Kuwait,” a Kuwaiti television host, Ahmad al-Fadli, said recently. “Is it their fault? No, it’s the fault of those who brought them here.”
But xenophobia is also escalating as expatriates are blamed for spreading the virus. A well-known Kuwaiti actress, Hayat al-Fahad, has taken criticism for saying Kuwait should expel migrants, who make up two-thirds of Kuwait’s population, “into the desert” to save hospital beds for Kuwaitis.
“Why, if their countries do not want them, should we deal with them?” she said.
With fear of foreign deliverymen rising, some Saudis have volunteered to deliver food and necessities during the crisis. Even as some point out that many doctors in Saudi Arabia are non-Saudis, others blame migrants for the virus’s spread, calling them ungrateful for failing to observe social distancing.
What inclusive policies there are could buckle under pressure from angry citizens and overstretched resources. Saudi Arabia is unlikely to be able to keep providing free health care for foreigners, while Qatar, which pays their wages even at private companies, cannot do so indefinitely.
Caught at the end of these falling economic dominoes, some foreign laborers are demanding to go home, but for many debts to visa sponsors and fines for residency violations stand in the way.
Though some Gulf countries have agreed to pay for repatriation flights, a few home countries are resisting because they lack the resources to care for or quarantine returnees. One exception is India, which has organized a huge evacuation effort aimed at bringing back hundreds of thousands of Indians, mainly from the Gulf.
But many will stay, perhaps taking lower-paid jobs in construction or cleaning, said Froilan Malit, Jr., who is researching Gulf migration at Cambridge University.
Cora Tarcena, 53, who worked as a secretary at a luxury car garage in Dubai making about $950 a month before the lockdown, has little choice: her family in the Philippines depends on her salary.
Now out of work, she does not know how she, her two adult daughters and their three roommates, who live in a single room crammed with four bunk beds, will eat or make rent. But if she can get another visa, she said, she will stay.
In the Philippines, “I’d just clean the house and I’d be without income,” she said. “I am ashamed to ask my children for money.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/world/middleeast/virus-forces-persian-gulf-states-to-reckon-with-migrant-labor.html -
Frankly, it's time to stop acting like we're the richest and kindest nation in the world. Please, work with the source countries on arranging repatriation flights to send them back if their work has been suspended, or can be terminated. Let the employers sort it out with their workers.
Are we still needing them to return to the construction sites after CB to build Changi T5, Tuas new port, Marina South, Jurong Lakeside, the Johor MRT, Paya Lebar Airbase, BTOs, expressways and multi-billion dollar dykes and polders that will prevent us from sinking? Must they die die continue to build these, failing which the books will not balance this year or GDP 2H will plummet into the darkest abyss?
Is 40,000 the magic maximum we will take in or can cope with our tiny population of HCWs and volunteers? Are we ordering more beddings from Indonesia?
How many more volunteers, SAF medic corps and private doctors/dentists are we going to pull out from the hospitals to service the CCFs?
How many more bentos are we going to whip up for the additional workers who are in extended SHN or in the queue waiting to be tested every day?
I'd thought the yummy catering was for a month or so. Now OMG, it's going to be a LONG cook, as those essential workers living in SERS, army camps, VDs, MSCPs, Sentosa Siloso hotel, Ascott floatels, 2 Genting Star Cruises, Pasir Ris chalets and vacant Northshore Primary campus won't be able to cook on-site till year-end, yah? :scratchhead:
Have the volunteers finished sewing with love 300,000 cloth masks for the MWs?
How many ICU beds have we left? Earlier, they reported ~1100+ ICU+HD beds in Singapore. We have 20,000 active cases now. Some ICUs must be reserved for Singaporeans who might have fallen down and injured themselves through accidents. -
lee_yl\" post_id=\"1974751\" time=\"1589008764\" user_id=\"17023:
Diy acupressure, not acupuncture
:udawoman:ammonite\" post_id=\"1974544\" time=\"1588916010\" user_id=\"50141:
I was just telling DH that many older folks rely on acupuncture for pain relief. Chronic pain is one area that conventional western medicine has little to offer. But if acupuncture is inaccessible, can consider diy accupressure at home instead. DH was quite impressed that I could \"cure\" his leg cramp in 10min during the circuit breaker, using the various points and strokes that I picked up over the years from my mum, sinsehs, chiros and masseurs.
I showed DH your post. Ask him whether he would like to try some of these (e.g. DIY acupuncture), he said no need
, today his aches and pain have totally disappeared! If acupuncture, my DH would have hobbled away as fast as possible. :lol: You just need to find the pressure spots and move along the connected points. Anyway just two more days before the sinseh shops open. 
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:sad:
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I hv not try acupuncture, tui na, gua sa
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.zeit\" post_id=\"1974841\" time=\"1589082586\" user_id=\"171271:
Tbh I am quite glad that we are providing care for the foreign workers at this point, unlike the Gulf nations. On the other hand, I am watching closely to see what percentage of these healthy young workers fall seriously ill. If most of them remain asymptomatic or only mildly unwell, we would have averted the worst while doing right by them and still be on track for our long term planning.
Frankly, it's time to stop acting like we're the richest and kindest nation in the world. Please, work with the source countries on arranging repatriation flights to send them back if their work has been suspended, or can be terminated. Let the employers sort it out with their workers.
Are we still needing them to return to the construction sites after CB to build Changi T5, Tuas new port, Marina South, Jurong Lakeside, the Johor MRT, Paya Lebar Airbase, BTOs, expressways and multi-billion dollar dykes and polders that will prevent us from sinking? Must they die die continue to build these, failing which the books will not balance this year or GDP 2H will plummet into the darkest abyss?
Is 40,000 the magic maximum we will take in or can cope with our tiny population of HCWs and volunteers? Are we ordering more beddings from Indonesia?
How many more volunteers, SAF medic corps and private doctors/dentists are we going to pull out from the hospitals to service the CCFs?
How many more bentos are we going to whip up for the additional workers who are in extended SHN or in the queue waiting to be tested every day?
I'd thought the yummy catering was for a month or so. Now OMG, it's going to be a LONG cook, as those essential workers living in SERS, army camps, VDs, MSCPs, Sentosa Siloso hotel, Ascott floatels, 2 Genting Star Cruises, Pasir Ris chalets and vacant Northshore Primary campus won't be able to cook on-site till year-end, yah? :scratchhead:
Have the volunteers finished sewing with love 300,000 cloth masks for the MWs?
How many ICU beds have we left? Earlier, they reported ~1100+ ICU+HD beds in Singapore. We have 20,000 active cases now. Some ICUs must be reserved for Singaporeans who might have fallen down and injured themselves through accidents.
Besides, the catering and hotel/cruise etc stays is also another way to pump money in and to help these businesses to stay afloat. Many of the providers have negotiated special rates for businesses to put their foreign workers in these rooms for month long stays. -
starlight1968sg\" post_id=\"1974830\" time=\"1589077048\" user_id=\"14025:
I read somewhere that in some instances, the employers rent the room but the number of workers the employees put into the room may differ. I am guessing that there are many different configurations to this.
Actually who pays for the stay in the dorms? The FWs or their employers?
Who is responsible for the living conditions of the dorm?
If it is the dorm operators, why the authority not charge them?
The undesirable living conditions is not the main causes but is one of them which led to the outbreak.
I am sure the govt has a set of guidelines and criteria that dorm operators have to follow, with some room for flexibility. Beyond the actual running - which can be good or bad - the communal living design itself is a key factor in cross infection. Redesigning the living space without making it prohibitively costly will be something to look into.
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