Violently, of course.

‘Afraid to Be a Nurse’: Health Workers Under Attack

[www.thenewstribune.com]

MEXICO CITY — The senior nurse went on national television to make a plea on behalf of her fellow health care workers: Please stop assaulting us.

Nurses working under her auspices had been viciously attacked around Mexico at least 21 times, accused of spreading the coronavirus.

In many cities, doctors, nurses and other health care workers have been celebrated with choruses of applause and cheers from windows and rooftops for providing the front-line defense against the pandemic.

But in some places health care workers, stigmatized as vectors of contagion because of their work, have been assaulted, abused and ostracized.

In the Philippines, attackers doused a nurse with bleach, blinding him. In India, a group of medical workers was chased by a stone-throwing mob. In Pakistan, a nurse and her children were evicted from their apartment building.

Dozens of attacks on health care workers have been reported in Mexico, where intense outbreaks among hospital staff of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, have unnerved residents and members of the medical community alike. Scores of doctors and nurses have fallen ill in several hospitals around the country, and widespread demonstrations have erupted among health care workers complaining about inadequate protective equipment.

Nurses in the state of Jalisco reported being blocked from public transportation because of their occupation. A nurse in Culiacán, capital of the state of Sinaloa in Mexico’s northwest, said she was drenched with chlorine while walking along the street.

In Merida, a city on the Yucatán Peninsula, a nurse said he was hit with an egg thrown by someone passing on a motorcycle.

Zepeda Arias, who spoke last week at a news conference, said 21 of her Social Security Institute nurses had been attacked in the past month.

Mexico moved more slowly than other countries in the region to require social distancing and encourage people to stay home, and the number of coronavirus cases has risen sharply in recent weeks. On Sunday night, government officials reported 14,677 confirmed cases in the country and 1,351 deaths.

Scattered accounts of hostility have circulated around the world.

In the Philippines, a nurse in the southern province of Sultan Kudarat was attacked by five men who thought he was infected with the virus because of his work. They poured bleach on his face, leaving him with what his doctors said could be permanent damage to his eyesight.

In a televised speech this month, the country’s president, Rodrigo Duterte, warned that people who discriminated against health care workers would be dealt with swiftly.

“I want to order the police to arrest anyone who harasses them,” he said. “ Once in prison, do not feed them. Let them starve.”

In India, health care workers have reported being physically attacked, spat at and threatened with sexual violence for treating patients with the coronavirus.

Doctors in protective gear were chased by a stone-throwing mob early this month in the central city of Indore after they tried to screen a woman for COVID-19.

“They screamed, ‘Catch them! Hit them!’ ” one of the doctors, Zakia Sayed, recalled in an interview with India Today, a television network. “We don’t know how and why the situation got so bad.”

Reports of health care workers being blocked from their homes by fearful neighbors — or evicted altogether by landlords — have proliferated in several countries.

Ghazala Bhatti, a nurse in Karachi, Pakistan, and the mother of three children, said her landlord had asked her to vacate their apartment because of fears that she would infect others in the building after treating COVID-19 patients.

A doctor at a government hospital in the state of Odisha, in India, filed a police complaint against residents of her apartment building after they accused her of spreading the virus. In her statement, the doctor said one resident threatened her with rape if she did not move out.

Dr. Sanjibani Panigrahi, who works at a hospital in the Indian city of Surat, said neighbors had tried to bar her from entering her building, telling her she should be “shunted out of society.

Good, I hope they all rot in jail! I hate Criminals and Killers and Rapists ...

El Salvador: Gangs 'taking advantage of pandemic'

[www.bbc.com]

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has said criminal gangs are taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic after more than 50 people were killed between Friday and Sunday.

He authorised the police and army to use lethal force to curb the violence.

He also ordered a 24/7 lockdown for imprisoned gang members, arguing that many of the murders were ordered from behind bars.

Mr Bukele was elected last year on a promise to reduce the murder rate.

Police said that 24 murders had been reported on Friday, making it the deadliest day since President Bukele came to power in June 2019.

Another 29 people were killed by Sunday afternoon local time, according to police figures.

Mr Bukele said El Salvador's notorious criminal gangs were taking advantage of the fact that the security forces had turned their attention away from them and towards curbing the spread of coronavirus.

He said the security forces would be given more powers to deal with the threat. "The police and armed forces must prioritise safeguarding their lives, those of their companions and of honest citizens. The use of lethal force is authorised in self-defence or in defence of the lives of Salvadoreans," the president said.

He also said that prisoners belonging to rival gangs would be made to share cells.

El Salvador's security minister, Osiris Luna, said the idea behind making rival gang members mix was so as to break up lines of communication between members of the same group and thereby limit their ability to plan attacks.

Before President Bukele came to power, members of the two rival gangs that are behind much of the violence in El Salvador - Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street gang - were housed in separate prisons in order to prevent deadly prison fights.

But President Bukele put an end to that arrangement, arguing it allowed the gangs to impose their own rules and take control of "their" prison to the extent that they would continue running their criminal enterprises from the inside, including ordering murders of prison staff and their family members.

As part of the new, more restrictive prison regime, inmates' communication was cut off, with wifi signals being scrambled and cell phones seized.

The latest measures by President Bukele go one step further with members of rival gangs now locked up in the same cells.

Mr Luna also said that they would "not receive sunlight, they will be in total confinement 24 hours a day in the seven maximum security prisons that there are in this country".

The measures come just days after the United Nations urged governments around the world to release vulnerable prisoners to ease overcrowding in prisons as the coronavirus pandemic spreads further.