Malaysian govt party rejects Mahathir’s resignation

Johannesburg, Feb 22: To meet shortage of skilled nursing staff, private hospitals in South Africa are recruiting senior Indian nurses for their good work ethics and ability to become efficient trainers for the local staff, according to a media report.

A report at a 2018 jobs summit indicated that the country had a shortage of more than 47,000 nurses.

The shortage of the skilled nursing staff has been attributed to several factors, including preference of highly qualified nurses to emigrate or take up contract employment in countries such as the UK, the United Aarb Emirates, Saudi Arabia or New Zealand for want of higher salaries, a report in the weekly Business Times said.

Mediclinic, one of South Africa's largest private hospital groups, confirmed that it is recruiting 150 nurses from India this year.

“To supplement our training, as an internal strategy, we will continue to recruit senior registered nurses from India,” a Mediclinic spokesperson told the Business Times.

Mediclinic started recruiting nurses from India in 2005 but could not provide details about how many among the more than 8,800 nurses it employs at its hospitals are from India.

Another company, Life Healthcare SA, said it employed 135 Indian nurses between 2008 and 2014.

Top managements at the hospital groups lauded senior Indian nurses as being very efficient trainers for local staff.

“But we find that many of them prefer coming here on short-term contracts due to family commitments," a hospital executive said on the basis of anonymity.

The official said that the few who apply for long-term positions are usually young newly-qualified nurses, which is not the group in demand.

“They work hard, with a patient-oriented work ethic, and do not have the nine-to-five approach of many local nurses, especially those who are unionised," the official said.

“We would be very happy to take in more nursing staff from India," the official added.

Jun 9: The World Health Organization says it still believes the spread of the coronavirus from people without symptoms is “rare,” despite warnings from numerous experts worldwide that such transmission is more frequent and likely explains why the pandemic has been so hard to contain.

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO''s technical lead on COVID-19 said at a press briefing on Monday that many countries are reporting cases of spread from people who are asymptomatic, or those with no clinical symptoms.

But when questioned in more detail about these cases, Van Kerkhove said many of them turn out to have mild disease, or unusual symptoms.

Although health officials in countries including Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere have warned that COVID-19 is spreading from people without symptoms, WHO has maintained that this type of spread is not a driver of the pandemic and is probably accounts for about 6 per cent of spread, at most.

Numerous studies have suggested that the virus is spreading from people without symptoms, but many of those are either anecdotal reports or based on modeling.

Van Kerkhove said that based on data from countries, when people with no symptoms of COVID-19 are tracked over a long period to see if they spread the disease, there are very few cases of spread.

“We are constantly looking at this data and we''re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question,” she said. “It still appears to be rare that asymptomatic individuals actually transmit onward.”

As the deadly coronavirus has spread worldwide, it has carried with it xenophobia -- and Asian communities around the world are finding themselves subject to suspicion and fear.

When a patient on Australia's Gold Coast refused to shake the hand of her surgeon Rhea Liang, citing the virus that has killed hundreds, the medic's first response was shock.

But after tweeting about the incident and receiving a flood of responses, the respected doctor learned her experience was all too common.

There has been a spike in reports of anti-Chinese rhetoric directed at people of Asian origin, regardless of whether they have ever visited the centre of the epidemic or been in contact with the virus.

Chinese tourists have reportedly been spat at in the Italian city of Venice, a family in Turin was accused of carrying the disease, and mothers in Milan have used social media to call for children to be kept away from Chinese classmates.

In Canada, a white man was filmed telling a Chinese-Canadian woman "you dropped your coronavirus" in the parking lot of a local mall.

In Malaysia, a petition to "bar Chinese people from entering our beloved country" received almost 500,000 signatures in one week.

The incidents are part of what the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine has described as "misinformation" which it says is fuelling "racial profiling" where "deeply distressing assumptions are being made about 'Chinese' or 'Asian-looking' people." Disease has long been accompanied by suspicions of foreigners -- from Irish immigrants being targeted in the Typhoid Mary panic of 1900s America to Nepali peacekeepers being accused of bringing cholera to earthquake-struck Haiti in the last decade.

"It's a common phenomenon," said Rob Grenfell, director of health and biosecurity for Australia's science and research agency CSIRO.

"With outbreaks and epidemics along human history, we've always tried to vilify certain subsets of the population," he said, comparing the behaviour to 1300s plague-ridden medieval Europe, where foreigners and religious groups were often blamed.

"Sure it emerged in China," he said of the coronavirus, "but that's no reason to actually vilify Chinese people." In a commentary for the British Medical Journal, doctor Abraar Karan warned this behaviour could discourage people with symptoms from coming forward.

Claire Hooker, a health lecturer at the University of Sydney, said the responses from governments may have compounded prejudice.

The World Health Organisation has warned against "measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade", but this has not stopped scores of countries from introducing travel bans.

The tiny Pacific nation of Micronesia has banned its citizens from visiting mainland China altogether.

"Travel bans respond largely to people's fears," said Hooker, and while sometimes warranted, they often "have the effect of cementing an association between Chinese people and scary viruses".

Abbey Shi, a Shanghai-born student in Sydney, said the attitude shown by some of her peers has "become almost an attack on students who are Chinese".

While Australia's conservative government has banished its citizens returning from Wuhan -- the central Chinese city at the epicentre of the virus -- to a remote island for quarantine, thousands of students still stuck in China risk their studies being torpedoed.

"Right now it looks like they have to miss the semester's start and potentially the whole year, because of the way the courses are set up," Shi said.

According to Hooker, studies in Toronto on the impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS -- another global coronavirus outbreak in 2002 -- showed the impact of xenophobic sentiment often lasted much longer than the public health scare.

"While there may be a cessation of direct forms of racism as news about the disease dies down, it takes quite a bit of time for economic recovery and people continue to feel unsafe," she said.

People may not rush back to Chinese businesses or restaurants, and may even heed some of the more outlandish viral social media disinformation -- such as one popular post imploring people to avoid eating noodles for their own safety.

"In one sense you might think the effects lasted from the last coronavirus to this one because the representation as China being a place where diseases come from has been persistent," Hooker said.