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The report discusses the ideas of the American professor of law and literature Stanley Fish and how they can help us to realize not only the place of humanities today but also the usefulness of literary activities for the dense picture of life. Examples include discussions on John Milton's works as well as Bulgarian literary works.
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We have to share with regret that on August 5, 2016, Professor Bogdan Bogdanov, President and founder of New Bulgarian University has left us. He was an impressive scientist with rich literary heritage. Prof. Bogdanov was a great visionary. In the years of transition from totalitarian regimeto democracy he was not wasting his time in vain politics, but rather put all his energy and made tremendous efforts in building higher education institution of a completely new type. He build a space to develop and share talent, knowledge and making. Let him rest in peace!
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Reactions, measures as well as discourses dealing with the current pandemic vary significantly across the world. While some countries were completely locked down, as was the case in Italy, some had claimed to have very few or no cases, as was the case in Turkey and Indonesia by March 10th, 2020. Nevertheless, the spread of COVID-19 from China has been clearly linked to those travelling from Wuhan in Hubei province in Central China. Therefore, it is important to understand the travel density/volume of passengers carried as well as routes from Wuhan through connected main regional air travel hubs across China. In this study, we developed a model on migration and travel intensity that can explain outbreak and spread of COVID-19 since it appeared at the end of 2019. We show that the presence of migrant stock populations of Chinese origin and the immigrant stock in China are useful indicators in the prediction of the spread of the outbreak worldwide in the event of interaction with several other macro factors. We argue that monitoring immigrant stock data and travel volume data based on human mobility corridors (i.e. origins and destinations), countries could have been better prepared and taken early measures to contain the spread of COVID-19.
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Two thirds of the 272 million international migrants in 2019 were employed in the destination country. Demographic and economic inequalities between countries, combined with globalization that reduced barriers to migrants, were expected to continue increasing the number of international migrant workers. Covid-19 closed many national borders to non-essential travelers, with limited exceptions. Seasonal farm workers were one of the notable exceptions, suggesting that many governments do not expect local workers to fill seasonal farm jobs despite record unemployment rates.
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Historically, epidemics have been closely related to population mobility. The COVID-19 outbreak is special in that, population mobility in China in the year 2020 is not only unprecedentedly prevalent and frequent, but has also become a prerequisite for the economy and many people’s livelihoods. The circulation of goods and the movement of people are arguably more important than assembly lines in factories in sustaining economic growth. The COVID-19 epidemic and the subsequent responses are particularly impactful because they abruptly halt what we may call a “mobility economy”.
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The Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) began to spread since December 2019 from Wuhan, a centrally located city in China with a population of 11 million, to almost all provinces throughout China and 213 other countries. On February 19, 2020 (when this work was completed), a total of 74,579 cases of COVID-19 infection were confirmed in China, and the death toll reached 2,119. Moreover, as human-to-human transmission had been found to occur in some early Wuhan cases in mid-December (Li et al., 2020), the high volume and frequency of movement of people from Wuhan to other cities and between cities was an obvious cause for the wide and rapid spread of the disease throughout the country. Prior study also suggested strong correlation between the spreading of infectious diseases with intercity travel (Colizza et al., 2006). The Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Removed (SEIR) model has traditionally been used to study epidemic spreading with various forms of networks of transmission which define the contact topology (Diekmann, Heesterbeek & Britton, 2013), such as scalefree networks (Pastor et al., 2001; Boguna et al., 2003; Small & Tse, 2006), small-world networks (Small & Tse, 2005), Oregon graph (Wang et al., 2003; Chakrabarti et al., 2008), and adaptive networks (Gross, D’Lima & Blasius, 2006). Moreover, in most studies, the contact process assumed that the contagion expanded at a certain rate from an infected individual to his/her neighbour, and that the spreading process took place in a single population (network).
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The history of the Pandemics makes a significant impact on the memory and behavior of the affected communities. It is important to study the connection between human mobility and the spread of viral infection. Specifically, we aimed to investigate whether there was a correlation between Mobility Trends and the spread of Covid-19 virus. Thus, in the conclusion it should be noted that the intensity of pedestrians, traffic and transit traffic during the study period, on average, after 15-20 days, affected the spread of the virus. If there was a positive slope and correlation coefficient between the variables presented in the period 22.01.2020 - 11.03.2020 (before the announcement of the pandemic), in the period 12.03.2020 - 14.04.2020 (after the announcement of the pandemic) the slope and correlation coefficients received negative values between the study variables, which indicates That on average, after 15-20 days, Due to the intensity of the movement, the center of the virus spread is identified, and the intensity of the movement itself is decreased.
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This chapter is an attempt to imagine the policy environment and socio-economic spaces of what a post pandemic SA could be for immigrant small/micro business entrepreneurs, who are owners of ‘spaza’ shops. I present a focused gaze for this sub set of immigrants (developing the informal economy in SA) who have been experiencing a cornucopia of challenges pre-pandemic and during the pandemic based on their status as immigrant entrepreneurs, the most pronounced of which has been xenophobia which is cocooned within the explicit aim of purging South Africa of immigrants. It is for this reason that I trace the realities of the landscape pre COVID-19 and during the pandemic before offering up three ‘imaginations’ (O’Tuathail, 1996) as possibilities for the future of immigrant spaza shop owners. I draw on existing securitization policies, political utterances and practices, socio-economic events and immigrants’ experiences in post- apartheid South Africa which has created particular ‘auras’ ( Roy, 2005) and anti-immigrant discourses that provide some insights into what a post pandemic future could be.
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One of the main results of the health crisis caused by the expansion of the coronavirus in Mexico is the plunge of the economic activity and the consequent reduction in employment. The pandemic adds to the negative performance that both the economy and the employment rate had been showing in the country. In January 2020, before the first COVID case, ILO had already estimated an increase in the unemployment rate in the country in 2020 and 2021. On the other hand, economic activity fell in Mexico -0.1 in 2019, which shows that Mexico was experiencing a recession before the pandemic onset.
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No one escapes insecurity today. It is one of the most basic human experiences, more pronounced in others depending on their personal and social circumstances. Personal insecurities refer to the subjective feeling of anxiety and to the concrete lack of protection. This paper attempts to interrogate collective insecurity particularly among migrant workers. The paper likewise argues that such experience gives rise to a form of collective resistance which has become more pronounced within the context of the coronavirus pandemic. In this paper, we argue that migrant insecurity is a collective experience, and is all the more heightened in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. (see for example, Cohen, 2020). We further argue that forms of resistance have been developed as a response to collective insecurity.
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On January 7, 2020, the Portuguese newspaper, Público, published an article about an unprecedented challenge facing Chinese leaders: a “strange form of pneumonia” (Chaiça, 2020) diagnosed in several patients in the Chinese city of Wuhan, that was subsequently named COVID-19. On March 2, the Portuguese government had placed major hospitals under alert and reinforced the supply of medicines (Campos & Lins, 2020). This occurred even before the declaration of a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation, on March 12 (WHO, 2020), and diagnosis of the first cases in Portugal. On March 18, a national state of emergency was declared - which imposed social measures, such as social isolation and mobility restrictions in public spaces. The state of emergency continued until May 2, when it was replaced by the state of calamity, and then by the state of contingency on July 1.
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This is a reflective commentary on the changing nature of Border Management in Uganda amidst the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic is the largest health and mobility crisis that our world has ever seen. Following travel restrictions and lock-downs, several countries are gradually opening their air spaces; however, border Governance will never be the same. To restore confidence in global travel, countries will have to rethink their Border Governance regimes, structures, protocols and procedures to accommodate health safety COVID-19 guidelines
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According to the World Bank, remittances around the world will fall about 20% as a result of the economic crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. The projected drop, which will be the sharpest fall in recent history, is largely due to the collapse of migrant workers’ wages and employment—workers who are often more vulnerable to the loss of jobs and wages during economic crises in the countries that host them. In light of these predictions, remittances will fall 19.7%, dropping to US$445 billion dollars compared to US$554 billion dollars the previous year. The World Bank predicts that the biggest drops will be in Europe and Central Asia (27.5%), followed by Sub-Saharan Africa (23.1%), South Asia (22.1%), the Middle East and North Africa (19.6%), Latin America and the Caribbean (19.3%) and East Asia and the Pacific (13%). Even when taking this trend into account, the institution considers that remittances will continue to be a very important source of financing for recipient countries compared to direct foreign investment, which it estimates will fall by more than 35% in 2020. This maintains the trend seen in recent years of larger amounts of remittances than direct foreign investment (World Bank, 2020).
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The worldwide spread of COVID-19 first reported from Wuhan in China is attributed to migration and mobility of people. This paper presents how our understanding of migration and livelihood could be helpful in designing a mitigating strategy of economic and social impact of COVID-19 in India. The paper concludes that there are many challenges migrants face during the spread of COVID-19 resulting from nation-wide lockdown. Many internal migrants faced problems such as lack of food, basic amenities, lack of health care, economic stress, lack of transportation facilities to return to their native places and lack of psychological support. On the other hand, COVID-19 has also brought into sharp focus the emigrants from India and the major migration corridors India shares with the world as well. Although state and central governments have adopted various strategies to deal with these issues, there is a huge uncertainty about how long this crisis will last and what damage it would do to the economy and livelihood of people. This paper further provides some immediate measures and long term strategies to be adopted by the government such as improving public distribution system, strengthening public health system, integration of migrants with development, decentralisation as a strategy to provide health services, and providing support to return migrants to reintegrate them, and alsostrengthen the database on migration and migrant households.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly challenged long-held assumptions about the inevitability of globalization. Despite efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO) to hew to a multilateral, coordinated and rational pandemic response, countries around the globe have responded to the emergence of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) by reflexively closing borders and curtailing mobility. At the same time, stigma, xenophobia and discrimination have surged. As we look back at the first turbulent months of the pandemic, two competing impulses are evident: a tendency to blame, exclude and foment nationalist instincts; and a more reasoned, inclusive response that addresses the needs of marginalized populations, while acknowledging that we are all interconnected in illness and health. We are at an inflection point in the COVID-19 pandemic; whichever one of these impulses is allowed to prevail, it will dramatically shape the public policy agenda, the experiences of refugees and displaced populations worldwide, and the health and wellbeing of our society.
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The last decade has seen considerable growth in multilateral approaches to human mobility. A host of partnerships among international organizations have come into existence on human mobility, a term that refers to the broad spectrum of movements associated with migration and displacement. Since the landmark first High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, held at the United Nations General Assembly in 2006, collaborations between multilateral organizations have increased continuously, both in terms of quantity and quality. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its global and wide-reaching impacts on virtually all aspects of life, has affected these modes of cooperation and will continue to do so in the future. To understand future scenarios of interagency cooperation on human mobility, this chapter outlines the structural determinants influencing such partnerships. This includes structures put in place before the beginning of the pandemic, lessons from the immediate response to COVID-19, and a projection of how future features may impact cooperation in the times ahead.
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According to the United Nations (2020), migrants are currently being affected by three overlapping crises due to COVID-19; a health crisis, a socio-economic crisis and a protection crisis. I will focus here mainly on the socio-economic crisis. Financial or monetary remittances, loosely defined as the money that migrants send back to friends and family members in their countries of origin, are an extremely important lifeline for those that receive them. In 2019, remittances reached a record high of an estimated $714 billion, with an estimated $554 billion going to low and middle income countries (World Bank - KNOMAD, 2020b, p. 30). Unfortunately, it looks like remittances are being heavily impacted by COVID-19. The World Bank (2020b) currently estimates a 20 per cent global reduction in remittances for 2020 with continued shortfalls through 2021.
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