FAUDA
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
Fauda means “chaos” in Hebrew and Arabic. It is the name of a magnificent Netflix series. The best way to pass the time under this damn confinement caused by Covid-19, aka “the Old People Killer”, is to watch a television series. I have done it in this endless quarantine.
I loved it. I knew, in advance, the episodes’ background. Certain young Jews, linked to an Elite Covert Unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, were facing Palestinian youth linked to Hamas, Fatah in the West Bank, and some of them even swore allegiance to ISIS through the usual video.
The unit exists and is the “Doron Kabilio (cherry in Hebrew),” and is empowered to commit targeted killings and other despicable acts aimed at preventing terrorist attacks and crimes against the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.
It was –at least I believed it– the Middle Eastern version of cowboys against Indians, of good versus evil, of the “good” against the “bad.” The cowboys, of course, were the Jews. The Palestinians, of course, were the Indians. But there was none of that. Stereotypes did not exist.
All were capable of destroying the adversary, interrogate him viciously, torturing him with one blow after another until they killed him. The Jews and the Palestinians were human beings driven by patriotism, adventure, desire for revenge, love, loneliness, lust, deception, and spite. Also, and in a huge proportion, they were moved by the desire for glory.
The religious issue separated them. The Palestinians took Allah very seriously. They prayed to him and offered him the sacrifice of their lives. The women among them had an auxiliary role and owed their husbands an awesome respect. The Jews, on the other hand, hardly mentioned Yahweh. They viewed their actions from a secular perspective. Women played the same roles as men. They could be unfaithful in bed while remaining loyal.
Is it a realistic series? Yes, but only in a certain way. Disbelief must be discarded, as is often the case in theater, and we must assume that the same secret war crew operates consistently without being detected in a small territory like Ramallah, which is a sort of city the size of a postage stamp.
But that stumbling block is easily overcome. Actually, the events occurred more or less like this, although in a different sequence. The main actor and co-writer of the series, Lior Raz, who plays the role of Doron Kabilio, belonged to an Israeli special unit that persecuted terrorists and carried out covert actions in the West Bank. The raw material for the scripts is his own experience.
His girlfriend back then, a 19-year-old girl named Iris Azulai, was stabbed to death by a Palestinian, who was arrested. Years later he was exchanged for the soldier Gilad Shalit, kidnapped by Hamas, in that amazing operation in which the Israelis exchanged more than a thousand prisoners, many of them terrorists, for the freedom of one of their own.
The other co-writer, Avi Issacharoff, is a Haaretz journalist and award-winning television reporter, a true expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although Issacharoff takes the Israeli point of view, he tries to be objective and respectful of the Palestinians.
That’s not possible. The point of view is essential, and the Palestinians are almost never satisfied. For them, revenge is a legitimate emotion. That is why Shirin al-Abed, splendidly played by the Franco-Arab actress Laëticia Eido, a Palestinian widow, in love with Doron Kabilio, although married in fear to her cousin Walid Abed, the local boss of Hamas, is an unforgivable traitor. It is a small world in black and white, absolutely irreconcilable with its adversaries.
It’s convenient to know it. There is no human way for Arabs and Israelis to reach reasonable agreements. As long as the Palestinians dream of throwing the Jews to the sea, that’s not possible.
Primera vez que cam publica sólo en inglés.
Debe ser su regalo para J
O no quiere que lo lea Victor Manuel (no el Victor de aquí, el de Bola de Nieve, que no sabe inglés)
para que conoscan a este vivido de carlo alberto montaner
elsolo es pura propaganda anti americana de espana no habla nada
MILES DE ESPAÑOLES SALEN A PROTESTAR CONTRA EL GOBIERNO DE PEDRO SÁNCHEZ
Grandes hileras de automóviles, desde los que ondeaban banderas de España, salieron a las calles…
la esposa de clinton son muy amigo de cam https://youtu.be/AusbE0G1rt8
julian que me dices
manuel
28 May 2020 at 4:32 pm
PERMALINK
Ya es 29 en China. Feliz dia amigo J!
cumpla 70 más!
Julian Perez
28 May 2020 at 4:46 pm
Gracias, Manuel 🙂 No sabía lo de los comentarios adicionales en las fotos.
Pero prefiero que sea porque es mi cumpleaños en Japón, no en China 🙂
Ud ahora es contado entre los dos millones de cubanos
Mayores de 70.
Esos dos son claves para entender de donde venimos
Y, por tanto, hacia donde debemos ir. Uds son los
Últimos en haber vivido su infancia antes del 59.
No nos abandonen, aunque ya la mayoría de uds
Sientan y crean pertenecer a otros lares.
The practice, called contact tracing, aims to identify those the virus might strike next. It’s an indispensable part of breaking the chain of a pathogen’s transmission and getting society back on track, according to most health officials including those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But in the United States, the idiosyncrasies and scale of this pandemic—and the intense polarization of this peculiar moment in American history—promise to make contact tracing the most complex and difficult health investigation in history.
Yet even as this workforce is ramping up, interviews with nearly two dozen experts suggests political tribalism, misinformation, the demonization of at-risk communities, and the lack of a cohesive federal response threaten to complicate the task. Tracing will only be successful if people trust public health officials, tell the truth, and respond by changing their behavior.
“It’s going to be hard,” said Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist and associate dean at the University of Washington School of Public Health. “The virus is new, and it’s poorly understood, which increases people’s fear. It’s a divisive time in this country, and when we’re in a climate like that, how do you rally people around being part of our response?”
We’re also perilously far behind. The number of new cases appearing each day is swinging wildly, from 13,000 on May 19 to 24,000 the next day, even though much of the country remains locked down. And those are just the cases we know about. Until the U.S. does a far better job of quickly figuring out who is infected, it simply won’t be possible to keep up with tracing.
Right now, the country tests roughly 300,000 people daily. That’s a fraction of what health experts have said we’ll ultimately need; estimates include 900,000, 3 million, and 20 million. Many of those tests require days-long waits for results—delays that let the virus extend its reach. And the Trump Administration has insisted it is unlikely to get beyond more than 500,000 tests.
A contact tracer reaches out to inform people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus in Paterson… Read More
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRYAN ANSELM, THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, is pessimistic. Even if 80 percent of the country managed to trace cases effectively—“which would be miraculous,” he said—the remaining 20 percent would be a constant source of new infections. New research, not yet peer reviewed, suggests tracing would have to catch at least half of all new cases to reduce transmission even 10 percent. “My view is it’s probably not going to work,” Lipsitch said. “But given the lack of alternatives, we have to try—and hopefully demonstrate that I’m wrong.”
His colleague, Ashish Jha with Harvard’s Global Health Institute, however, believes these problems are surmountable. To stand a chance, though, this campaign will have to move fast.
Tracing techniques have been honed over decades
Contact tracing is often characterized as sleuthing, but the job is more akin to social work. To trace contacts, investigators ask ill people or their next of kin about their whereabouts back to a few days before they showed symptoms, seeking anyone the victim had come within six feet of for at least 15 minutes. Those contacts are then passed to a tracer who reaches out by phone.
This second round of conversations follows a vague script. Callers explain to people that they may have been exposed. They answer questions and ask about symptoms and access to care. They ask the exposed people if they have food and a bathroom. They urge them to isolate at home and call their doctors. Callers ask these people who they, in turn, might unwittingly have infected.
Krysta Cass has made hundreds of such calls in the last two months as a tracer in Boston. “There’s a point in time where you want to pause and let them really digest what you said,” she explained. “You have to wait and listen, and then be a friend.” Her first task is to put people at ease.
“The human component can’t be underestimated,” said Nahid Bhadelia, medical director at the special pathogen unit at Boston Medical Center and an associate professor of infectious diseases at Boston University’s School of Medicine. “You’re basically asking people to reveal parts of their lives to you.”
This process can seem intrusive, but public health agencies have honed it over decades. They use tracing routinely for measles and food-poisoning outbreaks or to track HIV/AIDS and avian flu. It was central to stamping out Ebola in West Africa after the 2014 outbreak. “We get people to tell us who their public contacts are when they have syphilis,” said Kristen Pogreba-Brown, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Arizona. “We know how to do this.”
The virus is new, and it’s poorly understood, which increases people’s fear.
JANET BASEMAN, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Technology may help some this time around. Apple and Google and a half dozen other companies are developing cellphone applications that use GPS or Bluetooth technology. These apps can alert users that they were recently near an infectious person or allow them to retrace their steps to see if they crossed paths with a carrier. But most experts insist technology will merely support, not supplant, human tracing. And it may never be as effective in the U.S. as it has been in other countries.
“The things people are trying to do passively, with phone apps, aren’t the same as active contact tracing,” says Eric Perakslis, a data science professor at Duke University who worked in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak. He has advised several states on COVID-19 tracing. “The Bluetooth stuff is proximity monitoring. It’s contact-tracing-like. It’s not the same as interviewing people … making sure they have food or medicine, asking if they need help. You’re not comparing apples to oranges. You’re not even comparing apples to pork chops.”
For starters, tech solutions are valuable only if widely adopted, and polls show Americans are skeptical and worry that apps could infringe on data privacy. The U.S. also has so many cases that it can’t rely on weak crowdsourcing with limited penetration to find them all. Meanwhile, in much of Asia, previous viral outbreaks bred enough comfort and respect for tracing that there is less need for the handholding provided by human tracers. In a few countries, notably China, authoritarian governments also leave citizens little choice but to participate.
Americans, on the other hand, are less sensitized to the need for tracing, more independent, and more suspicious of government monitoring. That brings its own complications.
Skeptics have sowed doubt about tracing
The whole point of tracing is to find people quickly, ideally within 48 hours, and get them to act to halt the pathogen’s spread. In the best of times, the job isn’t easy. Not everyone recalls every contact. Some people don’t answer their phones. Some can’t afford to stay home.
And modern America is almost perfectly conditioned to accentuate these difficulties. The virus has hit minority communities hard. But after years of stepped-up immigration raids and racial demagoguing, many are reluctant to speak up.
“There’s distrust, misinformation, a stigma, no united front,” says Rupa Narra, a pediatrician at New York University’s South Brooklyn campus who worked overseas for Doctors Without Borders and once worked as an epidemiologist for the CDC. She’s seen parents of sick kids in her hospital downplay their own symptoms even as she sees them coughing. “I think we’ve not done a great job reaching different parts of our population.”
Talking heads on cable news and lawmakers in several states, including Louisiana and Minnesota, have demonized contact tracing. Washington state Rep. Jim Walsh, a Republican from Aberdeen, a city near the Pacific Coast, attacked tracing at a recent rally. “I’m very concerned about the rhetoric about ‘armies’ who are going to compel people to give up names of who they’ve been around,” he said later in an interview.
Whether lawmakers fret about cost, consider tracing a barrier to states reopening, or view it as a cudgel to attack political adversaries, their criticisms have muddied efforts to develop public support. In mid-May, after complaints, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, rescinded plans to require restaurants upon reopening to have customers leave names and contact information. He wanted owners to be able to forward that data to tracers if there were an outbreak in their establishment. The state’s health department also issued a rare statement to bat down rumors that tracing could lead to forced quarantines. Tracing is voluntary.
At the same time, a feature of public health—that most control is local—means the amount and priorities of tracing efforts will vary substantially from state to state. And privacy rules around health information generally prevent health districts from directly contacting individuals outside their state. That will likely prove cumbersome as states reopen and contact increases, especially as health authorities who are tracing cases race against the clock.
“If I call Joe Schmoe, and he says, I had these five contacts, and this person was visiting from Florida, technically I can’t call the person in Florida,” Pogreba-Brown said. “I have to work through Florida’s health system.”
Tracing and testing ramp up
So what do we do about that? The CDC should pull states together to improve data sharing and make sure contact tracing reaches the places that need it most. “This is clearly a national-level disaster that should be coordinated at the national level,” said Ben Brunjes, a University of Washington expert in emergency management and contracting.
In lieu of a rigorous federal response, Partners in Health, a Boston-based nonprofit, is embedding expert teams in health districts around the country to build up tracing programs. It is providing advisers to offer technical assistance. In April, the group worked with Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker to rapidly hire 1,000 tracers. By mid-May these workers had reached 32,000 people. The nonprofit now plans to add 600 more tracers in Massachusetts.
HOW SOLVING THIS MEDICAL MYSTERY SAVED LIVES
What do milk, sheep, and vaccines have in common? Louis Pasteur. Learn how he helped prove to the world that germs cause disease and usher in an unprecedented era of medical breakthroughs.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s Jha said testing is finally on the upswing. He has projected that the country needs 900,000 tests a day. He said logjams for ingredients like reagents to detect virus in samples can be loosened with a little cajoling. “I’ve talked to the companies,” he said.
Testing also could rise by orders of magnitude if samples are pooled. Since the vast majority are negative, authorities could combine a dozen specimens into one batch and then only retest the individual specimens if the batch tests positive. “If you have 20 test kits, you could still test a hundred people,” Jha said. If testing let people find out more quickly if they’re carriers, it would make them more responsive to tracing and less likely to break self-imposed quarantines.
To combat public wariness, experts say the U.S. needs a sustained campaign of accurate, apolitical information making clear that tracing is voluntary, confidential, and secure. Experts point to the Boston Public Health Commission, the nation’s oldest, which has spent decades making inroads with minority communities. Using a diverse staff that speaks eight languages, they’ve developed contacts that help navigate political barriers. “It’s about relationships,” said Thomas Lane, associate director of the commission’s Infectious Disease Bureau.
Health districts should also try to develop contacts among protest movements and tracing skeptics, Jha said. The idea is that hearing from a tracer should be no more controversial than getting a concerned call from your doctor.
In the meantime, Pogreba-Brown said, those who get sick should at least alert friends that they may have been exposed. “Getting a ping on your phone or a call from a stranger is very different,” she said, “from having your friend say, I feel like death, and you’ve been exposed, please take care of yourself.”
From Robert Maier, Penicuik, Midlothian, UK
I wonder whether there is a serious and overlooked aspect of any drive to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus in order to end the need for lockdowns.
Attaining herd immunity, if this is even possible, would require a significant proportion of the population to become infected and develop antibodies.
However, the broad distribution of cases may also serve as a breeding ground for new mutations of the virus. The more people who are infected, the higher the probability of new strains of the virus emerging.
If the pool of infected people is kept low, viral mutations, including those resulting in even more dangerous forms of the virus, might be avoided
From Bruce Hamm, London, UK
In your leader, you write: “Nonscientists have many roles to play in defeating the virus, but becoming armchair scientists isn’t one of them.” You are right that there is a huge problem with people who are unwilling to be led by scientists and the scientific method.
The turn to science by vast numbers of people in the face of the tremendous harm wrought by this pandemic does indeed pose real dangers – but it also opens up great opportunities. Rather than dumping cold water on people’s enthusiasm, we need to encourage this in a way that builds an appreciation for science, including the scientifically grounded procedures for determining truth, such as the peer-review process and so on.
A population of true armchair scientists who were willing to look at the world more scientifically and be led by science, rather than getting caught up in all kinds of wacky 5G or anti-vax conspiracies and superstitions, would be a boon
“It’s convenient to know it. There is no human way for Arabs and Israelis to reach reasonable agreements. As long as the Palestinians dream of throwing the Jews to the sea, that’s not possible”
Es impresionante la incidencia de nuestras pasiones en la construcción de nuestra historia.
Tanto de lo bueno como de lo malo.
Por ello no puedo dejar de preguntarme ¿Por qué no se hace nada para tener acceso a recursos que puedan modular sus consecuencias sociales para aprovechar lo mejor de ellas y evitar lo peor?
No es posible que aún no existan recursos a través de las ciencias de la psicología o de la educación o de la que sea para un objetivo como éste que podría evitar infinidad de conflictos y potenciar infinidad de beneficios.
Cuánto nos falta a los humanos para convertirnos en verdaderos humanos!!
Algunos lo van logrando. Falta que sobrevivan y se conviertan en tendencia.
Este siglo les toca sobrevivir, y entonces el siglo que viene devenir corriente
en todo el planeta. Eso es revolución, lo demás son cuentos de camino.
Esa es la idea amigo Manuel
Amigo Ramiro
>>Cuánto nos falta a los humanos para convertirnos en verdaderos humanos!!
Creo que el asunto es ése: que somos humanos. Quítense todas esas pasiones y quizás no haya más conflictos, pero, como Feuerbach, habríamos tirado al niño junto con el agua de la tina, pues ya no seríamos humanos.
Ya Huxley describió la ¨solución¨ en su novela ¨Un mundo feliz¨ (¨Brave new world¨) y la herramienta fue la ingeniería genética. Soy como el protagonista de la novela llamado ¨el Salvaje¨. Ese tipo de mundo no me parece un sueño, sino una pesadilla.
Créame amigo Julián que tengo presente esa posibilidad.
Hace poco ví una película titulada invasores y trata de una invasión alienígena que es algo así como un virus que invade a los individuos cambiando su conducta, teóricamente, como el virus alienígena se comporta.
Y el efecto más importante es la anulación de nuestras pasiones convirtiendo nuestra vida social en humanos que se parecen más a máquinas que a humanos.
La idea de la película es mostrar un mundo sin pasiones donde se terminan los conflictos. Todo es “perfecto”.
Finalmente, como siempre, ganan los humanos expulsando a los invasores (como si ahora encontramos una vacuna contra el coronavirus) y volvemos a la normalidad.
La película termina con los protagonistas escuchando noticias de las guerras en Medio Oriente y en otros lugares del planeta volviendo a nuestra “normalidad humana” como la de la serie comentada por CAM.
Es decir, obviamente que una vida humana sin pasiones no es humano. Desde ya.
Pero ¿No es humano progresar? ¿Debemos resignarnos a la “misma humanidad” que tenemos hoy? ¿Acaso no ha progresado la humanidad? ¿La Democracia no es exactamente eso, progreso que implica dejar atrás pasiones como las que inundan la vida política en Medio Oriente por ejemplo?
¿Por qué no seguir progresando?
Influir sobre nuestras pasiones para sacar lo mejor de ellas y dejar atrás lo peor.
De hecho, las instituciones son justamente una herramienta para ello. Y las instituciones que mejor funcionan son justamente aquellas que tienen presente la influencia de nuestras pasiones en nuestra vida social buscando aprovechar lo mejor de ellas y evitar lo peor ¿No es acaso exactamente eso la declaración de los padres fundadores?
¿No podríamos sumar otros mecanismos como la institución comentada para utilizar mejor nuestra capacidad humana para conducir nuestras pasiones en aras de un mundo mejor? ¿Sin guerras por ejemplo como la de la serie?
Pero si todos desconocen su importancia como es evidente se desconoce cada vez que vemos propuestas “políticamente correctas” como ud mencionó antes ¿Cómo progresar? ¿Se puede progresar si se ignora literalmente algo tan importante y capaz de decidir nuestra vida política, económica y social?
¿No es tiempo que pueblos como los de Medio Oriente dejen de conducirse por lo peor de nuestras pasiones?
Amén
Anonadado por el problema cultural. Saludos.
Claro que ha habido mejoramiento humano, y lo seguirá
Habiendo. Las pasiones como tiran hacia infiernos,
También pueden tirar a lo alto: nuestra mente puede
Más que lo que habita de fiera y reptil.
Y aquí veo un lugar elemental, fundamental, a las instituciones de la educación amigo Manuel.
Aquí si que juega un papel notablemente relevante la educación.
Si la enorme mayoría de los ciudadanos de Oriente Medio fueran instruidos sobre la importancia de nuestras pasiones en sus conductas ¿No habría al menos más posibilidades de dejar atrás el eterno “conflictismo” que protagoniza sus vidas políticas?
Cómo harán las instituciones para educar a un joven braquicéfalo con la nariz ancha en la base. Cómo harán.
Fears of total war as China repeats threat to INVADE neighbouring Taiwan
CHINA has vowed to take control of Taiwan by any means necessary. Origen: Fears of total war as China repeats threat to INVADE neighbouring Taiwan
Gracias, Musk.
Si, yo también lo vi en vivo. Fue una gozada 🙂