not the case for beijing beijing is more interested in stability yet in one area at least there's a promise of cooperation at a virtual summit this week china and the u.s. the world's 2 biggest carbon emitters pledged to work more closely on cutting their emissions a rare display of collaboration. unlikely to be repeated on other fronts adrian brown al jazeera hong kong. this is all just 0 these are the top stories india has seen its worst days so far from the coronavirus with nearly 3300 more fatalities taking the official told past 200000 but the actual number is thought to be much higher hospitals are running out of beds medical supplies and oxygen elizabeth has the latest from new delhi the situation is such. that people. from hospital to hospital to have.

from predatory into. the burial ground to hold funerals in a country. soon as possible not just because of custom but because of the very hot temperatures because of a shortage of mortuary facilities and as the situation unfolds we have international aid that's been arriving in the country. a lot of different oxygen supply factors concentrated. brazil sentence opened an inquiry into the government's handling of the pandemic which could damage president jabil so now it was better to be reelected next year brazil has the world's 2nd highest death toll millions of people in chile will soon be able to withdraw another 10 percent of their pensions early to help right out of the economic crisis made worse by the pandemic president sebastian pinera opposed the latest legislation but his bid to have it thrown out was rejected by the constitutional court. a car bombs exploded

in somalia's capital it happened on the western side of mogadishu one person was killed and another 4 were wounded the target was the headquarters of the national prisons authority and somalia's president has agreed not to extend his term and is promising to hold elections there's been growing unrest in the capital people have been fleeing mogadishu and residents fear more violence south africa's president cyril ramaphosa is appealing in a corruption inquiry involving his predecessor zonder commission is investigating the so-called state capture scandal during jacob zuma as a 9 year tenure zuma faces allegations of allowing a business family close to him to secure government contracts and influence policy the former president has refused to testify and those are the headlines the news is going to continue here on al-jazeera in about 30 minutes time after the string good buy. president joe biden into the white house spacing multiple crises

including the. divided america 3 months on has he managed to follow through on campaign promises to fix the country stayed with this but special coverage of biden's 1st $100.00 days in. just. i am femi oke a today on the stream philippe no nurses on the front lines of code 8 we find out why one group of nurses have died from the coronavirus in greater numbers than their coworkers i know you have questions this is a mystery that has multiple audiences jump into the you cheap comment section and you too can be part of today's show we start with a tribute from one of the largest nurses unions in the united states take a look. filipino nurses and other foreign trained health workers are very much

the unsung heroes of health care delivery and there are so many hospitals and health care institutions that would not be able to run efficiently and effectively without the work of filipino nurse migrants we have brought to delve into the life the work and some of the challenges of being in the filipino community we have sunny we've janina of roseanne thank you for being on the stream let me get you to introduce yourself to out audience sunny go ahead tell us who you are what you're doing thanks so much for having me 1st i read a couple had i'm a clinician i'm a pediatric nurse practitioner but i'm also a ph d. prepared nurse scientist and professor at villanova university where i teach health policy research and pediatrics gets a having to tell our audience who you are what you. so i'm zinni i am

a proud filipino in the grand i migrated here when i was 19 with my family and i have been an i.c.u. nurse for about 6 years now and i work in a cardiac i.c.u. in the top hospital in york city nice to have you raise and welcome to the stream introduce yourself to the stream of us thank you so much for having me here similar to sunny i will i wear a bunch of different hats i am an operating room nurse for about 9 years i'm also a proud filipino immigrant and i have also been documenting a bunch of filipino nursing families depend on make as a freelance documentary photographer all right so i'm going to get one if you'll take on this because a more this little one outside but i want to start sunny refute there's a statistic that is a shocking statistic for filipino nurses and covert casualties and covert deaths covert infections can you hit us with that statistic because it

is huge and it will make everybody stop doing what they're doing and watch the t.v. or their screens i think the 1st thing people have to know is that filipino nurses make up 4 percent of the total registered nursing population in the united states however when it comes to kogut they've suffered one 3rd of the casualties that have been experienced by registered nurses in the u.s. this may be due to a couple of things 1st of all filipino nurses disproportionately work in really highly acute areas like intensive care for instance also there are also employed sometimes in areas such as long term care facilities which are not as acute but a really great vectors as we know for the coded virus. i'm just looking to pictures of you working on my laptop here and that statistic how did you

find out about it and then how did you experience it so the small number of relative small number of filipino nurses working the u.s. health care system and then the large number who were impacted by cove it so i personally experienced that. when you know when york city was 1st hit by the pen demick. and the 1st surge happened in your city and you were admitting very sick he said and i see you. and that number is just really alarming for me i actually didn't know about it till just recently. but also i think it's very important you know it that you know even before depend that make filipinos for ready experiencing are pretty and you know multigenerational and multiply. family household and you know.

there's there's already inequality and i think that in the quality was just exacerbated by quite a bit 19 when you talk about inequality and poverty expanse poverty if i say why that is such a giant question would be half a for out here but if you could sort of pinpoint why in particular some filipinos would be ready in a difficult situation can you do that. take that it's really their new stuff and then decided to pick up. so. inequality because i think there chisel are of filipino nurses that work in densely populated urban areas like new york city and los angeles right so and the fact that we were it areas where it just like high exposures like the ice you see the sick son he said you know we're already. we're already at

a higher risk of you that i cope so sunny go ahead so i think another really important thing is that code sort of highlights an issue that's really at the forefront of a lot of things that are happening in terms of legislation right now that's specific to immigration so high proportion you know filipino nurses are immigrating from the philippines for many many reasons and they are the solution to health care staffing shortages in a bunch of countries not just the u.s. but canada are in germany u.k. australia finland and the u.a.e. and so because filipino nurses that basic and sort of human capital that's coming from the philippines the highly qualified and trained human capital it's coming from the philippines is coming to help us with our staffing shortages in the us that's one of the reasons why they experience poverty when they arrive because when you knew you're really just trying to get settled and you don't really have

a lot while you're trying to get on your feet. during comit a lot of things happened there were there were a lot of solutions that hospitals try to use to mitigate the staffing shortages using our domestically trained nurses and by that i mean nurses educate in the united states we tried to use unlicensed nurse interns who cared for covert 1000 patients we try to learn nurses and doctors who were already retired to come back to us to try and practice but in that sense we also relied on this immigrant nursing workforce that either has been here for a long time. i'm or was recruited to come here to help us resolve some of our staffing solutions in that period and that's why there may be poverty experienced by the filipino community even before the pandemic i want to play a little comment this is from melissa and we are really so why would more filipino nurses be dying than their coworkers at exactly the same time working in the same

conditions and this is what she told us i would love for you to react and then give us your take to he she is i think it really comes down to the barrio to bedside pipeline that is deeply rooted in u.s. imperialism and colonialism in the philippines a recent study by jennifer nazareth know of the brown university filipino health initiative done that instead of addressing insufficient staffing and unsafe working conditions in the u.s. for decades policy has led to an exodus of mainly white our ends from the acute in-patient and ice you settings and has led to the direct recruitment of immigrant labor primarily filipino of these crucial roles that now have a ever dangerous and life threatening role in cope at 19. go ahead. so there is just really a lot of things to unpack from from her state man her really powerful statement to start off i feel there is really historical ties to what brought to philip you know

nursing the asper here and in the united states. american colonialism had established the nursing profession to be what it is what it is now in the philippines and in turn have to have prepared many filipino nurses to be nurses in america instead of their home country so as so over the years as more and more shortages have happened through different pandemics and its different health crisis as filipino nurses have answered that call. for which really goes back to what she was saying as as more white nurses leave the field and create this demand filipino nurses really fill in those gaps and as mentioned earlier it's usually an acute settings in really high populated areas like new york city and

culturally a lot of filipino nurses also live in in these multigenerational household like janine had mentioned earlier. so all of these different factors coupled with health. health disparities as well a lot of filipino communities have high rates of diabetes or heart disease and all of these risk factors really are compounding each other to make the community really be hit hard by that 1000 that he's i want you to respond to some of the comments on each of you don't have to agree with them but i am really intrigued by your reaction. from you chief. filipinos will do jobs that people here in the united states complain or won't take that is direct and pretty brutal you know for us i think there's some accuracy in

that for sure i think a lot of the family so photographed or are working 60 hours a week or 2 full time jobs sometimes even 3 jobs just to provide for their family and they're not necessarily people who would complain about work conditions because they really feel strongly about caring for their patients and caring for their family still well i've also met some. people who have. paid the price for it. the pub the whole family of her cheryl about how she lost both of her parents to cope with 19 very early in the pandemic and that was because. her father did not have personal protective equipment to protect him while transporting equal than 1000 patients and that's something that he wasn't empowered and not to feel that he could refuse because he really wanted to care for his speech and at that time in

a i feel like many people were really placed in difficult situations especially in the beginning of the pandemic when there was such a shortage to protect yourself rosa and i'm just looking at you know your photo series here asper on the front lines took us through some of these pictures i'm just about to click from here this family. this is the bad gun family that's elizabeth grace and ernest and that's her firstborn child and both of them are nurses ernest on the right here he works in a by a containment unit so he he had seen patients essentially die every day and this is to go on here he works night shift. at a telemetry unit and he tends to also volunteered to take care of patients on his on his unit and that's him resting on his day and you feel bad you feel that

pain when you're so tired it hurts some people when i you tube comment section jeanine are just saying this is all about racism this is all it is we're in the united states the institutions of racist this is racism jenny respond. so like what i said earlier there was already some level of inequality there was just exacerbated by the cold midnight and i think we should just continue these conversations but because it's actually really important to be able to talk about it and be able as a filipino be able to speak my personal experiences about it and just you know i think it's true there are some level of inequality maybe raises so we don't know at this point but do you honestly honestly not know you just finger very cautious

about not corning in god we are in america right now we are in america in 2021 are you paying careful because you still have to go back to work. saying health institutions in the united states could do so much for the filipino nurses it's ok if you want to get that question to study right do a. study take it. so one thing you think that's really important to remember and i think touches on the experiences of on their cells that are here is that it's not easy to come to the united states when you come to the united states you are a highly trained person that has a baccalaureate degree you in order to practice as a registered nurse in the united states you also have to pass an english language exam you need to have that education evaluated to make sure it's a saying or at least equivalent to an american education and you also have to pass

a board exam what's not expected when people come here and just as a footnote i'm also an immigrant but i immigrated from canada so when i check that box i check an immigrant and i also check filipino but the perception is a little bit different but understanding that you know people p. . people who get care from a filipino nurse are getting care from an individual who has been trained to care for them who has had an education equivalent to what we've had in the united states and this idea of inequality in terms of education and language and culture is really a huge barrier to sort of resolving a lot of the things that you're seeing there in the chat and also by my colleagues that are here with me and one of the things that we could do so much better is to one understand that we're recruiting people to come work with us not for us but with us alongside us here in the united states and we could do so much better by

helping them in culture at themselves in the u.s. but also within the health care facilities where both providers aren't really necessarily culturally competent enough to understand what the immigrant nurse does because for so long there's been so many other names that have been attributed to immigrant nurses or nurses that just don't look like what we expect or wait such as for an educated nurse. you know internationally educated nurse which are basically euphemisms for nurses that haven't come from here and that's where we can you know we can really make a great improvement you know on may 11th there's going to be this very important document released from the national academy of medical sciences here in the us so when that when that report gets released it's going to be the future of nursing report 2030 i will be so interested to know in that report which is focused on

health equity if anything is in there that really focuses on how we can make the experience of nurses coming to this country better so we can work together was a what you want to add i can tell that you have something extra to jump into the conversation go ahead. i think just kind of jumping in on that conversation and one of the things i discovered throughout this journey of documenting a lot of filipino nursing families is there are recruitment agencies who who put the who play the middle middle man role in recruiting these nurses from the philippines and one of the nurses i i had documented. she learned that this company is taking a significant chunk of her salary for the 1st 3 years and that that also speaks to the poverty issue the just men period of immigration and all this inequality is that really come into play to make you disadvantage right from the get go when

you're just trying to better your life and also provide care for people around you bob obliques time is in our you chief comments right now hi there barbara thank you for having us thank you being part of the show and a barber says thank you for covering this critically important issue the public needs to understand how important filipino nurses are to the health of the public and their role in the health care system and star thing i want to go back to the reason why we started this conversation and bring it emerson because emerson is trying to unpack why or when so many medical professionals were on the front line why filipino nurses in particular face extra danger have a listen have a look. significant number of filipino registered nurses were in acute in critical care areas not include the intensive care unit and emergency department which may place in the record exposed or vulnerable to the effects of the new coronavirus

filipinos have disproportionate read some chronic illness such as by eighty's and hypertension when compared with other asian american subgroups these conditions have been associated with the severity of come in 1900 ems including deaths many of these filipino registered nurses maybe bird babies chronic disease states. didn't i remember in the u.k. . during the early days of the pandemic the national health service discovered that people of color who were in the medical profession what dying going to numbers than that because they took them off the front lines they made sure that they were safe as much as they possibly could be what has changed for filipino since now that we've got this information that we know that you have added risk you'll still work in what's different now. but i think it can be i

think. i think there. are some more we're just we just have more information and more knowledge about what we're dealing with. compared to when we 1st started last you know last year. so it's like the vaccine now and although we have more p.p. east now which is good so i don't think there is much there prince but i one thing i learned from this though is i have more appreciation and i feel more crowded being a front line worker and philip you know a nurse. rasm what's different now. i would have got at cole what janine said that at my job there hasn't really been

much difference i feel that i am the person who has been telling the statistics to everyone i know all but it hasn't really shaken any kind of change is not that i also kind of don't really know how to move forward from here knowing knowing these really astounding numbers are you scared that you more scared now that you've got the information and then go on i'm not more scared i kind of more angry and i think that's really why i'm pushing for a lot of awareness on this topic i think not just what is happening now i also want people to have an understanding will what happened in the past that brought us here to really have this deeper understanding of this filipino nursing day asprin were not just people who are dying we're not just statistics there are people's lives here that are really all. and i want people to also get to know that piece i want

to bring in one more thought and this is from butch to castro and it's really about taking action once we know this information how do we act upon it have a listen to poach. health care organizations most critically examine those factors in decisions that create working conditions that increase filipino nurses occupational exposure to code side just about the personal protective equipment it's made available to them but it also what are some units there primarily employed in what patients their routine the assign to them what shifts they're typically given how many hours are made to work and bigger question that needs to be asked is how institutional discrimination may be influencing these terminations . does unjustly subtracting them as nurses of color to disproportionate risk

of code related illness and death. so would you suggest that we now do with this information not just for the peano nurses but the public as well what next. you know cobra has taught us many things. you know we put a lot of things in place that have helped us to just get through those pandemic and some of them have been going to be brilliant but what we really have to understand is that these changes that we're making through this discovery discussion are going to make things better for everybody and i think it's a it's a really important one to sort of make sure that everybody is staffed appropriately to to make sure that we have the equipment that we need in order to protect us but also really make conscious decisions about how nursing staff is being distributed and used you know nursing is

a really tough jobs and when you're working at the front lines of code it these are areas and situations that we've never been exposed to so it's important for us to work together to make this whole year something that's really meaningful but also something that carrion starts through our post cold world we need to really figure out a better way to be stronger in a nursing workforce so that we can both balance the needs of you know nurses like janine right at the front line in my nurses in the o.r. like roads together sonny janine thank you very much for taking part in our conversation today about filipino nurses and how they're being disproportionately impacted by covert than their coworkers thank you chief as for your comments and questions i have a feeling there are a few nurses in the u.t.v. comments thank you for that and then we send you to one more place here this is can this will tell you about the filipino nurses the tradition in the united states and

also show you some of the extraordinary people who we lost over the past year thanks for watching this train see you next time. the small boy and his brother rescued from war in gaza by the red cross i hold it was a time when we were 1st released on a red cross truck now a world leader in crisis management and a highly regarded doctor in chicago who still misses her homeland just one day is possibly thinking of returning to jordan al-jazeera wilde meets 2 successful arab doctors in north america arabs abroad the humanitarian and the healer on al-jazeera . a weekly critique of the stories hitting the headlines the news media have been left to sort through mixed messages on a quite complex story from mainstream to street journalism and maybe objective is

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law. india's battle to breathe the desperate wait for oxygen supplies while the official covered 900 death toll surges past 200000. are about this and this is al jazeera live from doha also coming up somalia's president decides not to extend his term after protests and fighting is now called for early elections. south africa's pres.