curbs on movement will disrupt mobility and economic activity even as economies recover countries will be counting the cost of the pandemic for years to come school closures disrupted education and students in developing asia last nearly a 3rd of a year's learning on average that to substantially reduce future earnings and productivity the asian development bank says getting back on the path to growth will require a vast amount of government and private funds lawrence lee al-jazeera. is there with. top stories india has seen its worst day so far from the crowd a virus with nearly 3300 more fatalities taking the official toll past 200000 but the. thought to be much higher and it's withdrawn and has more from new delhi. the

situation is such. that people family members from hospital to hospital to have loved ones admitted. predatory and to have a toy. to hold funerals in a country. held as soon as possible just because of custom but because of the very hot temperatures because of a shortage of mortuaries facilities and as the situation unfolds we have international aid that's been evolving in the country for the last 2 days a lot of different oxygen supply that is concentrated sterile ventilator the british prime minister has denied allegations that he tried to get party donors to pay for renovations to his official residence boris johnson says he personally covered the cost the u.k. political watchdog is investigating. how bad the costs and by that most people will find it absolutely bizarre and of course is an electoral commission. to get in there is not i can tell you i conformed in full with the code of conduct with.

ministers listeria. officials who have been kept. been advised me throughout this whole thing but i think people will think it absolutely bizarre that he is focusing on this issue south africa's presidents a rum opposer has told a corruption inquiry involving his predecessor that he will not defend the indefensible jacob zuma is facing allegations of allowing a wealthy business family to secure contracts and influence decisions 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 mortgage issue and residents fear of more violence. there's been another night of protests in elizabeth city of the us state of north carolina demonstrators are calling for justice after the police killing of a black independent autopsy show that andrew brown jr was shot in the back of the herd his family says he was no threat to the police and was trying to flee those

were the headlines that clark will be here with the al-jazeera news hour just under half an hour next on al-jazeera is the stream to stay with us. al-jazeera is news night the biggest stories of the week delivered to your inbox last analysis and opinions. subscribe of the conversation. i had for me ok today on the stream philippe now nurses on the front lines of covert we find out why one group of nurses have died from the corona virus in greater numbers than their coworkers i know you have questions this is a mystery that has multiple audiences jumping into the you tube 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 filipino nurse migrants. we have got to delve into the life the work and some of the challenges of being in the filipino community we've sunny we've seen of roseanne thank you for being on the stream and to get you to introduce yourself to our 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 how to

policy research in pediatrics good to have you do need to tell our audience who you are what you do so i'm jenny i am a proud little you know immigrant i migrated here when i was 19 with my family and i have been a nice you nurse for about 6 years now and i work in a corridor i.c.u. in the top hospital in your city nice to have you raise our welcome to the stream introduce yourself to the stream of us thank you so much for having me here similar to sunny i what i wear a bunch of different hats and operating room nurse for about 9 years i'm also a proud filipino immigrant and i have also been documenting a bunch of of filipino nursing families tried to pandemic as a freelance documentary photographer all right so i'm going to get it all if you'll take on this because the more this little one outside but i want to start sunny refuse 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 nurse in population in the united states however when it comes to kobe 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 kobe virus i'm just looking janine

pictures if 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 experience that. when you know when york city was 1st hit by the penned the mic. and the 1st search happened in york 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 that you know even before depend that make filipinos for ready experiencing poverty and you know multigenerational and

multiply. multifamily households 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 have yeah but if you could sort of pinpoint why in particular some filipinos would be living in a difficult situation can you do that are my main problem take that it's really their stuff and then decided to pick up. sure. 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 lose the eat 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're new 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 tried 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 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. long time 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 for melissa and we are why would more filipino nurses be dying than their code walk us 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 an i.c.u. 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 copan a team. go ahead. 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 filipinos 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 filipino nurses have answered that call. 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 households 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 1000 then 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 take 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 one of the going 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 about it you feel that pain when you're so tired it hurts some people when i you tube comments 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 johnny respond. so like what i said earlier there was already some level of inequality that was just an 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 you need to 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 their 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 there says that our 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 a spot 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 white 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 still 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 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 that 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 used to 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 starving i want to go back to the reason why we started this conversation and bring in emerson because emerson is trying to unpack why or when so many medical professionals were on the frontline why filipino nurses in particular faced extra danger have a listen have a look. significant number of filipino registered nurses were in acute in critical

care areas that 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 the knees and hypertension when compared with other asian american subgroups these conditions have been associated with this verity of come in 1900 dims including deaths many of these filipino registered nurses may be burdened by these chronic disease states did 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 working what's different now. but i think it can be i think. not like there. are 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 proud of it 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. 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're more scared now that you've got the information i leaned 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 they are spread

out were not just people who are dying we're not just a to stakes 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 coding side just about the personal protective equipment it's made available to them but it's also what are some units they're 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 then he should

be asked is how institutional discrimination may be influencing these determinations. as unjustly subtracting them as nurses of color to disproportionate risk of code related illness and death. so what 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 is really 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 coded 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 kerry is that's through our post cold world we need to really figure out a better way to be stronger in 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 road 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 the neko workers thank you chief as for your comments and

questions i have a feeling there are a few nurses in the you tube comments thank you for that and then we send you to one more place here this is canada 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. from the london bridge to special guests in. his denials one women. the only thing that benefits from this. uninterrupted center for. those who are. foreigners. who like to think there's nationalism is not as ugly as someone else's nationalism . it's the political debate show that's challenging the way you think i

want to know where you stand on cancer culture. the range of ideas that can be heard from international politics to the global pandemic and everything in between companies are the ones with all the power what do we do what's the solution 'd get organized what are world leaders or governments missing. now up front with me marc lamont hill on al-jazeera. looking to reassure people in indonesia the government lifestream present joko widodo getting the country's 1st chinese scene of 1000 vaccine the 1st nation outside of china to grant emergency use thailand malaysia singapore and the philippines have all placed orders this despite a wide range of data on its efficacy from the early trials of the vaccine some southeast asia countries have not yet approved the jab this has led to some questions about the vaccine stemming from the lack of transparency and data the chinese regulators do not want to give up their control if. there ever. give

up a certain amount of control thailand is looking to start vaccinating high priority people with the see the back job some here feel is though the lack of transparency around the vaccine is not limited to trial data you have a major type of. group taking a stake in a company that produces. like some of its neighbors thailand is ordering vaccines from other companies as well. this is al jazeera. but they're on the clock this is unusual life and coming up the next 60 minutes running out of wood india's capital struggles to create its dead as the number of covert 1000 fatalities surged past 200 times. and the growing crisis is not

confined to india death numbers in neighboring pakistan also getting new highs.