Cities are the epicentres of the COVID-19 pandemic. From Wuhan to Madrid and Sao Paulo, the scenes were dark: patient-filled rooms, rows of refrigerated trucks acting as transit morgues, rows of food banks meandering through empty streets. At the same time, other people and animals have invaded streets and parks, while carbon emissions and smog grades have declined from New Mexico to Delhi.
COVID-19 is still on its way. Immediate aftershocks (loss of tasks, poverty, food shortages) must be addressed urgently. But much has been learned. Experience is already driving change.
In May, the mayors of 38 of the world’s largest cities, as well as Hong Kong, Los Angeles, California and Durban, South Africa, announced a set of principles to redesign their metropolises to make them more sustainable and equitable. Combat opposed to climate replacement is one of the priorities of the CoVID-19 Global Mayors Recovery Working Group. Milan, Paris, Bogota and Barcelona, for example, will close spaces for motorized traffic, widen roads and build motorcycle lanes.
Initiatives like that are welcome. But peoples want to reconsider in intensity how they govern and manage. They want leadership and health care systems, improve the way they communicate, supply locally in addition to food, goods and services, prioritize nature and address inequality.
Action, above all, strengthening and expanding networks within and between cities, will make urban spaces more resilient to long-term pandemics and other crises, such as climate change.1,2 By connecting now, cities will be in a better position to act temporarily and be giving or getting help from others when some other crisis occurs.
The city panels in COVID-19 are mixed. Although the image is changing, they are already telling us a lot about what works and what doesn’t.
First, strong leadership and governance in all grades is essential to obtain certain immediate responses.3,4 Well-run cities like Hanoi in Vietnam have been able to save it from primary epidemics from the outset by restricting travel and intensifying evidence. tracking and quarantine. Similarly, Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), the capital of the Indian state of Kerala with an estimated population of more than 2.5 million, has one of the lowest infection and mortality rates in the country: just over 4000 cases and 12 deaths as of August 1. – despite the return of thousands of academics and foreign workers. On the other hand, places like Sao Paulo in Brazil, Delhi and New York, which have responded slowly or ineffectively, have encountered overcrowded hospitals and many times more deaths.
Timely, reliable, accurate, and evidence-based data is crucial. People want to know why and how they keep social distance, wear masks, and quarantine the property. For example, Bangalore in India publishes a daily dashboard and maps of newly diagnosed infections that are used for local tracking (https://covid19.bbmpgov.in).
However, confusion, contradiction and underestimation are more the norm. The Chinese city of Wuhan has been criticized for its slow reaction to the emergence of the virus. The lack of a security lock in India has left millions of migrant workers struggling to arrange transportation home in March and May.
Some localities have manipulated data for political purposes or to avoid social instability. First, mortality rates were reported insufficiently or delayed in New York, St. Petersburg, Milan and Lahore, for example. Inaccurate data can cause problems. For example, in March, rumors that contagious evacuees were returning from China caused an insurrection in the Ukrainian city of Novi Sanzhary.
Disinformation is a common place, even in well-established disorders, such as dressing in a face mask to block the aerial spread of the disease. Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Ho Chi Minh City, some of which experienced or were ready for an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, made the mask mandatory temporarily. Western cities such as Milan, New York and Barcelona faltered; many still impose the use of masks. Multiple languages can be a barrier to communication. In Lusaka, Zambia, a nun and social servant named Sister Astridah Banda runs a live coVID-19 radio show in seven local languages to answer people’s questions.
Even the richest cities do not have medical services to deal with epidemics. Few giant hospitals are designed to isolate many other people with infectious diseases. For example, only 3 of Wuhan’s 90 hospitals were first designated as suitable for others with COVID-19; in April, 65 were. Mobile rooms and giant transit rooms were temporarily built to treat thousands more people.
Measures should be taken to minimize deaths from other acute or chronic causes. Hospitals that did not receive supplies to deal with the pandemic were reluctant to accept these patients for fear of infections or legal consequences. In response, Taipei in Taiwan has created hotlines where other quarantined people can call “disease prevention taxis” to take them to regimen treatment. Buenos Aires operates a WhatsApp chatbot called Boti to respond to public requests and refer instances to fitness professionals.
Technology is a combined blessing. Yes, social networks disseminate data, but they can also magnify the wrong data. Fact-checking sites and others were set up to combat it. For example, the messaging and social media app WeChat and the online weibo microblog page have established platforms that link hospitals, doctors, government and the media to provide reliable data and direct those who want them to services; Weibo widely used in Wuhan.
The Internet has allowed you to paint houses, learn online and buy groceries during closing. However, it also exacerbates inequality. Traders and bus drivers cannot paint from home. Many other people don’t have a smartphone or Internet access. For example, Indian migrant staff seeking to return home had to complete a confusing online bureaucracy in English, an unknown language.
Contact-seeking programmes have been shown to be effective in curbing the spread of the disease. The user’s increased user-friendly use makes it highly likely that other smart technologies will be implemented. China, which provides Americans with a QR barcode showing their threat based on travel and contact history, deploys generation to identify and measure other people’s temperatures in public places. Japan is approaching the generation of facial popularity for other people dressed in masks. These technologies take into account the violation and control of the state and companies over the rights of Americans.
COVID-19, like other diseases, disproportionately affects urban poor and some ethnic minority teams. In U.S. cities, infection and death rates are twice as high among others affected by poverty. Higher similar rates are observed in black or African-American communities and Hispanic or Latino communities, to those of white and Asian-American teams; Native and Alaska Native computers have hospitalization rates per COVID-19 five times higher than those of non-Hispanic white teams (see go.nature.com/37fffny and go.nature.com/349uvhd). In slums such as Dharavi in Mumbai, India, 67% of families have net toilets, soap and drinking water are scarce and physical distance is impossible. Unsurprisingly, until mid-July, 40-60% of other people living in Mumbai’s slums were infected. By contrast, the African cities of Kigali and Nairobi have established public hand-washing stations at bus stations and markets.
Migrant staff have been severely affected. Governments rarely take them into account when making plans and are invisible in censuses and surveys5. Singapore’s infections are highest among its migrant staff, many of whom live in narrow and unsanitary areas; unlike other citizens, they didn’t get a mask in the first place. In June, Germany witnessed an epidemic at a meat packing plant largely made up of eastern European migrant staff. In India, Africa and Latin America, millions of migrants have been excluded from aid during periods of blockade.
Ecology is overlooked in the planning of a pandemic. The extent of urban progression in the surrounding countryside exposes the population to disease. Some urban inhabitants who taste like wild meat may also be at increased risk of disease. In the United States, others living in the suburbs near forests are more likely to get Lyme disease, a tick-borne infection. Invasions of the African and Amazon rainforests are hot spots for diseases such as Ebola. The COVID-19 pandemic has also stoked fears about nature itself. Residents of the Indian city of Mysore, for example, were felling trees because they feared that bats would potentially transmit COVID-19.
Food supply chains have been damaged by the pandemic, resulting in higher prices, famines and the imaginable spread of the disease. For example, in June, Beijing experienced an outbreak of cases in a food market that handles frozen food imported from abroad. However, the pandemic has a greater interest of people in urban agriculture, which can build resilience to disasters. Half of Havana’s domain is operated through residents. Berlin is experiencing an increase in network growth. Grazing, fishing and the search for wild vegetables are widespread in Indian and African cities.
Our understanding of how city paintings also want to improve. Too many researchers still stick to the myths surrounding city life. For example, high-density urban life is erroneously attributed to high mortality rates in urban disasters. Let’s take New York and Hong Kong. These cities have similar populations (8.4 million and 7.4 million, respectively) and some of the largest residential densities in the world (New York, for example, has about 10,000 inhabitants depending on the square kilometer). However, New York City has recorded more than 220,000 cases and about 19,000 COVID-19 deaths, far more than the 3,398 cases shown and 33 deaths in Hong Kong (as of August 1, 2020). Density alone cannot explain such a radical difference.
Timely action is much more important. For example, Chinese cities show a correlation between the number of instances shown and the time required to limit mobility after the first case of COVID-19 (Pearson correlation 0.49, P
When urban and government leadership fails, communities and other organizations intervene. In Brazil, the G10 Favelas, a network of leaders in the nation’s ten largest casual settlements network, collects medical materials and donates donations to rent resident personal ambulances and fitness workers. By the end of June, more than 50,000 masks had been sewn in Sao Paulo’s largest slum, Paraisopolis.
In Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi, India, networks of philanthropists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies and Americans provide food and non-public protective devices to doctors and citizens of the city. They collect real-time maps of spaces that need help directing emergency help.
When Mumbai’s personal fitness formula collapsed the strain of COVID-19 infections, collaboration between the municipality and local economic personal conditioning practitioners limited the spread of the virus in the Dharavi slum.
Vietnamese cities have also forged links with local doctors and businesses. Less than a month after the first cases, local brands were generating COVID-19 control kits, allowing the number of control stations to increase from 3 in January to 112 at the end of April nationwide.
Links developed in past outbreaks have proven useful. Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is reallocating its infrastructure and body of workers trained to respond to Ebola outbreaks8. Seoul, South Korea, is applying the lessons learned from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in 2015, adding greater coordination, higher testing, and the use of generation for tactile search.
Links between cities are a source of strength. Many Chinese cities have won masks and protective devices from sister cities in South Korea, Japan and other countries. Once Chinese cities recovered, they returned aid (see “Helping each other”). People crossed borders for treatment, for example, between cities in Guangdong and Liaoning provinces in China and Italy to Germany.
The knowledge movement is also beneficial. In June, Beijing contained an epidemic by applying Wuhan’s lessons: quick disclosure of information, tracking the contacts of 365,000 others, and testing 2.95 million other people in 11 days from the first case shown. Risks have been assessed and measures have been adapted for Americans and neighborhoods to lock up the entire city. Vaccine and drug testing also requires coordination between cities.
We call on cities to expand the “resilience of the functional network” by sharing and coordinating crisis threat plans and actions. City groups, as well as urban-rural networks and other diverse networks that help others, will gain greater resilience than a city that operates alone. There is a transparent incentive: controlling one epicenter prevents spread to others. Stronger and deeper networks would also help combat other dangers, such as climate change.29 When a city is affected by major floods, heat waves or droughts, other cities can temporarily access the canals to provide assistance.
Geographical proximity is useful and governments demand that neighboring cities expand joint crisis-generating and threat-generating mechanisms. International coalitions of cities such as ICLEI (a global network of local governments committed to sustainable expansion), C40 (a coalition of the world’s mega-cities focused on combating climate change) and ‘sister cities’ inspire their members to do the same and extend beyond their limits. existing purpose of data exchange and learning10.11. The United Nations will have to play a leading role in the sale of such collaboration. The first step is the percentage of each other’s visions, strengths, and limitations. Then expand resource sharing mechanisms in the event of an emergency. The demanding situations are many. Establishments and governance structures will be very different. But collaborations between cities may also be less political, faster to react, and more pragmatic than those between countries.
Urban researchers want to look beyond unique variables and face the complexity of villages, as places where many points interact. More attention is to be paid to understanding the links between physical structure, urban processes, governance capacity and functional outcomes12. Researchers deserve to explore the most productive institutional and governance mechanisms to strengthen cross-city cooperation. These come with realistic mechanisms to distribute day-to-day work and to do some responsibility, that is, across national borders. Technology wants to evolve to integrate and percentage information. Neighboring cities can only a percentage of such platforms, for example, to allow the immediate resumption of travel and economic interactions and after this pandemic.
Cities have survived countless historical mistakes, from wars to famines. COVID-19 now shows that cities will also have to learn, adapt and evolve, together.
Nature 584, 517-520 (2020)
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