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Take action and carry out a random act of kindness for someone else.

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Samples of coronavirus found in Barcelona, March 2019

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Samples of coronavirus found in Barcelona, March 2019

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Abstract

SARS-CoV-2 was detected in Barcelona sewage long before the declaration of the first COVID-19 case, indicating that the infection was present in the population before the first imported case was reported. Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater would enable adoption of immediate measures in the event of future COVID-19 waves.

Article Summary Line SARS-CoV-2 genomes occur in sewage long before the declaration of COVID-19 cases among the population.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Funding Statement

This research was supported in part by the REVEAL project, funded by SUEZ Spain.

Author Declarations

I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.

Yes

The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

Not Applicable

All necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived.

Yes

I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).

Yes

I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable.

Yes

Data Availability

All raw data will be provided upon request

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Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater anticipates the occurrence of COVID-19 cases

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SARS-CoV-2 was detected in Barcelona sewage long before the declaration of the first COVID-19 case, indicating that the infection was present in the population before the first imported case was reported. Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater would enable adoption of immediate measures in the event of future COVID-19 waves.

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Once upon a time, about six weeks ago, more than 50 members of our Cleveland neighborhood left the warmth of our homes on a snowy weeknight to gather for a conversation about race.

We live in the largest development built in the city of Cleveland since World War II, with 222 homes. We call it an "intentional" community in this deeply divided city. It is economically and racially diverse, and includes a number of LGBTQ families. We are white, black and Latino. We are working parents, empty nesters and retirees.

We live in modest, well-tended homes. Our yards are small, and we have lots of front porches and stoops. This is by design. We are meant to be neighbors, not side-by-side strangers. An evening walk on summer nights easily involves a dozen hellos and a few spontaneous conversations.

On this night in February, though, we had gathered to discuss what many of us wanted to believe could never happen here, even as some had always assumed it would. One exchange had led to another, and then another after that, and it was becoming clear that even in our beloved community of good intentions, racial tensions were bubbling up. Many white residents had been unaware, which was part of the problem. My friend the Rev. Kate Matthews, who is white and served on the board of our homeowners' association, decided to do something about it.

Kate had recently read psychologist Deborah L. Plummer's book Some of My Friends Are ... about "the daunting challenges and untapped benefit of cross-racial friendships." As Kate explained it to me, it had increasingly bothered her that despite the number of African Americans in her orbit, none of them were her close friends.

Through her work on the board, Kate had grown close to several black residents. Her conversations with them led her to reach out to Plummer, who had recently moved back to Cleveland. Would she be willing to lead us in a conversation on what it means to be a healthy, diverse community?

Plummer agreed. Kate and a team of volunteers peppered the neighborhood with flyers. Nearly 60-half of us black, half white-showed up.

For two hours, we explored the difference between "fellowship friends"-those people we know in social or professional settings-and "friends of the heart," who are the ones who know our secrets and love us anyway. We talked about racism, a lot. We asked questions of one another and listened to the answers. Some of us winced. Others nodded in the universal language of "It's about time."

At the end of the discussion, as the snow continued to fall, we wrote notes to ourselves about what we planned to do to build relationships in our community. We sealed them in self-addressed envelopes, and Plummer promised to mail them to us in a few months. Seeing your own handwriting on an envelope addressed to you has a way of jolting one into accountability, I suspect.

We took our time leaving the meeting that night, lingering in our collective sigh of relief. We had more work to do, and we knew it. But we had a plan.

"We can start by being kinder," a woman behind me said as we walked out the door. "Who doesn't need kindness?"

Like most Americans, we had no idea what was coming.

Sometimes it seems the coronavirus has sidelined everything but the will to live. We are engaged in " social distancing," which is meant to protect us but sounds like the language of suburban developments with big lawns and guard booths at the gate. Grocery shopping has become the 2020 version of food rationing. We never know what will be available from one day to the next. Some are hoarding, and those empty shelves challenge our faith in our fellow humans.

Early in March, our church abandoned the handshake during the passing of peace at Sunday worship. Some opted for elbow bumps, but I liked placing my hand over my heart and making eye contact, maybe leaning in a little. A moot point now, as our church, like so many other houses of worship, has suspended all gatherings. This is meant to keep us safe, of course. The mischief in me would like to discuss what it says about our faith in God, and in one another, to believe we're better off apart. But then I think about how I always tell my husband, "Don't die stupid," after I find out he was talking on his cell phone while crossing a busy street. There's only so much we can ask of God.

As always in this country, some are suffering more than others. The elderly and the sick are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, but so are those who were at an economic and social disadvantage before this crisis started. When we pull out of our community, we don't have to drive even a half mile in any direction to see the continued blight of urban neighborhoods that never recovered from the soaring rate of foreclosures in 2007. Every part of life is harsher when you live in poverty, including the judgment of those who see you as an embarrassing footnote in the fabled tale of downtown development and renewal.

Racial and economic inequality, voter suppression and foreign interference with our elections-it was all so overwhelming before the threat of this virus became all-consuming. The racial tensions we were hoping to address in our community are magnified tenfold by a President who daily insists on giving COVID-19 a racist name, which I wish my colleagues would stop repeating because it is potentially endangering the lives of Asian Americans. Trump has repeatedly made clear that he doesn't care.

In our neighborhood, though, something is happening. We have shifted the topic but not the intention. Neighbors are checking in with one another more than we used to. We're sharing more phone numbers and coordinating tag-team trips to the grocery and pharmacy. Far more of us, it seems, are taking walks throughout the day. We are yearning for the connection, even if six feet away.

One neighbor, recently widowed, is circulating flyers offering to run errands and asking for donations for a nearby neighborhood in need. Her list included diapers and feminine-hygiene products, and so I've just walked around the house gathering up the supplies we keep here for the daughters in our family, and our youngest grandchildren. They won't be visiting soon, their parents insist, because they want to protect us. All those years of promising my children they would never have to worry about strong, mighty me, and here we are.

It is my habit to turn to poetry in times of stress. Today I picked up my copy of Mark Nepo's Surviving Has Made Me Crazy. His poem "In the Other Kind of Time" reminds me of what our community, what every community, should be trying to do in this moment, in this time.
Come with me out of the cold
We can throw them to the earth
or place them in the earth, and ask,
why these patterns in the first place?
If you want, we can repair them, if
they still seem true. Or we can
sing as they burn. where we can put down the
notions we've been carrying
like torn flags into battle
This is our truth: we've always needed one another. This is our bigger truth: we're starting to act like it.

That conversation about race in our community would be put on hold only with our consent, and it appears we've collectively made a decision: permission denied. We are setting fire to that reckless disregard for our potential.

The porches and front stoops are living up to their promise. We wave hello and talk across our tiny yards. The questions rise like songs: "How are you holding up?" "What do you need?" "How can I help?" The chorus is always the same: I see you.

Contact us at letters@time.com.

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We've Always Needed One Another. Amid the Coronavirus Outbreak, We're Starting to Act Like It

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Once upon a time, about six weeks ago, more than 50 members of our Cleveland neighborhood left the warmth of our homes on a snowy weeknight to gather for a conversation about race. We live in the largest development built in the city of Cleveland since World War II, with 222 homes.

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We began planning this special issue of TIME before any of us had heard the phrase flatten the curve, much less contemplated our own roles in the flattening. Its theme-getting out of silos and coming together as communities-is one we've been thinking about a lot here over the past few years. The world we cover is increasingly tribal and polarized-some studies suggest that empathy itself is in decline-and yet so many of the challenges we face require us to act together. And none more so than this pandemic that is testing our collective strength even in isolation. What does it take to get us to see beyond ourselves, beyond our divisions, and look out for one another?

I started as TIME's editor in 2017, right after a one-two punch of tragedy in the news: the violent protests by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., that killed a 32-year-old woman and injured many more, followed 13 days later by the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. Our cover the week of Charlottesville was Hate in America. By contrast, in the issue after Harvey, a moving column by my colleague Susanna Schrobsdorff-inspired by the extraordinary scenes of human chains, of strangers risking their lives to help strangers, of dogs, horses and hawks being pulled out of the floods-told a different story about the character and potential of our communities.

"Over and over, you hear people being reassured as they are supported by the arms of strangers. 'We've got you ... I've got you ... You're O.K.,'" she wrote. "Even those of us who live far from Houston have been jolted out of our silos."
Want to help? Here's a list of organizations and fundraisers accepting donations for health care workers, food banks and people who are unemployed because of COVID-19.
That is the epic test of character that we face now. Apart. Not Alone, a special issue overseen by Lori Fradkin, is devoted to stories of and by people who are forcing us out of our corners as we focus on a shared threat that is suddenly connecting the entire world. Some are doing it by throwing themselves into the fray as first responders-the courageous medical workers isolating themselves from their own families as they treat patients with the virus, the bus drivers delivering meals to kids in need whose schools have closed, and the leaders from businesses and nonprofit organizations, like the subject of this issue's cover profile, José Andrés, with whom TIME's Sean Gregory spent weeks traveling from one crisis to the next, only to find Andrés on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak as this issue headed to press.

Our government must do much more to support the frontline responders. But we all have a role to play as billions of people now are, by staying at home, often despite extreme hardship. It's hard to fathom another moment when so many of us will find ourselves so dependent on the goodwill of strangers.

We are apart, but we are not alone.

"We wave hello and talk across our tiny yards," the journalist and novelist Connie Schultz writes of her neighborhood in Cleveland. "The questions rise like songs: 'How are you holding up?' 'What do you need?' 'How can I help?' The chorus is always the same: I see you."

We don't know when this storm will pass. But we do know how to help.

"Without empathy," Andrés tells us, "nothing works."
Want to help? Here's a list of organizations and fundraisers accepting donations for health care workers, food banks and people who are unemployed because of COVID-19.

Contact us at letters@time.com.

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We began planning this special issue of TIME before any of us had heard the phrase flatten the curve, much less contemplated our own roles in the flattening. Its theme-getting out of silos and coming together as communities-is one we've been thinking about a lot here over the past few years.

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Full coverage at CTVNews.ca/Coronavirus

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Canadian hospitals take drastic measures amid COVID-19 crisis

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'Really heartening': Canadians coming together during COVID-19 pandemic

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Full coverage at CTVNews.ca/Coronavirus Canada and U.S. poised to restrict tourists, visitors from crossing border Tracking every case of COVID-19 in Canada Doctors map body's COVID-19 immune response: study 'We're effectively hostages': Canadians stranded in Morocco due to COVID-19 flight ban Met Gala postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak Major economic package coming, Trudeau mulls taking new emergency steps Virus hits tourism on Ecuador's iconic Galapagos islands Facebook bug wrongly deleted authentic coronavirus news People with compromised immune systems are living in fear of COVID-19 Travelling back from Florida?

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On a walk during the 1985 Geneva Summit, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan asked Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev whether the Soviet Union would help the United States if it were attacked by aliens from outer space. Gorbachev, while puzzled, agreed that it would, possibly warming up the Cold War a little. Stories like this about adversaries uniting to defeat a shared enemy have endless appeal.

We relate to these stories because they remind us of familiar subplots in which hatchets are buried, old friends reunite, and together, they defeat a shared enemy against all odds. In this case, research confirms our intuition. Since Sherif's ground-breaking research over 60 years ago, many studies have shown that, in the face of a common enemy, even entire adversarial groups start to like each other more. My colleagues and I wanted to examine why this happens.

Our research showed that uniting against a common enemy changes the way people perceive similarity across racial and gender divides. Specifically, uniting against a common enemy causes profound changes in the degree to which we categorize other people as "us" or "them."

To study this phenomenon, participants in our experiments saw several speakers' faces or names along with statements they made. The discussions were either about neutral topics like daily life or about a common threat like terrorism or disease. The speakers clearly belonged to one of two categories. In some studies, they were either Black or White, in some they were male or female, and in one study they were Jewish or Arabic. Then, participants were asked to remember who said each statement.

We were interested in the kinds of mistakes people made in identifying who made each statement. For example, if one of the Arabic speakers said something, and participants couldn't remember exactly who said it, would they be more likely to guess that it was one of the other Arab speakers or a Jewish speaker? If they thought it was another Arab speaker, that would suggest that they were categorizing speakers on the basis of being Arab versus Jewish.

Participants made fewer mistakes based on skin color and gender when the speakers were discussing a common enemy. In other words, when presented with a common enemy, participants were less likely to see people as Black or White or as Women or Men but maybe just as all human. This effect occurred even for Israeli Jewish and Arab participants who were discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: having a common enemy led them to categorize one another less. In short, people categorize others less into groups when they are threatened by a common enemy.

The effect occurred in the absence of many of the conditions that research suggests are needed to break down boundaries between in-groups versus out-groups. For example, the speakers did not have to like each other, have a common goal, or even cooperate toward working towards this goal. Moreover, it occurred even when people were not directly threatened by the common enemy.

So, what can we conclude from our research? When people share a common enemy, we don't just unite on the surface to face the threat. Sharing a common enemy also changes how people see one another in profound and important ways.
For Further Reading
Flade, F., Klar, Y., & Imhoff, R. (2019). Unite against: A common threat invokes spontaneous decategorization between social categories. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 85, 103890.

Sherif, M. (1958). Superordinate goals in the reduction of intergroup conflict. American Journal of Sociology, 63(4), 349-356.

Felicitas Flade is a social psychologist at the University of Mainz, Germany who studies how social groups come to be, persist, and influence our thinking.

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My Enemy's Enemy is My Friend-Common Enemies Blur Lines between Groups in Conflict | SPSP

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On a walk during the 1985 Geneva Summit, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan asked Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev whether the Soviet Union would help the United States if it were attacked by aliens from outer space. Gorbachev, while puzzled, agreed that it would, possibly warming up the Cold War a little.

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You know folks, the things I've witnessed over the last sixty-seven years of my life seem to foretell a somewhat dystopian future for all of us.

We've suffered wars, genocide, racial and gender bias, hatred, and persecution, mass murders of our children, rioting, and this latest scourge, pestilence, which in the US alone has killed over 100,000 people.

With things around us rapidly disintegrating before our very eyes, we, the Human race, must quickly realize we're the only ones who can save ourselves.

And if that is indeed the case, then I, for one, believe we may be doomed. If not doomed into extinction at least doomed to spend whatever time Human beings have left on this earth warring, killing each other, persecuting each other, and filling our lives with hatred.

Because you see, hatred seems to be the only base human emotion that appears to effectively motivate a lot of folks into taking unreasonable actions against their fellow humans.

Case in point. I'm going to take a step back, way back to before my time when the USS Maine blew up in 1889. To this day, the jury is still out on whether or not the USS Maine was attacked or suffered an accidental explosion.

At the time it didn't matter one bit.

How do you whip up national fervor and promote a unified front of people willing to go to war? How do you provide American opinion a common foe to hate? You allow American yellow journalists to portray the Spanish as evil. You let these journalists fill American minds with details of Spanish cruelties dispatched against the downtrodden citizens of Cuba.

You teach the American citizens to unify their hatred against the Spanish, and you have the entirety of America willing to go to war seeking revenge for lost brothers.
Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!
What was American sentiment during WWI and WWII? Did the Americans love the German people at the time or was the entire country anti-fascist and anti-nazi? My grandparents used to tell me how much they and everyone else they knew hated the Nazis and the Germans and what they stood for.

Again, America united against a common foe by hatred.

After Pearl Harbor, there wasn't a single American who professed forgiveness and love toward the Japanese. This unified hatred was so intense even Japanese American citizens were rounded up and placed in internment camps on American soil.

This hatred, cleverly wrapped up in disguised blankets of saving millions of American lives caused two detonations of nuclear weapons for the first and only times in the history of the Human race.

Hatred against a common foe. In war, some may call it patriotism, for there have been many true patriots who have died in conflicts throughout the centuries. But what I speak of is the general feeling of the noncombatants, who saw their sons and daughters come home in caskets with the American flag draped over it. And those whose children never came home.

They harbored a trace of bitterness and hatred for the offending race of people they attributed to their children's death until the day they themselves died.

What's going on today is the same kind of subdued hatred from either closet or blatantly outspoken white supremacists and Nazis who are counting on this nation's inability to unite against a common foe.

Them.

Now, more than ever, this nation needs to stop hating and come together to fight the true enemy, the enemy tearing our country apart at the seams. It doesn't matter what color you are, what your religious beliefs are, what your national creed once was, or your immigrant status. What matters is that you're here now in what was once the greatest nation in the world.

You're here and you can either make a choice to hate each other and perish as the real enemy sits patiently while we weaken ourselves to the point they can easily take over.

Or you can choose to stand together, unite in peace, and eradicate this cancerous growth.

No war like this will be over in minutes or hours. The damage we Humans have caused by our hatred of each other is enormous and spans several generations. But today is a great day to start. Today is a great day to stand side by side in a united front and say, "no more." No more will we allow hatred to tear us apart. Now more than ever, Humans need to stand together in unity.

If we continue in the direction we're headed, we may never be allowed the opportunity to do so.

Let's keep in touch: paul@pgbarnett.com
© P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.

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You know folks, the things I've witnessed over the last sixty-seven years of my life seem to foretell a somewhat dystopian future for all of us. We've suffered wars, genocide, racial and gender bias, hatred, and persecution, mass murders of our children, rioting, and this latest scourge, pestilence, which in the US alone has killed over 100,000 people.

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CBC News · Posted: Mar 16, 2020 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: March 16, 2020

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How Canadians are helping each other amid the COVID-19 outbreak | CBC News

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As governments across the world respond to the spread of the novel coronavirus, individuals have reacted with solidarity, offering support to neighbours within communities and across the country.

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Il est pile 18 heures lorsqu'une mosaïque de visages inconnus surgit sur l'écran de l'ordinateur. Sur l'application de visioconférence Zoom, on entrevoit des bouts de canapé, un cadre de lit, des bibliothèques. Marie est chez ses parents à Volvic (Puy-de-Dôme), Justine dans le 10 e arrondissement de Paris, d'autres sont à Rennes, Nantes, Marseille... " Merci d'être là ! ", s'exclame Lauren Miller, 27 ans, animatrice de cette réunion de 50 futurs bénévoles organisée par l'association Makesense.

Nos vies confinées en direct : vous vivez le confinement à l'étranger, racontez-nous

" En attendant que tout le monde se connecte, qui veut partager une recette de cuisine ? ", tente Lauren. Passé les pommes au four, Virginie, l'une des participantes, active son micro : " Pour moi, être dans l'action, c'est un moteur pour supporter le confinement. Mais je ne me voyais pas me lancer seule. " La majorité du bataillon a entre 20 et 40 ans, beaucoup n'ont jamais été bénévoles avant le confinement. Makesense s'adresse particulièrement à eux, et se présente comme une rampe de lancement vers l'engagement, version start-up. " Si vous êtes ici, c'est que vous voulez aider. Même à votre échelle, même si vous n'aidez qu'une seule personne, vous pouvez avoir un impact ", débite Lauren.

Ici, tout est balisé : les bénévoles intègrent un " programme " de cinq jours, à base de mails de formation quotidiens et d'actions à réaliser, d'échanges sur des boucles WhatsApp en " team " de quinze, sous la houlette d'un ou d'une " super-mobilisatrice ". Goli Moussavi, directrice de La Cloche, une association d'aide aux SDF partenaire du programme de Makesense, se lance dans un mini-exposé sur les difficultés de sans-abri en temps de confinement. Cette semaine, l'objectif de l'une des " promos " sera de constituer des kits de produits d'hygiène pour ces personnes, en sollicitant notamment des pharmacies pour des dons en nature - ceux-ci seront ensuite distribués par des associations spécialisées dans l'aide aux SDF.

Article réservé à nos abonnés Lire aussi Coronavirus : la tension devient forte dans certains centres d'hébergement d'urgence à cause du confinement

" Une nouvelle catégorie d'actifs qui nous rejoignent "

Des réunions de lancement de ce type, Makesense en organise tous les lundis depuis le 23 mars. Avec un effet boule de neige. Ils étaient 45 bénévoles la première semaine. Lundi 13 avril, le programme comptait 450 nouveaux participants, répartis en groupes : l'aide aux soignants, aux SDF, aux personnes âgées... Un emballement qui témoigne de ce que bon nombre d'observateurs constatent : depuis un mois, le confinement a suscité un puissant élan de solidarité, notamment chez des personnes qui ne s'étaient jamais engagées.
Il vous reste 77.86% de cet article à lire. La suite est réservée aux abonnés.

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" Jamais on n'avait vu un tel engagement " : le confinement provoque un élan de solidarité

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Hausse des bénévoles dans les associations, mobilisation individuelle ou collective pour aider un voisin à faire ses courses ou fabriquer des masques de protection : cette crise, comme d'autres avant elle, a suscité une " insurrection de la bonté ". Récit.

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Comment contribuer dans le mouvement positif

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Comment contribuer dans le mouvement positif

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Au Québec, comme ailleurs, la pandémie de la Covid-19 provoque un état d'urgence sans précédent. Fait rassurant : nous observons une multiplication des gestes de solidarité, et d'entraide représentant une réponse collective à la hauteur des défis posés par l'apparition du coronavirus.

La robustesse et la résilience de la philanthropie face à des enjeux internationaux de grande ampleur sont un phénomène que nous avions déjà évoqué en janvier dernier lors des feux australiens.

Read more: L'argent ne sauvera pas la planète, la philanthropie doit s'adapter

La population, les entreprises, les organisations et les institutions, tant canadiennes que québécoises, se sont rapidement mobilisées devant la menace posée par la Covid-19. Parmi elles se trouvent des organismes de bienfaisance, qui regroupent des œuvres de charité ainsi que des fondations subventionnaires publiques, privées et communautaires.

Notre groupe de recherche s'intéresse aux actions du secteur philanthropique en réponse à l'enjeu des inégalités sociales et des défis environnementaux. Nous sommes d'avis que pour bien répondre à la crise, les organismes de bienfaisance peuvent regrouper leurs actions autour de quatre stratégies :

1. Adapter les modalités d'intervention

Le principal effet de la crise du coronavirus est de nous contraindre au confinement afin de générer de la distanciation sociale. Toutefois, les besoins d'aide aux personnes ne sont pas disparus et de nouveaux besoins sont apparus.

Pendant la Covid-19, il est essentiel de maintenir les services aux personnes les plus vulnérables. Différentes actions sont requises, telles le renouvellement des banques de bénévoles, pour mobiliser des personnes de moins de 60 ans ou encore l'adoption de nouvelles façons de venir en aide aux personnes isolées, dont les sans-abri ou les " sans chèque ", car non éligibles aux différentes mesures de sécurité sociale.

LA PRESSE CANADIENNE/Graham Hughes

Nous observons une mouvance importante d'adaptation dans les façons de donner du temps, de l'argent ou d'offrir à la population différents services. Les exemples sont nombreux et se multiplient de jour en jour. Pensons à la formation de groupes d'entraide à l'échelle des quartiers grâce à des plates-formes virtuelles, ou à l'utilisation du sociofinancement pour mobiliser les dons en argent.

Des fondations canadiennes se regroupent également pour mettre en commun leurs ressources financières afin de venir en aide directement à des organismes de bienfaisance ou communautaires. Des fonds d'urgence sont aussi mis en place par des organisations philanthropiques pour intervenir rapidement auprès des populations les plus vulnérables. À cela s'ajoute l'appel du premier ministre, François Legault, qui a demandé aux travailleurs mis à pied de faire du bénévolat pour pallier les besoins des organismes communautaires.

Enfin, l'action adaptative revêt aussi une dimension cognitive. Les organisations philanthropiques doivent avoir accès à une information crédible et à des données fiables pour pouvoir départager le vrai du faux et ainsi prendre des décisions éclairées. Pour ce faire, il faut compter sur des médias robustes et sur un bon niveau de communication avec les milieux scientifiques. Une bonne information est non seulement une information juste et crédible, mais aussi une information qui jette un regard critique sur la réalité.

2. Faire sa juste part dans l'effort global

Au plan international, des actions d'envergure sont actuellement posées. D'abord l'alliance entre la Fondation des Nations unies, la Swiss Philanthropy Foundation et l'Organisation mondiale de la Santé (OMS) afin de mettre sur pied le Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund le 13 mars dernier.

L'objectif de ce fonds est de recueillir les dons en argent de la part d'individus, d'entreprises et d'institutions à travers le monde afin de soutenir le travail de l'OMS, qui intervient de manière globale pour lutter contre la propagation du virus.

Selon les données en date du 28 mars, le Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund avait recueilli un peu plus de 112 millions de dollars auprès de 205 000 donateurs individuels et corporatifs. L'ONU a aussi lancé le " Plan de réponse humanitaire " qui vise à amasser 2 milliards de dollars. Des instruments financiers deviennent ainsi disponibles pour soutenir le travail de grandes organisations à l'échelle internationale.

3. Préparer la sortie de crise

Il faut prévoir l'après Covid-19 en tenant compte des inégalités sociales.

Rappelons que la pandémie a des impacts différents d'un groupe à l'autre. À ce sujet, l'Observatoire québécois sur les inégalités a produit une analyse très éclairante qui explique comment certains groupes sociodémographiques sont particulièrement affectés par la crise. Ainsi, nous sommes tous concernés en ce moment, mais nous ne le sommes pas de la même façon.

Read more: Covid-19: quatre actions à prendre dès maintenant pour protéger les enfants vulnérables

Pendant que des personnes bénéficient de conditions favorables, ont un revenu garanti et peuvent faire du télétravail, d'autres personnes, moins privilégiées, sont au front : les travailleurs des services essentiels, dont les " anges gardiens ", qui œuvrent pour le bien commun. Or, le risque sanitaire n'est pas le même pour les concierges, les professionnels de la santé, les commis ou les chauffeurs de bus que pour les gestionnaires ou les universitaires - dont nous sommes - qui peuvent accomplir leurs tâches à domicile.

Certes, il importe de reconnaître l'importance de leur travail actuellement, mais cette reconnaissance symbolique devra se traduire de façon tangible par des améliorations de leurs conditions de travail.

La crise actuelle soulève des enjeux en matière de justice sociale puisque les dynamiques inégalitaires déjà présentes au sein de la société se font sentir avec plus d'acuité. Cette réalité est à garder en mémoire. Elle interpelle l'écosystème philanthropique sur les actions à poser pour trouver des façons novatrices de s'attaquer aux injustices sociales.

4. Soutenir une économie locale et durable

Le présent temps d'arrêt est l'occasion de réfléchir à la grande fragilité de notre système économique, qui repose sur le libre marché et l'interdépendance généralisée des économies nationales.

Dès lors, l'idée d'un " retour à la normale " ne devrait pas constituer notre vision de l'avenir. Nous observons aujourd'hui la grande fragilité induite par l'hyperconnectivité des sociétés. En plus d'avoir favorisé une propagation extrêmement rapide du virus sur tous les continents, celle-ci menace les chaînes d'approvisionnement et nous rappelle les bienfaits d'avoir une économie locale en santé.

Sur ce point, les fondations subventionnaires peuvent agir grâce à des stratégies d'investissement d'impact et de finance solidaire pour assurer la viabilité des entreprises locales qui offrent des services essentiels aux communautés.

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Covid-19 : comment aider en temps de crise ou le grand défi de la philanthropie

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Au Québec, comme ailleurs, la pandémie de la Covid-19 provoque un état d'urgence sans précédent. Fait rassurant : nous observons une multiplication des gestes de solidarité, et d'entraide représentant une réponse collective à la hauteur des défis posés par l'apparition du coronavirus.