As an experienced healthcare professional with decades of experience, Nadia Kiderman has seen first-hand the natural value that medical care and science can provide. But emotional and mental health are equally important, and sometimes even more important than physical health.
In fact, many studies have borne out that one’s mental and emotional health are directly related to one’s physical health. It’s especially during frightening crises like the COVID-19 pandemic that it’s especially important for us to seek to inspire those that might be inclined to feel emotions and feelings of depression. Of course, there’s an array of different ways to do that.
One can inspire through music or through video content. For this, Youtube can be a very helpful and useful platform. Especially for those in elder-care facilities over the course of this pandemic it’s so important that music therapy be employed by staff to help reawaken the spirits within. Movies, film and even books can be of great value to help ignite a spark of excitement and illicit a potent reaction from an elder-care resident.
It’s important to also educate citizens in as many ways as possible, of honest and true information about this pandemic. Beyond the obvious dangers the COVID-19 pandemic poses, people across the globe need to be consistently updated on how the Coronavirus is continuing to develop, and whether there are any indications of a vaccine or other helpful drug that is on the way.
Through her website, Nadia has been consistently enlightening the public about the dangers that the pandemic closes. But moreover, she has been educating authors and thought-leaders in the blogosphere of critical information, news-items and source materials that need to be aggressively promoted to citizens worldwide.
In developed countries and in the West information is easily accessible not only on television, radio and print, but of course also in the digital universe. In fact, the accessibility of such information is surely something too many of us take for granted in western and developed countries. Unfortunately, when one looks beyond the West and into Africa by example, there is little to no information being shared in a constructive and responsible fashion with the public and people on the ground. This is deeply troubling. In some cases, this is because of the human rights violations taking place in the country; and the tight-grip and control the autocratic regimes exercise over the available media channels. For some strong-men it appears the Coronavirus has proven to be a source of great weakness spreading unpopularity among their people. For this reason, in their judgement it likely behooves them to downplay the severity of the crisis.
Of course, few things could possibly be more reckless and irresponsible than this. As a consequence, the actual number of cases in many of these countries has been severely downplayed and we will likely never discover the accurate statistical data showing how many documented or actual cases of Coronavirus there were in these countries. In some, we will not even be able to find out the number of fatalities. Besides for being tragic, this is something that there needs to be a louder outcry of to change. The World Health Organization should be applying pressure on these regimes to provide accurate information to their citizens and other international bodies should be doing everything they can to ensure that these autocrats feel a need to be in compliance with such humanitarian international standards.
As The Times of Israel has reported on, Israel is an excellent model for exactly how a government albeit in the Middle East, should be running an operation in the midst of such a pandemic. The healthcare system in the country has clearly shown that it was equipped and prepared to handle the fallout from this crisis. But beyond that, media channels have of course been open to citizens. The government has proceeded in a responsible manner to share information about the pandemic and has updated the citizenry accordingly as changes have been instituted in the way of policy prescriptions.
When this awful travesty of a pandemic comes to an end finally, it’s time for us to not only consider how to make the media’s role more accentuated in a proper fashion down the road; but also to ensure that governments that are autocratic in nature feel the need to comply with ethical and democratic norms to provide an environment that allows for lives to be saved, and others preserved.