Virus experts fear pope’s trip to raise infection risk in Iraq
VATICAN CITY — Infectious disease experts are expressing concern about Pope Francis’ upcoming trip to Iraq, given a sharp rise in coronavirus infections there, a fragile health care system and the unavoidable likelihood that Iraqis will crowd to see him.
No one wants to tell Francis to call it off, and the Iraqi government has every interest in showing off its relative stability by welcoming the first pope to the birthplace of Abraham.
The March 5-8 trip is expected to provide a spiritual boost to Iraq’s beleaguered Christians while furthering the Vatican’s bridge-building efforts with the Muslim world.
But from an epidemiological standpoint, as well as the public health message it sends, a papal trip to Iraq amid a pandemic is not advisable, health experts say.
Their concerns were reinforced with the news Sunday that the Vatican ambassador to Iraq, the main point person for the trip who would have escorted Francis to all his appointments, tested positive for COVID19 and was self-isolating.
In an email to The Associated Press, the embassy said Archbishop Mitja Leskovar’s symptoms were mild and that he was continuing to prepare for Francis’ visit.
Beyond his case, experts note that wars, economic crises and an exodus of Iraqi professionals have devastated the country’s hospital system, while studies show most of Iraq’s new COVID-19 infections are the variant first identified in Britain.
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Dr. Navid Madani, virologist and founding director of the Center for Science Health Education in the Middle East and North Africa at Harvard
Medical School’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The Iranian-born Madani co-authored an article in The Lancet last year on the region’s uneven response to COVID-19, noting that Iraq, Syria and Yemen were poorly placed to cope, given they are still struggling with extremist insurgencies and have 40 million people who need humanitarian aid.
In a telephone interview, Madani said Middle Easterners are known for their hospitality, and cautioned that the enthusiasm among Iraqis of welcoming Francis to a war-torn part of the world might lead to inadvertent violations of virus control measures.
“This could potentially lead to unsafe or superspreading risks,” she said.
Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious disease control expert at the University of Exeter College of Medicine, concurred.
“It’s a perfect storm for generating lots of cases,” he said.
Nearly 700,000 people in Iraq have been infected by the coronavirus with over 13,400 dying from COVID-19,
according to Johns Hopkins University
Organizers promise to enforce mask mandates, social distancing and crowd limits, as well as the possibility of increased testing sites, two Iraqi government officials said.
The Vatican has taken its own precautions, with the 84-year-old pope, his 20-member Vatican entourage and the 70-plus journalists on the papal plane all vaccinated.
But the Iraqis gathering to attend Francis’ Masses, hear his speeches and participate in his prayer meetings are not vaccinated.
And that, scientists say, is the problem.
Pankhania also questioned the optics of the Vatican delegation being inoculated while the Iraqis are not, and noted that Iraqis would only take such risks to go to those events because the pope was there.
In words addressed to Vatican officials and the media, he said: “If you get infected, you’re not going to die. But the people coming to see you may get infected and may die.”
Another negative consequence of America’s mass incarceration policies is being felt by correctional systems as the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus overwhelms crowded jails and prisons. Take the Chesapeake Detention Facility in Baltimore where one third of its inmates and staff contracted COVID in less than a month — as of Feb. 15, 169 inmates and 80 employees had tested positive. Concerned with the rapid spread of illness and the threat to people’s lives, attorneys have filed a class-action lawsuit against state officials on behalf of inmates for not taking the necessary precautions to keep the facility safe. Among the complaints: Inmates don’t have supplies to properly clean their cells, staff do not clean common areas frequently enough, and mask enforcement is inconsistent and often lax.
The crowded and tight quarters at correctional facilities create the perfect environment for spread of disease, which has never been more evident than during the current pandemic. Those conditions are rooted in a criminal justice system that has long focused on locking people up, giving the U.S. one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with 698 inmates per 100,000 people in the population. We also have the proud honor of being home to the largest total number of prisoners, around 2.1 million people, most of whom are Black or Latinx.
COVID has given more urgency to thinning out the jail and prison population, whether it be by freeing nonviolent offenders or elderly inmates who no longer pose a public safety threat; using home detention more frequently or setting more people free on their own recognizance, while awaiting trial or on reasonable cash bail amounts. The court system in Maryland has done some of that since the pandemic started, but not nearly enough. The same can be said about other parts of the country too.
More focus on release could have saved lives. Data from researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in JAMA in July, found that the number of U.S. prison residents who tested positive for COVID-19 was 5.5 times higher than the general U.S. population. After adjusting for age and sex, the death rate would be three times higher for prisoners.
Reducing the number of people incarcerated before they get COVID also could stop the spread in the community. Inmates can take the virus back to their families and neighborhoods once released. Researchers from Harvard and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris examined jailing practices and the impact of COVID transmission at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and found that “jail-community cycling far exceeds race, poverty, public transit use, and population density as a predictor of variance.” Cycling people through Cook County Jail alone was associated with 15.7% of all documented COVID-19 cases in Illinois and 15.9% of all documented cases in Chicago as of last April, according to the research published in Health Matters.
In Baltimore, state officials aren’t commenting on the lawsuit, filed by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner law firm, nor what caused the COVID spread, other than to say the jail followed state health procedures.
The group wants a court order for an independent expert to inspect the facility, for inmates to be given hand soap and paper towels and for common areas to be cleaned several times a day. They also want some inmates with underlying health conditions who are vulnerable to the coronavirus to be released or transferred to another facility. These are all reasonable requests in the interest of public health and given the high number of cases at the facility. The state needs to better protect inmates and correctional officers, which also keep the community safer.
What is happening in Baltimore shows the larger problem with mass incarceration, and we can only hope the country becomes less reliant on putting people behind bars long after the pandemic is over. The COVID consequences are just one of the collateral consequences that don’t need to exist.