Agriculture has a major role to play in the building of a nation’s economical background and foundation. Many western and developed countries take agriculture as a major priority when establishing their yearly budgets for their various nation. Its sector is next to none as long as life is a concern. It has a major role to play in economic growth.
Agriculture as a sector can employ almost all fields and disciplines of studies as it is not limited to Agriculturist alone. This again is another factor that adds up to the economical development of a country. Nonetheless, in countries like Africa, especially Nigeria, Agriculture is paid less attention to. It is also restricted to farming due to the lack of information and awareness it has been given or brought out.
In the western world, one of the cheapest commodities is food items and they are mostly sold in cents (coins). With this, food is no longer an issue to them and this is prices regulated by the government as well. Also, such countries encourage agricultural investment and also give scholarship opportunities to those who need them.
Various courses in Agriculture cut across engineering, management science, Environmental Science, and medicine. This again is to show the relativity of Agriculture to other courses. For example, we have courses like Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural Economics, Soil science, Veterinary Medicine, and many others.
However, for this article, we will be discussing the role of agriculture in building the economy of a country.
1. Exportation of its Product
Agriculture can boost a country’s economy through the exportation of its produces. This will boost the economy of any country especially when a product which is available to particular weather and soil are exported to a country when they don’t have such.
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2. Improving Free Cash Flow
Once, there are enough agricultural produces, buying and selling becomes easier and thus bringing about the free flow of cash, than when it is only produced in a particular area and by one person or a company.
3. Increase Job Availability
When a country has good agricultural industries unemployment will become a thing of the past because the more industries and companies venture into agricultural produces, the more people will be employed.
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4. Revenue Generation
Agriculture can become a major revenue generation to a country or as another form of it. Using the case of Nigeria that solely depend on oil, if agriculture is attached to it, it becomes another source of revenue generation, and in case of an oil price drop, agriculture becomes the major one.
These are the role agriculture plays in building the economy of a country. Kindly leave feedback on this and follow for more updates.
Britain has offered to vaccinate 20 percent of Zimbabwe’s population against the COVID-19 pandemic, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported on Thursday.
The 20 percent will cover the most vulnerable three million people in the country.
UK’s ambassador to Zimbabwe Melaine Robinson made the commitment when she met Vice President and Health Minister Constantino Chiwenga on Wednesday.
“We discussed COVID-19 and particularly vaccines. The UK has been a leading country in the world putting the Covax together. We have put over 700 million U.S. dollars into making sure that the lower-middle-income countries can vaccinate their most vulnerable populations,” she said.
She said Zimbabwe was on track to become one of the countries that would benefit from the vaccine, adding that distribution would start when the right immunity against COVID-19 is available.
Chiwenga said Zimbabwe will prioritize vaccination of frontline health care workers and other critical groups like the elderly.
“Once we have accepted the 20 percent which is being offered, we also look at our own resources to ensure the rest of the population are covered,” he said.
As of Wednesday, Zimbabwe had registered 12, 656 COVID-19 cases, 10, 259 recoveries and 330 deaths.
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For a brief moment in October, it seemed that youthful protesters calling to “abolish” a police force had succeeded. After weeks of mass demonstrations against police brutality, the government agreed to disband a widely hated police unit.
This was in Nigeria, not the United States. But the lessons from Nigeria have broad relevance for protesters elsewhere calling for major reforms to policing.
In Nigeria, it took just three weeks of mass demonstrations for President Muhammadu Buhari to announce he would eliminate the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, or SARS, the most reviled segment of the national Nigerian Police Force.
SARS officers were infamous for demanding bribes at checkpoints and for violent confrontations with civilians that could end in death. Though heavily armed, SARS officers seldom wore uniforms. Many Nigerians struggled to distinguish the police from the criminals they ostensibly pursued.
Buhari explained his decision to dissolve SARS by stating his “commitment to extensive police reforms… to ensure that the primary duty of the police and other law enforcement agencies remains the protection of lives.”
In my research on the history of law enforcement in Nigeria, I’ve documented how durable its police institutions are, and how resistant to fundamental change.
The Nigeria Police Force dates back to British colonialism, which lasted until 1960. It is notoriously ineffective, and since it is a federal agency its officers are usually not local to the places they patrol. Officers are poorly paid, which leads them to demand bribes and encourages other forms of corruption. A lack of oversight means that police who abuse their power are seldom punished.
The Special Anti-Robbery Squad – the target of protesters’ recent ire – is a federal police force created during Nigeria’s long military dictatorship.
Military rule in Nigeria lasted from 1966 to 1999 with two brief interruptions, punctuated by the Nigerian Civil War from 1967 to 1970. After the war, economic volatility and a glut of leftover firearms contributed to a spike in property crime.
Nigeria’s military rulers responded to a national crisis of armed robbery by imposing martial law and making robbery a capital offense. SARS was established in 1992 as part of one such crackdown. But it endured after Nigeria returned to a civilian-led democracy in 1999.
Other law enforcement tools the military had used, like tribunals, continued after dictatorship, too, as did colonial-era punishments like corporal punishment by police.
#EndSARS
The mandate of SARS went beyond patrolling and investigating. It also made judgments about guilt and meted out punishment, just as policemen and soldiers had done during military rule. That punishment could entail torture, and even death, which human rights groups documented.
SARS officers also tormented Nigerians with more mundane harassment. They set up checkpoints to search cars and phones for “evidence” that they then used to demand bribes.
SARS officers patrol a polling station in Kano, in northern Nigeria, during Nigeria’s 2019 presidential election. Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images
#EndSARS built on a long history of discontent with the Nigerian police. While the movement in some ways recalled Black Lives Matter in the United States – which issued a statement in support of #EndSARS – age rather than race was at its center. Its leaders argued that, as young people in a state run by elderly ex-soldiers, they were vulnerable to police harassment.
“Soro soke werey” – a slang phrase roughly meaning, “speak up, madman” – was one of its slogans, an indictment of past generations for having tolerated police violence.
#EndSWAT
Two days after President Buhari agreed to disband SARS, celebration turned to disillusionment.
On Oct. 14, the Nigerian Police Force unveiled a new police squad, the Special Weapons and Tactics Team, or SWAT. The police promised SWAT would be “strictly intelligence-driven,” and that “no personnel from the defunct SARS will be selected to be part of the new tactical team.”
Activists suspected SWAT was a new label for an old institution, not a meaningful reform. Rather than clearing the streets, protests grew, in Nigeria and abroad. #EndSARS became #EndSWAT. On Oct. 20, soldiers opened fire at an #EndSWAT protest in Lagos, killing at least 48.
Six police officers have been killed on the job since the #EndSARS movement concluded, and the Lagos State government has compensated their families. Nothing has been paid to the families of the protesters who died. The Lagos State government opened a judicial commission of inquiry to investigate the Oct. 20 killings, but such inquiries, which are merely advisory, have come to little in the past.
Nigeria’s government has begun punishing the young organizers of #EndSARS, including by freezing their bank accounts and revoking their passports. This, too, has echoes in the past. Financial penalties were imposed on the losing side of the Nigerian Civil War in the early 1970s, and military regimes regularly prevented their critics from leaving the country.
As Americans end one year and begin another, one of the most controversial topics of conversation will be the presidential election.
We experienced the election season from a unique perspective. We each taught college courses on the 2020 campaigns while they were underway, and as a result had a sort of three-month-long focus-grouplike conversation with the newest American voters.
Our students were anxious and enthusiastic about the subject matter and shared some of their fears and insights with us and with one another. We tried to explain how national politics works, and we learned from their fresh perspectives on the presidency and presidential elections. After an election year marked by struggle and challenge, what we observed gave us some hope.
Franklin Pierce and Warren Harding were not exciting presidents. What about Joe Biden? The Conversation, from Mathew Brady/Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons, Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons, Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-ND
Historical precedent
Our students, while young, recognized that 2020 was a consequential contest without obvious parallels in recent American elections. One of the candidates was a mesmerizing and polarizing populist who rose to political fame just four years ago; the other was a familiar actor on the national stage for nearly five decades – three decades longer than our students have been alive.
A common theme was division. Some of our students wrote about previous elections and saw comparisons between 2020 and 1800, when partisanship ran hot and slanderous commentary was common. Some thought today was more like 1968, with civil rights activism, angry political protests, a silent majority and racist dog whistles that everyone could hear.
A few thought 2020 was like 1852, when both parties struggled to avoid the hard issues facing the nation; or 1920, when a war-weary and pandemic-exhausted nation craved normalcy.
If those last two comparisons held, they would make Joe Biden the next Franklin Pierce or the next Warren Harding – presidents who were not exactly awe-inspiring.
And like most Americans, the students were worried about what they saw happening in the country. An informal survey in one of our classes showed that of the more than 200 students who responded, over 50% were stressed out and exhausted by the election. A few – 15% – even said they were “scared” by what they were seeing in national politics.
But our students weren’t turned off by the election.
All of the surveyed students were first-time voters and nearly all of them actually voted. Almost all – 95% – thought the vote-counting process was conducted fairly. Twenty-five percent got beyond the stress and exhaustion and reported that they felt interested and energized by the election. Only 3% were bored by it.
Even better: More than 85% of students said they would get involved in politics in the years ahead. Of those, one in four said they’d consider running for office themselves; six in 10 want to work in a public policy job on issues they care about.
Those numbers are perhaps inflated by the lofty ambitions of the young people who attend highly selective institutions of higher education. But even if our results are from an admittedly small and non-random sample, they are still encouraging – especially compared with polling in previous years. Our students will not be content to stay at home and leave politics to others. These are the kind who are ready to change the world.
In one of our courses, students took time at the beginning of class periods to report on where the candidates stood on the major issues of the day. This was information that was hard to find in the chaotic candidate debates or in superficial social media messaging. For both of us, taking issues seriously in a predominantly character-focused campaign was a relief from negative advertising and Twitter tirades, and it made our students more confident observers of what was really at stake in 2020.
This sort of partisan clash doesn’t appeal to many of the students the authors taught. David Ryder/Getty Images
Bipartisan conversations
We were surprised to find that learning about this election made our students less partisan. In the informal class survey, a majority said the course had reduced, not enhanced, their partisanship.
In one of our courses, we presented opposing viewpoints from Republican and Democratic guest speakers, taking the students out of the bubble of their one-sided news feeds. Students in that class said that a highlight of the course was asking questions that applied to speakers from both sides, and then comparing the answers.
Americans are divided by more than just political party affiliation. In one of our classes, students read Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized,” which presents evidence that American partisanship is increasingly intertwined with geography, demography, religious conviction and level of education.
Good universities accept applicants from different backgrounds and create opportunities for discussions that involve students with different political views. Our students told us that taking an election course made them better equipped for the hard conversations about politics and policy that often take place between friends and family members.
Don’t get us wrong – partisanship is alive and well on college campuses, where liberal points of view are often overrepresented. But our students showed less partisan division than we had expected and seemed open to argument and evidence from more than one side of the political spectrum. In fact, the surveyed students said by a 70-30 margin that they regularly talk about politics with friends who have a different political view from their own – something Klein argues is not typically the case with most Americans these days.
Was their somewhat subdued partisanship because their exposure to 2020 controversies took place in the constraints of a college classroom? Or do they belong to a generation that is going to reject the hyperpartisanship of their elders and try harder to find common ground and common sense in American politics?
We don’t know the answer, but we just completed a semester in which our nation’s newest voters gave us some hope for the future of American civil society.
Federal government agencies, from the Treasury Department to the National Nuclear Security Administration, have been compromised by the attack. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
So much remains unknown about what is now being called the Sunburst hack, the cyberattack against U.S. government agencies and corporations. U.S. officials widely believe that Russian state-sponsored hackers are responsible.
The attack gave the perpetrators access to numerous key American business and government organizations. The immediate effects will be difficult to judge, and a complete accounting of the damage is unlikely. However, the nature of the affected organizations alone makes it clear that this is perhaps the most consequential cyberattack against the U.S. to date.
An act of cyberwar is usually not like a bomb, which causes immediate, well-understood damage. Rather, it is more like a cancer – it’s slow to detect, difficult to eradicate, and it causes ongoing and significant damage over a long period of time. Here are five points that cybersecurity experts – the oncologists in the cancer analogy – can make with what’s known so far.
1. The victims were tough nuts to crack
From top-tier cybersecurity firm FireEye to the U.S. Treasury, Microsoft, Intel and many other organizations, the victims of the attack are for the most part firms with comprehensive cybersecurity practices. The list of organizations that use the compromised software includes firms like MasterCard, Lockheed Martin and PricewaterhouseCoopers. SolarWinds estimates about 18,000 firms were affected.
As CEO of cybersecurity firm Cyber Reconnaissance Inc. and an associate professor of computer science at Arizona State University, I have met security professionals from many of the targeted organizations. Many of the organizations have world-class cybersecurity teams. These are some of the hardest targets to hit in corporate America. The victims of Sunburst were specifically targeted, likely with a primary focus on intelligence gathering.
2. This was almost certainly the work of a nation – not criminals
Criminal hackers focus on near-term financial gain. They use techniques like ransomware to extort money from their victims, steal financial information, and harvest computing resources for activities like sending spam emails or mining for cryptocurrency.
Criminal hackers exploit well-known security vulnerabilities that, had the victims been more thorough in their security, could have been prevented. The hackers typically target organizations with weaker security, like health care systems, universities and municipal governments. University networks are notoriously decentralized, difficult to secure, and often underfund cybersecurity. Medical systems tend to use specialty medical devices that run older, vulnerable software that is difficult to upgrade.
Hackers associated with national governments, on the other hand, have entirely different motives. They look for long-term access to critical infrastructure, gather intelligence and develop the means to disable certain industries. They also steal intellectual property – especially intellectual property that is expensive to develop in fields like high technology, medicine, defense and agriculture.
One of the targeted organizations, cybersecurity firm FireEye, would be a poor choice for cybercriminals but highly desirable for the Russian government or other adversaries of the U.S. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The sheer amount of effort to infiltrate one of the Sunburst victim firms is also a telling sign that this was not a mere criminal hack. For example, a firm like FireEye is an inherently bad target for a criminal attacker. It has fewer than 4,000 employees yet has computer security on par with the world’s top defense and financial businesses.
3. The attack exploited trusted third-party software
The hackers gained access by slipping their malware into software updates of SolarWinds’ Orion software, which is widely used to manage large organizational networks. The Sunburst attack relied on a trusted relationship between the targeted organization and SolarWinds. When users of Orion updated their systems in the spring of 2020, they unwittingly invited a Trojan horse into their computer networks.
Aside from a report about lax security at SolarWinds, very little is known about how the hackers gained initial access to SolarWinds. However, the Russians have used the tactic of compromising a third-party software update process before, in 2017. This was during the infamous NotPetya attack, which was considered the most financially damaging cyberattack in history.
4. The extent of the damage is unknown
It will take time to uncover the extent of the damage. The investigation is complicated because the attackers gained access to most of the victims in the spring of 2020, which gave the hackers time to expand and hide their access and control of the victims’ systems. For example, some experts believe that a vulnerability in VMWare, software that is widely used in corporate networks, was also used to gain access to the victims’ systems, though the company denies it.
Some of the exposed organizations, like Microsoft, made limited use of the SolarWinds software, which appears to have contained the damage they suffered. Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA
I expect the damage to be spread unevenly among the victims. This will depend on various factors such as how extensively the organization used the SolarWinds software, how segmented its networks are, and the nature of their software maintenance cycle. For example, Microsoft reportedly had limited deployments of Orion, so the attack had limited impact on their systems.
In contrast, the bounty the hackers stole from FireEye included penetration testing tools, which were used to test the defenses of high-end FireEye clients. The theft of these tools was likely prized by hackers to both increase their capabilities in future attacks as well as gain insights into what FireEye clients are protecting against.
5. The fallout could include real-world harm
There is a very thin, often nonexistent line between gathering information and causing real-world harm. What may start as spying or espionage can easily escalate into warfare.
Further, real harm can be done to individuals with information alone. For example, the Chinese breach of Equifax in 2017 has put detailed financial and personal information about millions of Americans in the hands of one of the U.S.’s greatest strategic competitors.
No one knows the full extent of the Sunburst attack, but the scope is large and the victims represent important pillars of the U.S. government, economy and critical infrastructure. Information stolen from those systems and malware the hackers have likely left on them can be used for follow-on attacks. I believe it is likely that the Sunburst attack will result in harm to Americans.
When Lagos state was the capital city of Nigeria the state looked so beautiful and everybody in Lagos was following his or her responsibilities the city was clean, no refuse dumping on the road side, Lagos state was the most populated city in Nigeria and now that Lagos is no longer the capital city of Nigeria, it is still the most populated city in Nigeria. It is the second fastest-growing city in Africa and the seventh in the world. According to World Population Review (WPR), the Lagos State Government estimates the population of Lagos at 17.5 million, a number that has been disputed by the Nigerian Government and found to be unreliable by the National Population Commission of Nigeria, which puts the population of Lagos at about 21 million in 2014. This latest reports automatically makes it the biggest city in Africa. Lagos is an old town bordering on the Atlantic Ocean, with over 2,000 years of history. See photos of Lagos state in 1960s
. Lagos was once the capital of Nigeria and had a population a bit less than 300,000, which is equivalent to the population of today’s Bradford. Surprisingly, in just about five decades, Lagos has grown to become Africa’s most populous city and also one of its economic powerhouse Lagos state is the Center of Commercial and Industrial Activities, in those days in the early 1960s, life in Lagos state was easy because there was no heavy jam no bad road and the rate of unemployment was low so everybody was busy, crisis, stealing, fight and all other violent related issues were not occurring frequently, every part of Lagos state was peaceful until we gained independent in 1963 ever since then things in Lagos where going from bad to worst, and beauty of the state fade away,
Recently, when I opened Instagram, I noticed that the usual spot for checking notifications is now a Shop tab. The Instagram blog post announcing the redesign said that the change will support small businesses and connect people with their favorite brands and creators.
This made me pause. As a researcher who studies social media, people and society, I’m concerned about the effects of surveillance capitalism. This includes social media companies profiting from collecting user data, making algorithmic inferences about people’s preferences and using this information to target people with advertising.
Features like Instagram’s Shop tab facilitate surveillance capitalism, so it’s important to look at their consequences. Many people use Instagram to share their lives with other people, but the redesign is shifting the nature of the social media platform toward online commerce. This shift opens people to highly targeted advertising and makes them vulnerable to advertising that exploits their emotional experiences.
Shift to shopping
Research, including my own, shows that people use Instagram to record their big and mundane moments, find community, exchange social support, express identities and keep in touch with friends.
In 2017, colleagues and I showed how ad hoc communities form around the tag #depression on the platform, and how much of the discourse is to make sense of the experience of depression, record it, share it with others and exchange support with other people dealing with depression. I argued that it is important for the platform to recognize the value users find in these communities and support them, rather than ban or nudge them to go elsewhere, when they come to the platform to express themselves and build solidarity.
The notification button, represented as a heart icon, brings up a screen that indicates the interactions people have had with your Instagram presence – for example, who has liked your posts and comments. It’s likely that the notification button was the most frequently clicked tab. When people interact with technology, they form habits. I am probably not the only one clicking the new Shop tab when I mean to click the notification button. It’s possible that the company did this simply to ensure that Instagram users encounter the new feature, but there are other ways to accomplish that.
By choosing to make the Shop tab central to its platform, Instagram is sending its users a message: This platform is a business, and interactions on this platform are going to be commodified.
Though some people may come to Instagram to find things to buy, many don’t. App designers can provide an unneeded feature and create a need for it over time. This is not without precedence in the context of social media and shopping. For example, when Facebook, which owns Instagram, relaunched Facebook Marketplace in 2016, the Marketplace product manager, Bowen Pan, said: “We show you the most relevant items for you, even if you don’t know what you want.”
Potential harms
People share all kinds of personal information on Instagram, such as mental health, physical health, traumatic events, pregnancy, loss, infertility, becoming new parents and getting married. Social media companies’ access to such sensitive information is a concern, for how the companies could exploit the information and the risk of third-party access to the data.
Instagram can use computational techniques to infer people’s affective states – their emotions and moods – based on many signals available to the platform. These include what content users view and post. There is substantial evidence that emotions and affective states play a key role in advertising. While capitalizing on emotions and emotional personal experiences for profit is not unique to social media or algorithms, the data-driven, opaque and hyperpersonalized approaches boost the scale of potential harm.
Presumably, what people see in Instagram’s Shop is personalized based on what the platform’s recommendation algorithm determines they would like and be inclined to purchase. How does the inferred socioeconomic, gender, age, race and other attributes shape what the platform recommends to users in the Shop tab? What shops get to be recommended and visible? Instagram users can be as young as 13, the age required to open an account. How does personalization work for children? How does this feature affect the experience of individuals with low socioeconomic status? What principles and values is the platform adhering to in designing these recommendation algorithms, Staff Picks and other means of presenting products?
A major consideration is when people get recommendations to purchase items during vulnerable moments. Sharing or seeking information about a difficult, personal experience on a social media platform and then having the platform capitalize on an algorithmic understanding of the experience – which might or might not be accurate – is problematic.
What are the implications for impulsive buyers who may turn to Instagram as a space for community and peer support to resist impulsive purchasing, but who are instead confronted with things to purchase and have no way of opting out? How about for someone who is on the platform to find support while coping with a substance use disorder, but instead encounters recommendations to purchase items related to drinking? What happens if a person posting about experiences with pregnancy loss begins seeing ads for baby clothes? This last scenario has happened.
In recent and upcoming studies, I observed that, to varying degrees, people find social media platforms capitalizing on their personal, intimate experiences – especially those associated with negative emotions – manipulative and harmful. Social media platform designers and decision-makers should consider ways to address potential harms preemptively rather than retroactively.
The Instagram blog post announcing the Shop feature states that there are marketers and influencers on the platform and young people who want to purchase the same products their favorite creators use. This might be a need for some Instagram users, but not all. If Instagram is determined to emphasize shopping, and if opting in is not possible, I believe the company should allow users to opt out of the Shop feature.
Losing personal connections
Recent research has shown that people share less and less personal information on Facebook, which has had its Marketplace feature since 2016, and use platforms like Instagram to engage in more personal, intimate discourse. This is due in part to site features and whom people are connected to on each platform. By moving away from a focus on people and their connections, and by commodifying and potentially manipulating users to purchase items on the platform, Instagram could go down the road that Facebook did – fewer personal connections and less personal, meaningful content.
Instagram’s website states that it is “bringing you closer to the people and things you love.” But people and things are different phenomena, and the ways people feel closer to each other are different from the ways they are drawn to things, businesses and brands. By wanting to do both, or perhaps by using the former to benefit the latter, the company may be missing the mark on how to bring people closer together.
The enormous job of vaccinating the nation is underway, but for rural Americans, getting a COVID-19 vaccine becomes harder the farther they are from urban centers.
We work in ruralhealth care settings and have been examining the barriers to health care for these patients to find ways to ensure health and safety.
The problem with big batches and cold storage
The first two authorized vaccines – one made by Pfizer and BioNTech and the other by Moderna – are mRNA vaccines. It’s a new type of vaccine that uses the molecular instructions for building virus proteins rather than injecting parts of the weakened virus itself. Both must be kept in very cold temperatures.
To ensure stability, the vaccine doses are shipped in special containers with dry ice, and for now, vaccines are being delivered only in large batches. The Pfizer vaccine is shipped in increments of 975 doses at a time, which creates a challenge for small hospitals.
Urban areas will be able to quickly distribute those doses, but finding enough patients to vaccinate quickly in rural areas may prove more difficult.
Both vaccines also require two doses per person, with the second dose of Pfizer’s vaccine given 21 days later and Moderna’s 28 days.
As a result, the vaccine distribution efforts will favor hubs that cater to more populated areas to avoid wasting any vaccine or leaving patients unable to get their second dose.
The Pfizer vaccine ships in batches of 975 doses and must be used within five days. David Ryder/Getty Images
Cold storage is another challenge, since small hospitals are less likely to have expensive freezers. The Pfizer vaccine must be stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 70 Celsius) and Moderna’s at minus 4 Fahrenheit. There are limits on how many times the vaccine shipping containers can be opened and how quickly the vaccines must be distributed. Once thawed and prepared, the Pfizer vaccine must be used within five days and Moderna’s within 30 days.
Each patient must receive both doses of the vaccine from the same manufacturer to ensure safety and effectiveness, adding to the challenge. Manufacturers have included personal dosing cards for patients to carry with them to help address this challenge.
Rural America’s take on COVID-19 and vaccines
Rural America already has difficult barriers to health care access.
It has fewer health care providers serving a more geographically diverse population than in metropolitan communities. And in many of these areas, rural hospitals have been closing at an alarming rate, leaving people to travel farther for care. The population is also older. Public transportation that could help poor or elderly residents reach hospitals is rare, and distance and geography, such as mountain roads, can mean driving to those sites takes time.
Getting accurate information about the vaccine and how to receive it into rural areas has also proved difficult. Many rural counties still have limited access to broadband internet connections, smartphone service and other technologies. That often means residents rely on television, newspapers and radio for news, which can limit the depth and scope of information.
Rural nonprofit health care organizations have tried to bridge that gap and improve rural communications about vaccines and the pandemic. Care Compass Network, which coordinates organizations across southern New York, has offered educational webinars with the latest information about the virus and the vaccines, for example. But there is still much work to do.
Rural Americans’ views on vaccines are influenced by media and word of mouth, politics and religion, as well as previous experience with vaccinations and, perhaps most importantly, the difficulty of accessing health care.
In a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in December, about 35% of rural Americans said they probably or definitely would not get the vaccine, higher than the 27% nationwide.
Small batches, new vaccines and pharmacies
Getting enough of the U.S. vaccinated to eventually end the pandemic will require more work in all of these areas. That includes improving shipping and storage processes so orders can be broken up and distributed to smaller hospitals, distributing more vaccine doses, and improving communication.
With Moderna’s vaccine arriving in smaller batches and not requiring such low temperatures for stability, it may prove to be more accessible for rural areas in the near future. Utah has already taken advantage of those characteristics to get initial doses to smaller hospitals outside its urban areas and has started vaccinating health care providers. Pfizer has said it may be able to offer smaller batches by April.
Other vaccines on the horizon are also expected to have less stringent storage requirements and may potentially be delivered in a one-shot method rather than a two-dose series. The falling number of rural hospitals still remains a challenge for getting vaccines to patients, though. Allowing community pharmacies to offer the vaccine – particularly if independent pharmacies are included – could eventually help expand the distribution network in rural areas.
Location, location, location. Where you place your Amazon Echo smart speaker is important to make sure you’re getting the most out of Alexa. But it’s not just about the room you place your Echo device in; it also depends on which speaker you own, what you use Alexa for, and which room you spend the most time in.
For example, an Echo Show has a clear home in the kitchen for looking up recipes, but it’s also nifty to have in the bedroom if you want to fall asleep watching Amazon Prime movies. But an Echo Dot might work best in your living room, where you can control playlists and smart home devices, or in your kitchen for setting timers.
