Coronavirus: Air pollution and CO2 fall rapidly as virus spreads

By Matt McGrath BBC Environment correspondent 19 March 2020

Traffic has been much-reduced on the streets of New York

Levels of air pollutants arming gases over some cities and regions are showing significant drops as coronavirus impacts work and travel.

Researchers in New York told the BBC their early results showed carbon monoxide mainly from cars had been reduced by nearly 50% compared with last year.

Emissions of the planet-heating gas CO2 have also fallen sharply.

But there are warnings levels could rise rapidly after the pandemic.
A really simple guide to climate change
Climate-related words and phrases explained

With global economic activity ramping down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, it is hardly surprising that emissions of a variety of gases related to energy and transport would be reduced.

Scientists say that by May, when CO2 emissions are at their peak thanks to the decomposition of leaves, the levels recorded might be the lowest since the financial crisis over a decade ago.

  

Image copyrightNASA

While it is early days, data collected in New York this week suggests that instructions to curb unnecessary travel are having a significant impact.

Traffic levels in the city were estimated to be down 35% compared with a year ago. Emissions of carbon monoxide, mainly due to cars and trucks, have fallen by around 50% for a couple of days this week according to researchers at Columbia University.

They have also found that there was a 5-10% drop in CO2 over New York and a solid drop in methane as well.

"New York has had exceptionally high carbon monoxide numbers for the last year and a half," said Prof Róisín Commane, from Columbia University, who carried out the New York air monitoring work.

"And this is the cleanest I have ever seen it. It's is less than half of what we normally see in 

Although there are a number of caveats to these findings, they echo the environmental impacts connected to the virus outbreaks in China and in Italy.

An analysis carried out for the climate website Carbon Brief suggested there had been a 25% drop in energy use and emissions in China over a two week period. This is likely to lead to an overall fall of about 1% in China's carbon emissions this year, experts believe.

Both China and Northern Italy have also recorded significant falls in nitrogen dioxide, which is related to reduced car journeys and industrial activity. The gas is both a serious air pollutant and a powerful warming chemical.

European Space Agency satellite image showing levels of nitrogen dioxide over Italy

With aviation grinding to a halt and millions of people working from home, a range of emissions across many countries are likely following the same downward path.

While people working from home will likely increase the use of home heating and electricity, the curbing of commuting and the general slowdown in economies will likely have an impact on overall emissions.

"I expect we will have the smallest increase in May to May peak CO2 that we've had in the northern hemisphere since 2009, or even before," said Prof Commane.

This view is echoed by others in the field, who believe that the shutdown will impact CO2 levels for the whole of this year.

"It will depend on how long the pandemic lasts, and how widespread the slowdown is in the economy particularly in the US. But most likely I think we will see something in the global emissions this year," said Prof Corinne Le Quéré from the University of East Anglia.

"If it lasts another three of four months, certainly we could see some reduction."

What's likely to make a major difference to the scale of carbon emissions and air pollution is how governments decide to re-stimulate their economies once the pandemic eases.

Back in the 2008-09, after the global financial crash, carbon emissions shot up by 5% as a result of stimulus spending that boosted fossil fuel use.

In the coming months, governments will have a chance to alter that outcome. They could insist, for instance, that any bailout of airlines would be tied to far more stringent reductions in aviation emissions.

"Governments now have to be really cautious on how they re-stimulate their economies, mindful of not locking in fossil fuels again," said Prof Le Quéré.

"They should focus those things that are ready to go that would lower emissions, like renovating buildings, putting in heat pumps and electric chargers. These are not complicated and can be done straight away, they are just waiting for financial incentives."

However, some argue that if the pandemic goes on a long time, any stimulus would more likely focus on promoting any economic growth regardless of the impact on the environment.

"I certainly think climate could go on the back burner, and in this case, I don't think there is much hope that stimulus goes to clean energy," said Prof Glen Peters from the Centre for International Climate Research.

"Any stimulus will help those with job losses such as tourism and services. I think this is very different to the global financial crisis. The only silver linings could be to learning new practices to work remotely, and buying a few years of lower growth allowing solar and wind to catch up a bit, though, these may be rather small silver linings."

Canada’s mysterious lake monster

For generations, a mythical beast has been said to lurk in the depths of Okanagan Lake. But now a new view on British Columbia’s most revered serpent is taking hold.


By Lisa Kadane BBC 10 March 2020


Not long after I moved to Kelowna, a city in southern British Columbia known for its wineries, water sports and hiking trails, I saw a news story about a monster sighting. Two brothers had seen something undulating across the water in the middle of Okanagan Lake, an 84-mile long lake that curves down the Okanagan Valley past Kelowna in the shape of a serpent. The wave crested and fanned out like a wake, but there wasn’t a boat in sight. They were adamant it was Ogopogo.


Ogopogo is to Kelowna what Nessie is to Loch Ness

You can’t live in Kelowna for any length of time without hearing about its mysterious lake creature. Ogopogo is to Kelowna what Nessie is to Loch Ness: a yet-to-be-identified cryptid that reputedly resides in the lake’s depths and surfaces just often enough to keep the legend alive.



For generations, a mysterious beast has been rumoured to lurk in Okanagan Lake's depths (Credit: Moccasin Trails)

It’s been described as a multi-humped serpentine beast, with green or black skin and the head of a horse, snake or sheep. Drawings depict a coiling sea dragon like what you might see on an old mariner’s map where it says, “Here there be monsters.” Around town, Ogopogo takes on a benign cartoonish form as a 15-foot-long green- and cream-coloured statue on the waterfront, the smiling mascot for the local WHL hockey team and as plush toys at souvenir shops. Like its palindrome name, its physical appearance – and very existence – is something no one can make heads nor tails of.

Ogopogo mania peaked in the 1980s when the region’s tourism association offered a $1m reward for proof of the creature’s existence. Greenpeace came forward and named it an endangered species, demanding that Ogopogo be captured only on film, and not in the flesh. American TV shows of the era, including In Search Of and Unsolved Mysteries, even reported on the Okanagan Valley’s mysterious inhabitant.

A 15-foot-long green- and cream-coloured statue of Ogopogo greets visitors along Kelowna's Waterfront Walk (Credit: Lisa Kadane)

Yet, it wasn’t until I attended the International Indigenous Tourism Conference in Kelowna last autumn that I realised the Ogopogo of Canadian popular culture – a creature that 16% of British Columbians believe in – only came about through miscommunication between Canada’s early European settlers and the Okanagan Valley’s original inhabitants, the Okanagan/syilx.

It’s not really a monster, it’s a spirit of the lake and it protects this valley from one end to the other

“It’s not really a monster, it’s a spirit of the lake and it protects this valley from one end to the other,” said Pat Raphael of the Westbank First Nation, a member nation of the larger Okanagan/syilx Nation Alliance, who guided me through the syilx’s ancestral lands bordering Okanagan Lake. As our bus drove south along the water, she explained that while many in Canada know the creature as Ogopogo, to the syilx, it’s n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ (n-ha-ha-it-koo), which means “the sacred spirit of the lake.” Raphael pointed out the brown hump of Rattlesnake Island across the water, where the spirit is said to dwell. She also had us practice saying n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ in nsyilxcən, the syilx language.

“It’s not Ogopogo! What are you, colonised?” she joked when a few of us struggled with the pronunciation and reverted to saying Ogopogo.

According to the Okanagan Valley’s original inhabitants, the Okanagan/syilx, the spirit of ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ watches over the lake (Credit: laughingmango/Getty Images)



Before European fur traders arrived in the valley in 1809, the syilx had been living in the area for at least 12,000 years. They had their own laws, justice system and beliefs. Chief among them was the importance of water, represented by n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ. It existed in two forms: a spiritual form and a physical, tangible form, which was embodied by the lake itself. Sometimes, though, the spirit would reveal itself from within the lake.

“In our stories, [n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ is] actually very dark in colour and it’s got the head of a horse and the antlers of a deer,” said Coralee Miller, assistant manager at the new Sncəwips Heritage Museum in West Kelowna. “Missionaries saw our water spirit and the habit was to demonise our spiritual beliefs.”

The syilx fed n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ symbolically, with tobacco and sage, and occasionally an offering of Kokanee salmon to thank the lake for providing food and water. “That’s where I think that misunderstanding came from – settlers saw us throw a little bit of meat in the water,” Miller explained.



Many tall tales of Ogopogo spread over the years, and there was once even a $1m reward for proof of the creature’s existence (Credit: Lisa Kadane)

Pioneers were soon telling stories of a serpent in Okanagan Lake that needed a live animal sacrifice to appease it and ensure a safe passage across the water. Once the idea of a bloodthirsty lake serpent took hold, it grew out of control – settlers began patrolling the lake with guns because they were nervous the beast would attack.

But by the 1920s (and likely in the absence of any actual human predation), cooler heads prevailed. Tourism officials named the creature Ogopogo after a catchy English folk song, whose lyrics included: “His mother was an earwig; his father was a whale; a little bit of head; and hardly any tail; and Ogopogo was his name.” N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ had transformed from a revered spirit into a cartoon-like creature that would lure tourists.

Over time, Ogopogo is what made Kelowna a household name in Canada

It’s hard to know just how many people have travelled to Kelowna over the last century in the hope of seeing the mythical lake monster, but over time, Ogopogo is what made Kelowna a household name in Canada. For years, the creature appeared on Kelowna’s parade float, both in town and at larger parades in the Pacific Northwest and Alberta. Gift shops hawked gimmick jars of Ogopogo’s “eggs” and even its “feces” that would fly off shelves. While the tourism office no longer actively promotes Ogopogo today, the legend remains as popular as ever.

Many Ogopogo sightings have taken place over the William R Bennett Bridge (Credit: Andrew Strain, Destination BC Photography)

Yet, the misappropriation and commodification of n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ is a sensitive issue. To Miller, a member of the Westbank First Nation, n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ and Ogopogo are two separate entities and shouldn’t be conflated. One of the museum’s missions is to tell the story of the area’s Indigenous people, and talk about the importance of n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ in protecting the lake. It’s part of what she calls “de-programming;” questioning or deconstructing the colonial perspective on local history and culture. This is also an important step towards reconciliation, an ongoing, countrywide process of establishing and maintaining respectful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.

This spring, Indigenous tour company Moccasin Trails is launching paddling tours on Okanagan Lake where guides will discuss n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ as a spiritual talisman – not a physical lake monster – and explain how it became appropriated.

We want people to leave our experiences with a better understanding of Indigenous culture

The canoe journeys begin with a feeding of the water ceremony. As the canoe glides across the lake’s glassy surface, a syilx cultural leader scatters sage and tobacco in the water while summoning the spirit world and telling his ancestors to keep everyone safe. Moccasin Trails co-owner Greg Hopf says the ceremony is powerful, and meant to illustrate the connection Indigenous people have with the earth, which is highly personal.

“It’s kind of what each person interprets the spirit to be,” he said. “We want people to leave our experiences with a better understanding of Indigenous culture.”



Indigenous-led tours will soon take visitors out onto Okanagan Lake to explain the importance of n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ (Credit: Moccasin Trails)

In downtown Kelowna, the Okanagan Heritage Museum works with the Westbank First Nation to tell a more thorough story of the region’s history. It redid its entire gallery in 2019 and represents syilx as a living culture, rather than focusing solely on the people’s way of life pre-colonisation. According to Kelowna Museums’ executive director, Linda Digby, sylix knowledge and perspective is now woven into every era depicted in the museum, and a display on Ogopogo explains how n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ was misunderstood by settlers and grew into a tourism boon.

“To settlers [Ogopogo] was a real thing,” said Digby. “They definitely misinterpreted what they heard from the Indigenous community and had no qualms about making up their own stories and appropriating from them, and it wouldn’t have even occurred to them they were doing that.”

As time wore on, the settlers’ inventory of stories grew – their neighbour saw the creature, or they themselves saw something strange in the lake. “You live here long enough everyone’s going to see something,” Digby said.

The Okanagan Heritage Museum recently redid their displays to tell a more balanced story of the region’s history (Credit: Matt Ferguson, Tourism Kelowna)

During my quest to understand n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ, I encountered a few people who are true believers based on what they’ve seen in Okanagan Lake. And they are far from alone: the museum’s archives are filled with newspaper clippings of Ogopogo sightings over the decades, along with stories about how a lake monster is good for the city’s bottom line.

“Ogopogo is great for tourism. It adds colour and panache and atmosphere,” said Robert Young, a University of British Columbia Okanagan earth sciences professor who is often called on as a voice of reason when an Ogopogo sighting occurs or new “footage” surfaces.

For Young, Ogopogo isn’t a question in biology, it’s a question in earth science processes – the way water moves over the surface of the earth. Thermal stratification in a lake can cause a wave to appear from nowhere when a denser layer of water slides beneath a more buoyant layer, as often happens in the spring or autumn, he explained. He calls it an “Ogopogo wave”.

Some locals are hesitant to want to disprove Ogopogo's existence, saying it's good for tourism (Credit: Meghan Reading, Tourism Kelowna)

This theory offers a plausible explanation for what people might be seeing on the water. But while Young is all for critical thinking about Ogopogo, he’s also loathe to disprove its existence. It should persist, he says, saying that Ogopogo is a Canadian cultural icon, and n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ is an important part of syilx beliefs.

I don’t worry a lake creature will nibble my toes when I go for a dip, but the power of nature gives me pause. I’ve started many days with a morning walk that leads to a ridge ringed by mountains overlooking Okanagan Lake and the rounded hills and extinct volcanoes of the Thompson Plateau behind it. I’m in awe I live in such a stunning place. When the wind ripples the water and sways the ponderosa pine trees growing on the hillside, I feel a connection to the natural beauty of my home. Maybe that spirit of place is my interpretation of n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ.


https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CRYPTOZOOLOGY

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Coronavirus: Robots use light beams to zap hospital viruses

By Adrienne Murray
Technology of Business reporter





ADRIENNE MURRAY
The UVD robot takes about 20 minutes to treat a room

"Please leave the room, close the door and start a disinfection," says a voice from the robot.

"It says it in Chinese as well now," Simon Ellison, vice president of UVD Robots, tells me as he demonstrates the machine.

Through a glass window we watch as the self-driving machine navigates a mock-hospital room, where it kills microbes with a zap of ultraviolet light.

"We had been growing the business at quite a high pace - but the coronavirus has kind of rocketed the demand," says chief executive, Per Juul Nielsen.

He says "truckloads" of robots have been shipped to China, in particular Wuhan. Sales elsewhere in Asia, and Europe are also up.

"Italy has been showing a very strong demand," adds Mr Nielsen. "They really are in a desperate situation. Of course, we want to help them."
ADRIENNE MURRAY
Powerful UV light is already a proven means to kill microbes

Production capacity has tripled, and the team now assembles one disinfection robot a day at their facility in Odense, Denmark's third largest city - and home to a growing robotics hub.

Glowing like light sabres, eight bulbs emit concentrated UV-C ultraviolet light. This destroys bacteria, viruses and other harmful microbes by damaging their DNA and RNA, so they can't multiply.

It's also hazardous to humans, so we wait outside. The job is done in 10-20 minutes. Afterwards there's a smell, much like burned hair.

"There are a lot of problematic organisms that give rise to infections," explains Prof Hans Jørn Kolmos, a professor of clinical microbiology, at the University of Southern Denmark, which helped develop the robot.

"If you apply a proper dose of ultraviolet light in a proper period of time, then you can be pretty sure that you get rid of your organism."

He adds: "This type of disinfection can also be applied to epidemic situations, like the one we experience right now, with coronavirus disease."
ADRIENNE MURRAY
UVD has tripled output of its disinfecting robots

The robot was launched in early 2019, following six years of collaboration between parent firm, Blue Ocean Robotics and Odense University Hospital where Prof Kolmos has overseen infection control.

Costing $67,000 (£53,370) each, the robot was designed to reduce the likelihood of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) which can be costly to treat and cause loss of life.

While there's been no specific testing to prove the robot's effectiveness against coronavirus, Mr Nielsen is confident it works

Dr Lena Ciric, an associate professor at University College London and expert on molecular biology, agrees that UV disinfection robots can help fight coronavirus.

"Coronavirus is very similar to other viruses like Mers and Sars. And we know that they are being killed by UV-C light," he says.

Disinfection robots are no "silver bullet", says Dr Ciric. But she adds: "These [machines] provide an extra line of defence."

"We're in the run up to having a lot of coronavirus patients in the various hospitals. I think it's wise to be on top of the cleaning regimes… from an infection control point of view. "

To be fully effective, UV needs to fall directly on a surface. If lightwaves are blocked by dirt or obstacles, such shadow areas won't be disinfected. Therefore manual cleaning is needed first.

UV light has been used for decades in water and air purification, and used in laboratories.

But combining them with autonomous robots is a recent development.
Image copyright XENEX
Xenex also has a device which uses UV light

American firm Xenex has LightStrike, which has to be manually put in place, and delivers high-intensity UV light from a U-shaped bulb.

The company has seen a surge in orders from Italy, Japan, Thailand and South Korea.

Xenex says numerous studies show that it's effective at reducing hospital-acquired infections and combating so-called superbugs. In 2014, one Texan hospital used it in the clean-up after an Ebola case.

More than 500 healthcare facilities, mostly in the US, have the machine. In California and Nebraska, it has already been put to use sanitising hospital rooms where coronavirus patients received treatment, the manufacturer says.

In China, where the outbreak began, there has been an adoption of new technology to help fight the disease.

The nation is already the highest spender on drones and robotics systems, according to a report from global research firm IDC.

Leon Xiao, Senior Research Manager at IDC China says robots have been used for a range of tasks, primarily disinfection, deliveries of drugs, medical devices and waste removal, and temperature-checking.

'I think this is a breakthrough for greater use of robotics both for hospitals and other public places," says Mr Xiao. However space in hospitals to deploy robots and acceptance by staff are challenges, he says.

Image copyright YOUIBOT
YouiBot has quickly developed its own disinfecting robot

The coronavirus has spurred home-grown Chinese robotics companies to innovate.

Shenzhen-based YouiBot was already making autonomous robots, and quickly adapted its technology to make a disinfection device.

"We're trying to do something [to help], like every one here in China," says YouiBot's Keyman Guan.

The startup adapted its existing robotic base and software, adding thermal cameras and UV-C emitting bulbs.

"For us technically, [it's] not as difficult as you imagine… actually it's just like Lego," says Mr Guan.

Image copyright YOUIBOT
YouiBot at a hospital in Wuhan

It has supplied factories, offices and an airport, and a hospital in Wuhan. "It's running right now in the luggage hall… checking body temperature in the day, and it goes virus killing during the night," he says. However the robot's efficacy hasn't yet been evaluated.

Meanwhile plant closures and other restrictions to curb coronavirus, have hampered getting parts. "The lack of one single component, [and] we cannot build a thing," adds Mr Guan, though he notes things have improved in the last couple of weeks.

"There are not many good things to say about epidemics," says Professor Kolmus, but it has forced industry "to find new solutions".

Vampire bats 'French kiss with blood' to form lasting bonds

GETTY IMAGES

Vampire bats are actually rather friendly - to each other at least

Vampire bats establish friendships by sharing regurgitated blood with their neighbours in a "kind of horrifying French kiss", a new study says.

Researchers observing the mammals said their sharing behaviours appeared to be an important aspect of their bonding.

If bats go three days without eating, they can die of starvation, so sharing the blood can be a life-saving act.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, aimed to determine how the species developed relationships.

It found that when the vampire bats became isolated in a roost, pairs unfamiliar with one another - but in close proximity - would begin grooming, then "mouth-licking" before swapping food.

Secrets of how vampire bats became bloodthirsty
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"We go from bats starting as strangers from different colonies to groupmates that act to save each other's life," said Prof Gerald Carter, author of the study and behavioural ecologist at Ohio State University.

"They have this 'boom and bust' foraging experience, so they either hit it big and get a large blood meal or they're starved for that night.

"Food sharing in vampire bats is like how a lot of birds regurgitate food for their offspring. But what's special with vampire bats is they do this for other adults," Prof Carter said.

He added that the bats would groom even after their fur had been cleansed, suggesting that the behaviour was not just an issue of maintaining hygiene.

Vampire bats are the only mammals to feed entirely on blood, which they get by biting larger animals such as cattle.

The flying creatures can drink up to half their weight in blood a day, unlike their other bat relatives, which generally dine on fruit, nectar or insects.

In November, a scientific study discovered that bats that form bonds while in captivity often continue their relationships when released back into the wild

Around the world from your sofa: British Library to put rare globes online

Examples include 1679 pocket globe and 1730 terrestrial globe showing California as an island

Digitally recording a globe at the British Library. Photograph: The British Library


Mark Brown Arts correspondent  Published on Wed 18 Mar 2020

What better way to see the world in these travel-restricted times than from the comfort of your sofa? The British Library is this month putting on a digital display of some of its more hidden treasures, including historic globes which will be available to explore online.

The library has about 150 historic globes in its vast collection of books, manuscripts and maps. Most are so delicate they are rarely seen by visitors.

On 26 March the library will launch the first fruits of an ambitious two-year project to digitise the globes, allowing people to see them in incredible close-up detail.

“Everyone loves an old globe, don’t they,” said Tom Harper, the lead curator of antiquarian maps at the library. “When you see one you want to spin it.

“They seem really visible, accessible things … but actually original globes are really quite elusive and even mysterious. Because they were built as tactile objects original ones are really rare and often in a terrible state.

“The globes we’ve got here we have to be very protective of them. We can’t bring them out for readers to look at because they are so fragile so they are the hidden world maps and hidden star charts of the collection.”

The process allows people to see close-up detail of the globes online. 

Photograph: The British Library

Seven globes will go online initially, including what is possibly the earliest miniature pocket globe, made by Joseph Moxon in 1679, which would have been seen as a gentlemanly status symbol.


Other globes will include Richard Cushee’s 1730 terrestrial globe which has California as an island and the northwest of north America labelled “unknown parts”.

Harper said globes were able to tell fascinating stories about the history of discoveries. “Globes are brilliant for that. You get a sense in the 18th century, before and after Cook, of this incredible excitement about exploration, what latest things were being found all over the world.

“You can appreciate it more when you are looking at a globe, you get a physical sense of it being completely on the other side of the world which you don’t get when you look at a map.”

There will also be original celestial globes going on the website, including one from 1606 made by the Dutchman Willem Janszoon Blaeu.

These globes, which show the stars, would often have been paired with terrestrial globes, to be seen together as a 3D model of the universe.

“It was quite a profound, conceptual thing to do when you think about it,” said Harper.

“People haven’t really given enough time to them in the past, they are quite complicated things to understand.

“It is with the celestial globes that you really get so much more of the culture of the age, of the people who were looking at and making the globes.”

Library staff have worked with the digitising company Cyreal on the project for two years. Some of the globes have been photographed as many as 1,200 times to capture every aspect of their surface area. “The technology now is so much more accessible than it was five years ago.”

The globes will be available on the British Library website. There will also be an augmented reality version of the globes, available via the Sketchfab app.

Harper said there was still much to learn from historic globes and he hopes the public will help.

“We want to find out things about these globes that we haven’t noticed before. It’s not just features or places on the globe which we haven’t noticed, they have been well studied, it’s more how these features are shown, and what that tells us about the people who were looking at them. It is more the contextual history we are interested in.”

DOWN AND OUT IN LA

'If I get it, I die': homeless residents say inhumane shelter conditions will spread coronavirus

As California officials urge residents to avoid physical contact, residents worry the facilities are not prepared to cope with the outbreak

Sam Levin in Los Angeles Thu 19 Mar 2020 THE GUARDIAN
 

A homeless man huddles under a blanket in Los Angeles. 

Photograph: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Southern California homeless shelter residents say long-running unsanitary and inhumane conditions now put them at severe risk of death amid the rapid spread of the coronavirus.

As California officials this week urged millions of residents to stay inside and avoid physical contact to slow the spread of Covid-19, people living in several overcrowded homeless shelters in Orange county say they continue to sleep in rows of beds within a few feet of each other, and that they often lack basic hygiene supplies and amenities.

The residents report a variety of serious problems, including empty soap dispensers, a lack of toilet paper, no hot water, broken sinks, no working thermometers, blood-stained walls and infrequent cleaning. They worry the shelters are ill-prepared to cope once the spread of the virus intensifies in the US.

“It’s appalling. One person gets a cough and everyone gets it,” said Wendy Powitzky, 49, who has been living at the La Mesa shelter in Anaheim in southern California for months. “We’ve already been passing around a standard cold.”

Some days, the soap containers in the bathroom go empty: “Most people don’t have their own. So I guess everyone else is just washing their hands with water.”

California has the largest homeless population in the US, with more than 40,000 people living in shelters on a given night. Advocates and shelter residents have warned for years that many of the facilities are underregulated and underfunded, and that conditions in some may pose significant health hazards. Amid the coronavirus crisis, they fear, those circumstances could make the spread of the virus in shelters near-inevitable.
Homeless tents line the street in downtown Los Angeles. 

Photograph: Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images


A significant number of shelter residents are older and already live with serious health problems. The ongoing problems with sanitation and accommodations in some of the shelters make it largely impossible for many residents to comply with Covid-19 precautionary measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control, according to Eve Garrow, the homelessness policy analyst with the ACLU of Southern California.

What’s more, some in shelters have been waiting for years for more permanent housing due to a severe shortage of affordable homes for low-income renters. If residents leave now, they could lose their spot and also face police harassment if they sleep outside. Despite these risks, some are fleeing the facilities to avoid the virus and returning to encampments, even as officials urge people to seek shelter.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” said Garrow, who spent more than a year investigating conditions in local shelters for a 2019 report documenting the unsafe and toxic environments. “If coronavirus impacts people in shelters, it’s going to spread like wildfire.”
Risk death inside or arrest outside: ‘Where do we go?’

Homeless organizations have been sounding the alarm for weeks, warning that the coronavirus could cause catastrophic harm to unhoused communities amid the absence of a coordinated strategy to aid people already struggling to survive in tents and overcrowded shelters. Officials in Los Angeles moved on Tuesday to temporarily stop some of the sweeps of encampments due to coronavirus.


Residents in four homeless facilities in Orange county, the region Garrow studied, shared with the Guardian photos and accounts of long-running problems that have sparked new fears amid the corona crisis. 

The Courtyard shelter in Santa Ana, California. 

Photograph: ACLU of Southern California

“If I start coughing, they may throw me out and I will have no place to go,” said one homeless man in his 70s, currently living at The Courtyard, a Santa Ana shelter where the ACLU last year found “squalid conditions”. The resident, who has spent years at the facility, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the shelter. He has serious health problems and worries coronavirus would kill him: “If I catch it and die, this miserable life will be over for me.”

His shelter, a former bus terminal that houses more than 400 people in cots, has multiple broken sinks and dysfunctional soap dispensers, he said: “We have to supply our own soap, and then we have to wait in line to get a sink that works.”

Joseph Grubb, a 53 year old who has been staying at a Salvation Army shelter in Anaheim for months, said one men’s bathroom has blood on the walls and the other one has no soap: “The coronavirus is going around like crazy and they are not even cleaning the bathrooms up … You have to go into the bloody one to wash your hands. I try not to touch the door and kick it open.”

With coronavirus concerns and the conditions not improving, Grubb said he decided to leave the Salvation Army, even though he has nowhere else to go. He said he was worried about the older residents remaining: “If the virus does hit there, they are gone.”
Homeless camp along the Los Angeles river. 

Anti-homeless laws in some cities force people into shelters. 

Photograph: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Because the city of Anaheim also has a number of anti-homeless laws meant to prevent sleeping outside and force people in shelters, Grubb said he is now sleeping in a tent, living in fear police will cite or jail him: “Every night, we don’t know if we’re going to get arrested for being where we’re at, or harassed.” But it was preferable to the shelter, he added.

Callie Rutter, 56, recently lived in the Bridges at Kraemer Place shelter in Anaheim and is now in a care program fighting lung cancer. She predicts the coronavirus would spread at the shelter just like the notorious “Kraemer cough” had done in the past. “It’s a mass shelter in the middle of winter. But, even if it was summer, it wouldn’t make a difference.”

Powitzky lived in the La Mesa shelter, where she slept in a dorm-like cubicle with three other women within a few feet of her.

Powitzky said she left the La Mesa shelter this week over coronavirus fears and was told she would lose her spot. She said there have been basic plumbing problems at the shelter with shower water not draining properly, creating further risks of spreading diseases. When she reported her recent potential fever, staff said they didn’t have a functioning thermometer to take her temperature and ended up sending her to the hospital, where she discovered she was sick, but not with coronavirus.

Powitzky said she has repeatedly complained about unsanitary conditions and the response was, in effect, “If you don’t like it you can leave.”

“But where are we going to go?” she asked. “We can’t be in the streets.”
The dangers of mass shelter quarantines

There is no single state entity with oversight over safety in shelters, which are run by a patchwork of not-for-profits and local municipalities and have often lacked the training and resources needed to support a surging homeless population with complex needs. Solving longstanding structural problems during an unprecedented health crisis is a huge challenge for the organizations, but advocates have urged government agencies to have a unified strategy to prioritize resources and supports for this population, given that they are the most vulnerable.

Mike Lyster, a spokesman for the city of Anaheim, which oversees the Salvation Army shelter, did not respond to specific questions about the bathrooms, saying in an email that the shelter has a “high standard of facilities”. He added: “There always can also be an isolated issue, but bathrooms are regularly cleaned and addressed.”

Paul Leon, CEO of the Illumination Foundation, which runs La Mesa, said the shelter recently had a problem with a thermometer but that it was now monitoring all residents’ temperatures multiple times a day. He said the shelter has no soap shortage, though there may have been an “isolated incident”, adding that the facility has recently stocked up on sanitizer and other supplies.

Leon said the shelter was trying to be strict about when people enter and exit to minimize possible Covid-19 transmission: “The shelters could be the safest place for them.” He said the situation was “under control”, but added, “Next week, we’ll see how bad it gets.”

At the Bridges shelter, staff are doing widespread screening for possible symptoms and are prepared to isolate people as needed, said Larry Haynes, director of the not-for-profit that runs the facility.

Some shelters are now preparing for lockdowns and quarantines if outbreaks occur. While those restrictions could help to stop the spread of the virus to the outside world, some advocates warned that they could put the most vulnerable people in the shelters at greater risk to catch the virus  

A homeless man sits in the morning sun in 

downtown Los Angeles in front of city hall. 

Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

“If anyone comes down with it, we’re going to get locked down,” said Joshua Ogle, a 41-year-old La Mesa resident who has lived in multiple Orange county shelters, adding that he feared for his friends who were seniors and how residents’ mental health might suffer under quarantine. “People are going to really lose their minds.”

Garrow said she feared quarantines would do nothing to fix conditions that promote contagions. In a letter to state officials on Monday, she instead called for health and sanitation standards and social distancing practices to be adopted and enforced at shelters, for the state to bring hygiene supplies and coronavirus testing and treatment to the facilities and for officials to provide housing vouchers so people can self-isolate.

Meanwhile, California’s governor said he was working to make hotels and trailers available to homeless people to get them inside and prevent mass outbreaks, and LA’s mayor said he would make 6,000 beds available at city recreation centers.


A spokesperson for Orange county, which oversees several shelters, including The Courtyard, did not answer specific questions but said the county was evaluating federal and state guidelines and resources to figure out solutions for homeless people: “This may include creating appropriate spaces for isolation such as temporary structures, tents and trailers, and or motels and hotels as available.”

Davon Brown, a resident who lives at an LA park encampment, said he felt safer being able to isolate in a tent and would not consider a shelter: “If you want more people to die, you put them in a shelter.”

One Salvation Army resident in his 60s, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said he should not have been in this predicament in the first place. He has been in the shelter for over two years, waiting for housing. He thought by now he’d have his own roof over his head and be safe: “It just hasn’t happened, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to.” And now he faces a high risk of serious illness or worse, he said: “If I get this, I could die.”

The coronavirus pandemic threatens a crisis for human rights too
 

Afua Hirsch

People could soon be arrested for a sweeping range of new offences, sparking troubling scenes in the UK
Thu 19 Mar 2020
Spanish police and soldiers deployed at Atocha railway station in Madrid to fight against the spread of Covid-19. Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP via Getty Images


You can learn a lot about someone’s perspective from what they find reassuring at a time like this. This week I saw a private briefing from a bank, soothingly reassuring its clients that “this feels more like 9/11 than 2008”. I think the point was to let investors know that this crisis is not systemic. It felt a bit like updating the old wartime spirit for today’s hyper-capitalist economy: “Keep well-capitalised, and carry on.”

I can think of a host of reasons why 9/11 does not bring calming thoughts to mind, but one is the long-term impact it had on human rights. Back then I was in the early stages of becoming a human rights lawyer. My very first day in court was with the team defending a victim of extraordinary rendition, where Britain had helped facilitate his torture. By the time I was practising, the 7 July London bombings had happened, and so had draconian new laws – 90-day detention without trial, plus sweeping surveillance and monitoring. Many Muslims remember this as the time that racial profiling and state harassment – in airports, on the tube, in the street – became the new normal.

This might sound like a strange issue to raise when the national priority is – understandably – how to stop the spread of coronavirus, treat the sick and tackle the hit to the economy. But since last month, when the government drafted emergency regulations to grant police new powers – and more far-reaching laws are expected this week – the potential has been building for a clash between liberty, privacy and public health measures. The authorities now have the power to arrest and detain someone they believe is infectious for up to 14 days, to move that person around from custody facilities including secure hospitals, and to take blood or saliva from them by force, even if they are a child.

All schools to close from Friday; GCSE and A-level exams cancelled – UK Covid-19, as it happened

Read more

The legislation set to come before parliament is likely to ban public gatherings, to widen police and immigration officer powers of detention and restraint, to give doctors powers to sign death certificates without seeing the deceased person’s body, to allow fast-tracked burial and cremation, and to strip back services in care homes. People who refuse to self-isolate could be made to do so using the always contested “reasonable force”.

Our human rights protections – long maligned by many of the politicians now running our pandemic-stricken nation – were designed for moments such as this. They contain specific exemptions for situations in which the state needs to contain the spread of infectious disease. And the continuing shutdown caused by coronavirus doesn’t make them less relevant, it makes them more important than ever.

The proposed measures will contain safeguards – as they are constitutionally required to do so – especially rights to appeal. But this being a government that has decimated legal aid, brought our court system to its knees and repeatedly attacked the judiciary, a key element of trust is already compromised.

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1:18 Coronavirus: renters to be protected from eviction says Johnson – video

Trust is one of those ingredients in a democratic process that is hard to notice until it is gone. But this government’s cavalier approach to applying the rule of law at the best of times – let’s remember the prime minister misled the Queen and illegally prorogued parliament – does not inspire confidence at a time of crisis.


Lawyers who focus on the right to human dignity in the care of vulnerable or elderly people were appalled to hear Boris Johnson suggest that the deaths of vast numbers of British people would be an acceptable price to pay for so-called “herd immunity”. One QC compared the idea to Germany’s post-9/11 attempt to permit hijacked passenger planes to be shot down, as if the lives of those on board were expendable. Similarly, he suggests, the very idea of herd immunity would have “subordinated human dignity by treating it as a quantifiable entity that can be measured and weighed in the balance.”

There’s the potential for a kind of tyranny of the majority – one of the reasons we need human rights in the first place – and then there are the new, established but upgraded, tyrannies of the state. China has developed an app of remarkably intrusive proportions, using facial recognition to track both your movements and those of everyone in your proximity, so that they can be tested in the event you become infectious.

Israel is ditching superfluous apps altogether and simply allowing security services to hack infected people’s phones to monitor their movements.

Donald Trump has insisted on a project of deliberate racial demonisation by calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” – inflaming what we already know to be harmful prejudice against east Asian people, including those who have suffered shameful abuse in Britain. In one of the most surreal responses to the pandemic, commentators who are usually allergic to this form of social justice have belatedly discovered the concept of reparations – not for the genocidal abuses committed by Europeans over the centuries, but for Europeans from the allegedly guilty Chinese.

The truth is that China has been remarkably effective at stemming the spread of Covid-19, but has done so through a heady concoction of human rights abuses and authoritarian rule, of which no one should be envious. Human Rights Watch has reported censorship; dissenters put “under quarantine”; a disabled child left to die when his parent was forced into isolation; and a leukaemia sufferer turned away from hospital.

That doesn’t justify racism against Chinese people any more than the British should be stigmatised for the uniquely dodgy leadership we currently endure. This pandemic has exposed what many of us said about the Tories’ long boast of “record high” numbers of people in employment – namely, insecure workers with no rights and no safety net. Likewise, we warned about starving the NHS so that its resilience is shot, creating a generation of renters with no savings, and allowing homelessness and destitution to mushroom.

These casualties had already become the new normal. But once we see newly troubling scenes – people arrested for resisting isolation or treatment – we will be reminded why this could become a crisis of rights, as much as it is one of disease.

• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist

CRIMINAL CAPITALISM
Former London bankers convicted after Germany's 'greatest tax robbery'

First case of its kind sheds light on complex fraud known as cum-ex trading

A British banker at the trial at a regional court in Bonn, Germany. 

Photograph: Thilo Schmülgen/Reuters


Philip Oltermann in Berlin THE GUARDIAN Published on Thu 19 Mar 2020

Two former London bankers were handed suspended jail terms and one a €14m fine for tax fraud in a landmark trial that is likely to unleash dozens of similar cases across Germany.

The ruling is the first criminal conviction for what the judge, Roland Zickler, called “a collective case of thievery from state coffers”.

Martin Shields and Nicholas Diable managed to avoid jail by closely cooperating with German prosecutors and shedding light on a complex fraud scheme that siphoned €400m out of German state coffers.



'The men who plundered Europe': bankers on trial for defrauding €447m

Known as “cum-ex”, the scheme involved trading shares at high speed on or just before the dividend record date – the day the company checks its records to identify shareholders – and then claiming two or more refunds for capital gains tax which had in fact only been paid to the state once.

On Wednesday the judge stated that the trades were illegal rather than merely exploiting loopholes in the law.

“Do we all want to live in a world where everyone is ripping each other off?” Zickler said, addressing the defendants at the regional court in Bonn.

Cum-ex trade flourished on an “industrial scale” in the years after the financial crash, as banks across Europe were bailed out by the state. Shields started his career in investment banking as a junior trader for Merrill Lynch, before moving to the London branch of Germany’s fourth-largest bank, HypoVereinsbank, where he met Diable.

The chief prosecutor, Anne Brorhilker, said a harsher sentence would have “covered up the fact that the greatest tax robbery in German history was not conducted by two individuals but hundreds of people”.

The Bonn court also seized €176m from MM Warburg, a Hamburg-based private bank that had links to most of the transactions under review in the trial. A spokesman for the bank said it would appeal the decision.

State prosecutors across Germany are currently investigating at least 600 individuals, including bankers, traders, advisers and lawyers, for having practised similar schemes. At least 130 banks are under suspicion of having taken part in cum-ex trades.

“There will be further trials,” said Zickler.

Estimates of the cum-ex scandal’s total financial damage to the German state range from €5bn to €55bn.

In his closing statement, the former investment banker Shields said he had set off on a journey that “began in a bubble and remained in a bubble”.

“Many things were taken for granted and – unfortunately – were not questioned sufficiently,” said the 42-year-old, whom the Bonn court ordered to pay €14m to compensate for the personal profits he had made. “Whatever was taken for granted back then, I now see turned out to have been the wrong path.”

With more and more parts of Europe under lockdown to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus, the verdict in the 44-day trial was moved forward to ensure the two UK-based bankers could still attend the court in person.

Tulsi Gabbard quits 2020 Democratic presidential race
ENDORSES BIDEN

Hawaii congresswoman who assembled eclectic group of 
supporters backs Joe Biden and thanks Bernie Sanders

Tulsi Gabbard during a Democratic presidential primary debate 

on 20 November 2019. Photograph: Derek White/Rex/Shutterstock

Adam Gabbatt in New York THE GUARDIAN

Published on Thu 19 Mar 2020

The controversial Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. She had been the last woman in the contest – albeit a very long shot from the start – after Elizabeth Warren decided to quit within two days of a poor showing on Super Tuesday.

Gabbard, who won two Democratic delegates, both in American Samoa, endorsed Joe Biden as she suspended her campaign, a surprise move given she was one of few Democrats in Congress to back Bernie Sanders in 2016.

“Although I may not agree with the vice-president on every issue, I know that he has a good heart, and he’s motivated by his love for our country and the American people,” Gabbard said.

“I’m confident that he will lead our country guided by the spirit of aloha, respect and compassion, and thus help heal the divisiveness that has been tearing our country apart.”

Gabbard, 38, had assembled an eclectic coalition of anti-war Democrats, independent voters, libertarians and disaffected Republicans, but never drew sufficient support to trouble the better-known candidates.

She finished with just 16 votes in Iowa, the first state to vote. In New Hampshire, where Gabbard spent months campaigning, she came in seventh.



Important announcement.
From Oahu, Hawaiʻi. #StandWithTulsi pic.twitter.com/XcHshtgVYA— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) March 19, 2020

On Super Tuesday, 3 March, when 14 states voted, she came nowhere in any of them as Joe Biden charged to the front of the field. The only prize of the night for Gabbard was earning two out of six pledged delegates in American Samoa, the US Pacific island territory where the billionaire former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg won his only contest in the Democratic primary, before dropping out of the race the following day.

The exit of Gabbard, who was born in American Samoa and is of mixed ethnicity, leaves a 2020 field of candidates that began as the most diverse in American history but narrowed inexorably to Biden and Bernie Sanders fighting it out to compete with Donald Trump, all straight white men in their 70s.

Gabbard ran as a progressive, anti-war candidate, frequently stressing her experience as a member of the Hawaii national guard. Her campaign speeches largely focused on the ills of American wars overseas, with Gabbard promising to redirect money from the military budget to social programs.

As her campaign failed to gain momentum, however, Gabbard and her supporters increasingly criticized the media for failing to provide her with enough airtime – although the congresswoman never approached double figures in national polls.

Gabbard was seen as a rising star in the Democratic party when she became a member of Congress in 2013, and was appointed a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee.

She resigned that position, however, to endorse Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and continued to chaff against her party when she met with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in 2017, later questioning the consensus that Assad was behind a chemical attack that killed dozens of people.

Despite backing Biden over Sanders, Gabbard thanked the Vermont senator in her announcement.

“I want to extend my best wishes to my friends Bernie Sanders, his wife Jane, Nina Turner and their many supporters for the work that they’ve done,” Gabbard said. Turner is the national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 campaign.

She continued: “I have such a great appreciation for Senator Sanders’ love for our country and the American people and his sincere desire to improve the lives of all Americans.”

Gabbard’s moves became increasingly unorthodox in recent months as she strived for exposure.

In January Gabbard sued Clinton for $50m in retaliation for Clinton suggesting the Hawaiian was a Russian asset, months after Gabbard filed a $50m lawsuit against Google for allegedly suspending her campaign’s advertising.

Ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Gabbard held a Fox News interview where she defended Donald Trump’s decision to fire the key impeachment investigation witnesses Lt Col Alexander Vindman and EU ambassador Gordon Sondland.

A day later Gabbard appeared on the conservative Fox News network with Sean Hannity, a friend and informal adviser to the president who has promoted conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the dead DNC staffer Seth Rich.

UK
Windrush report: call for inquiry into extent of racism in Home Office

Alliance of 16 anti-racism groups says report on scandal proves ‘institutional failures to understand racism’

Windrush report: what the Home Office needs to act on

Amelia Gentleman and Owen Bowcott THE GUARDIAN Thu 19 Mar 2020

An investigation into the extent of institutional racism within the Home Office must be launched in response to a damning report on the Windrush scandal, an alliance of anti-racism groups has urged.

The call came after the long-awaited publication of the independent inquiry into the government’s handling of the scandal, which saw British citizens wrongly deported, dismissed from their jobs and deprived of services such as NHS care.

The inquiry – which prompted an official apology from the home secretary, Priti Patel – concluded that the Home Office demonstrated “institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race”. It was commissioned after the Guardian’s reporting on the government’s “hostile environment” immigration policy led to the exposure of the scandal and eventually the resignation of the then home secretary, Amber Rudd.

In response to the findings, a consortium of 16 pressure groups called on Thursday for the Home Office’s immigration policies to be scrutinised to assess whether they are discriminatory.

While the report stopped short of describing the Home Office as institutionally racist, the government now needed to analyse why “Home Office culture, attitudes, immigrations and citizenship policies have repeatedly discriminated against black and ethnic minority British citizens,” deputy director of the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, Zubaida Haque, said.

She added that the report made it “very clear that the injustice was not an accident, but a result of institutional failures to understand race and racism”.

In the report, the Home Office is blamed for operating a “culture of disbelief and carelessness”. It concludes that the failings are “consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism”.

Patel gave an official apology in the House of Commons on Thursday, saying: “There is nothing I can say today that will undo the suffering … On behalf of this and successive governments I am truly sorry.”

But Michael Braithwaite, 68, who was sacked in 2017 from his job as a special-needs teaching assistant at the London primary school where he had worked for more than 15 years (despite the fact that he had lived in the country for half a century) said he was frustrated to hear Patel make a new apology almost two years after the government first did so.

“It’s the same expression of empathy, and more promises like last time. It’s there to make us feel better, but things haven’t changed,” he said, adding that he wanted the government to dismantle its hostile environment policies.

His remarks were echoed by Elwaldo Romeo, 65, who was sent a letter by the Home Office in 2018 telling him that he was liable to be detained, and offering him “support on returning home” (despite the fact he had moved to the UK from Antigua 59 years earlier, aged four). “Two years on, why have we still got Windrush people living in dustbins and airports?”

Responding on behalf of Labour, the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said: “The verdict that there are elements of institutional racism at the Home Office is damning, and means there must be a root-and-branch overhaul and change of culture.”


The review, prompted by months of Guardian reporting on the consequences of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policy, says the scandal was “foreseeable and avoidable”. It says warning signs of problems caused by the immigration policy – such as “racially insensitive” billboards telling people to “go home or face arrest” – were ignored.

There was a tendency to blame individuals caught up in the immigration regulations, the report says. They found themselves criticised for failing to obtain evidence of their status, even though when they tried to do so they were not provided with the right documentation.

The report’s author, Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary, said at its launch: “The Windrush generation has been poorly served by this country, a country to which they contributed so much and in which they had every right to make their lives. The many stories of injustice and hardships are heartbreaking, with jobs lost, lives uprooted and untold damage done to so many individuals and families.”

Williams said she met about 800 people, and many of the interviews had been extremely upsetting. She said one man had been in tears when he told her how he had lost his job and his home “in tragic circumstances”. He told her: “I can’t believe I have been treated like this by my beloved England.”

Williams said: “There were a number of examples that were equally as upsetting. There was an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. They couldn’t understand how this had been allowed to happen.”

The 275-page report said the roots of the problem could be traced back to racially motivated legislation during the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

Williams wrote: “While I am unable to make a definitive finding of institutional racism with the department, I have serious concerns that these failings demonstrate an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation within the department, which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism.”

She said many people “felt a strong sense of Britishness and had no reason to doubt their status or that they belonged in the UK. They could not have been expected to know the complexity of the law as it changed around them.”

Q&A

What is the Windrush deportation crisis?


Who are the Windrush generation?

They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948.

What happened to them?

An estimated 50,000 people faced the risk of deportation if they had never formalised their residency status and did not have the required documentation to prove it.

Why now?

It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary, to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of people’s citizenship or immigration status.

Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status?

Some children, often travelling on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973.

What did the government try and do to resolve the problem?

A Home Office team was set up to ensure Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents would no longer find themselves classified as being in the UK illegally. But a month after one minister promised the cases would be resolved within two weeks, many remained destitute. In November 2018 home secretary Sajid Javid revealed that at least 11 Britons who had been wrongly deported had died. In April 2019 the government agreed to pay up to £200m in compensation.
Photograph: Douglas Miller/Hulton Archive
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The report, which examined 69,000 official documents, noted that the Home Office does not have a large black and minority-ethnic workforce at senior level. “I think it is unfortunate that most of the policymakers were white and most of the people involved were black,” a senior official is quoted as saying in the report.

The Windrush scandal unfolded after it became clear that the Home Office had wrongly designated thousands of legal UK residents as being in the country illegally.

Some were wrongly deported to countries they had left as children half a century earlier, and others were mistakenly detained in immigration detention centres.

The scandal led to the resignation in April 2018 of the then home secretary Amber Rudd and put Theresa May’s drive to create a “really hostile environment for illegal migration” under the spotlight.

In the past two years the government’s Windrush taskforce, set up to assist those affected, has given documentation to more than 8,000 people confirming that they have the right to remain in the UK.

'Lambs to the slaughter': 50 lives ruined by the Windrush scandal