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The Glass Plate

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By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

National Health Institute

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1. Instituto Nacional de Salud -INS- (National Health Institute) is one of the State-funded leading health and biomedicine institutions in charge of: i. Developing and managing scientific knowledge on health and biomedicine, in order to contribute the health conditions of people; ii. Researching health and biomedicine through basic and applied sciences; iii. Monitoring health safety; iv. Act as a national laboratory of reference.
2. During the beginning of Covid 19, INS has monitored the cases in Colombia, analyzed positive results from national labs, organize and systematize datasets; inform citizens about infection numbers and projections, and recommend epidemiological models to the central government.

Source link (here)

National Health Institute: Open Data

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https://www.datos.gov.co/Salud-y-Protecci-n-Social/Casos-positivos-de-COVID-19-en-Colombia/gt2j-8ykr/data

This is the online open data about the evolution of COVID-19 displayed by the National Health Institute INS (Instituto Nacional de Salud) from Colombia.

1. The INS publishes this data after gathering results from the rest of the country.
2. This informations supports government´s decisions on quarantine, projections and bringing normal life back.
3. The INS has criticized the results of tests received from some regions. They argue that they are not well handled and they must not to be reconfirmed.

The Group of Inmunovirology of the University of Antioquia

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The Group of Inmunovirology of the University of Antioquia isolated and cultured SARS-CoV2, the pathogen that causes the COVID-19. This will allow researchers to test how the virus acts against antiviral medication and desinfectant products, that will provide key information about the effectiveness of those.

Link source (here)

Evidence on cabin desinfection

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Cabin disinfection started to by adopted in different public places in Colombia, either by initiative of the private sector or public institutions. However, in this bulletin, the Ministry of Health reminds that they could harm human health and there is not evidence of its effectiveness.

https://www.minsalud.gov.co/Paginas/Cabinas-desinfectantes-no-son-recomendables-para-covid-19.aspx

National Health Institute

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https://www.datos.gov.co/Salud-y-Protecci-n-Social/Casos-positivos-de-COVID-19-en-Colombia/gt2j-8ykr/data

1. The INS publishes this data after gathering results from the rest of the country.
2. This informations supports government´s decisions on quarantine, projections and bringing normal life back.
2. The INS has criticized the results of tests received from some regions. They argue that they are not well handled and they must not to be reconfirmed.

Paraguay´s ayudapy platform

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The government of Paraguay released ayudapy.org a georeference and crowdsourcing platform to donate, volunteer, and inform about individual needs (food, medicine, childcare, and hygiene products) during the COVID-19 crisis. Paraguay has one the lowest infection rates of Latin America, and since the government decided to lock down citizens in March, people have suffered from food scarcity (link). Ayudapy has been criticised because people seem to to not getting help to their houses.