I watched the press briefing yesterday noon. The U.N press briefing on October 14th. The briefing addressed a variety of topics ranging from Climate to Israel, to the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. There were a few issues that stood out to me as important that I noted. The first was the huge health crisis in Libya regarding covid-19. The numbers were insane regarding the 44,985 cases and 656 deaths, and how the number of functioning health care facilities has dropped by 38%. It was just a stark contrast when hearing about how covid is running rampant in a country like Libya, where the response may be dampened because of low capacity and resources, compared to hearing covid news in U.S where the issues are stemming from the constant politicization of the virus and the ineptitude of its leaders. The second issue for me was the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. We know that Azerbaijan attacked an autonomous state where many Armenians live but it was interesting to see how these attacks caused a burden on healthcare and how covid cases went up as a direct result. I didn’t know that the U.N had issued a global ceasefire, but when secretary-general said “as long as humans keep fighting humans, the only winner will be covid-19”, really resonated with me and that statement seems to hold true across all nations at the moment. The last thing that I thought was really important was during the questions and answers segment at the end. There was a question posed to Mr. Bays regarding an offer by Putin to vaccinate the U.N staff. The response said that discussions are ongoing but stressed the importance of any vaccines being cleared by the World Health Organization. This was crazy to me because I was unaware of Putin’s offer to the U.N but am following events in Russia, and while I know that Russia has made developments on the vaccine, I’m not sure if its been tested enough to be released to the U.N or anyone for that matter.
