The Spill-Over Impact of the Novel Coronavirus-19 Pandemic on Medical Care and Disease Outcomes in Non-communicable Diseases: A Narrative Review

OBJECTIVES: The coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic has claimed more than 5 million lives worldwide by November 2021. Implementation of lockdown measures, reallocation of medical resources, compounded by the reluctance to seek help, makes it exceptionally challenging for people with non-communicable diseases (NCD) to manage their diseases. This review evaluates the spill-over impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with NCDs including cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes mellitus, chronic respiratory disease, chronic kidney disease, dementia, mental health disorders, and musculoskeletal disorders. METHODS: Literature published in English was identified from PubMed and medRxiv from January 1, 2019 to November 30, 2020. A total of 119 articles were selected from 6,546 publications found. RESULTS: The reduction of in-person care, screening procedures, delays in diagnosis, treatment, and social distancing policies have unanimously led to undesirable impacts on both physical and psychological health of NCD patients. This is projected to contribute to more excess deaths in the future. CONCLUSION: The spill-over impact of COVID-19 on patients with NCD is just beginning to unravel, extra efforts must be taken for planning the resumption of NCD healthcare services post-pandemic

"Mother-weights" and lost fathers: parents in South Asian American literature

That parent-child relationships should play a significant role within South Asian American literature is perhaps no surprise, since this is crucial material for any writer. But the particular forms they so often take – a dysfunctional mother-daughter dynamic, leading to the search for maternal surrogates; and the figure of the prematurely deceased father – are more perplexing. Why do families adhere to these patterns in so many South Asian American texts and what does that tell us about this œuvre? More precisely, why are mothers subjected to a harsher critique than fathers and what purpose does this critique serve? How might we interpret the trope of the untimely paternal death? In this article I will seek to answer these questions – arguably key to an understanding of this growing body of writing – by considering works produced between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century by a range of South Asian American writers

Dancing in the Diaspora: Cultural Long-Distance Nationalism and the Staging of Chineseness by San Francisco’s Chinese Folk Dance Association

<p>This essay analyzes the history of a San Francisco Bay Area cultural institution over a period of more than four decades, and, applying to it the concept of "cultural long-distance nationalism," it attempts to tease apart the complexity of cultural practice in diaspora. The organization in question is the Chinese Folk Dance Association (CFDA), founded in 1959, a pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) troupe of amateur dancers and musicians playing Chinese instruments. As someone who was peripherally involved with the group in the mid-1970s and early 1980s and was a friend or acquaintance of a few members of the group, I became curious about the changes in its activities, its performance programs, its roles in the Bay Area community, and its self-perceived relationship to the homeland over time. I have examined the CFDA’s performance programs, photographs, and press coverage since the 1970s (earlier archival material was not available to me), as well as interviewed three of its key figures and spoken on several occasions with one of the three, the long-time executive director of the group and a friend from graduate school. What I have found is that the changes undergone by the group reveal the multiplicity of factors that go into the staging of Chineseness in diaspora and the challenges inherent in such a process. The challenges are especially acute given how rapidly the nation-state to which a specific cultural presentation is tied—the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—has itself been undergoing rapid and radical transformations.</p&gt