Bridging the pandemic divide

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/07/2020 (1922 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One Winnipegger is trying to make sense of how governments around the world are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, one interview at a time.

A foreign policy and health specialist, Sai Shanthanand Rajagopal has been co-interviewing and recording video calls with world leaders in an effort to educate the public on the international response to an unprecedented health crisis in recent months.

“I thought that maybe, we could have some cross-talk between countries and see if we could share some insights,” said Rajagopal, who is co-hosting the Bridging Borders Project with Henna Hundal, a friend and a fellow member of Harvard University’s Class of 2019.

Rajagopal, a 2020 Rhodes Scholar, and Hundal launched the interview series in the spring. Since April, the duo has interviewed a total of 40 presidents, prime ministers and other top officials involved in pandemic policy-making — thanks, in part, to their connections through their Ivy League alma mater and previous international research projects.

Their interview subjects have ranged from Kosovo’s prime minister to the president of the Navajo Nation in the United States to the Canadian-Icelandic first lady of Iceland, while their conversations have touched on everything from public health protocols to economic struggles to international politics. The audio clips have aired on radio stations in the United States and are being uploaded online to the Bridging Borders Project website.

Some of the most interesting conversations Rajagopal said he has had with leaders to date from his Winnipeg studio (and Hundal, from her Boston home) have been with leaders from small countries who have had to get creative during the pandemic.

Rajagopal pointed to an interesting conversation with the prime minister of Bhutan, who spoke about the country’s strict three weeks of quarantine for all recent arrivals and lockdown on all entries except for a single port. In another interview, the hosts learned how the economy of Sint Maarten, part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has struggled because it heavily relies on tourism and has had to further indebt itself to the Netherlands.

It was after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called on all Canadians to return home in March that Rajagopal came up with the idea for the project and collaborated with Hundal, who is an experienced radio host. At the time, being an international mechanical engineering student in Boston, he was watching how his two homes of Manitoba and Massachusetts were responding to the virus outbreak.

“The rhetoric in Canada was so much more ‘everyone must stay home’ — and they did,” said Rajagopal, who is the foreign affairs critic for the Green Party of Canada.

The 23-year-old recalls talking to his family in Winnipeg about how the whole city had seemingly shut down when soon as the virus was detected; meanwhile, in Boston, where he was packing his bags, people were only starting to practice physical distancing.

On Saturday, Manitoba announced a single additional case of COVID-19, bringing the total tally of lab-confirmed positive and probable cases to 337. The death toll remains at seven in the province.

Also Saturday, Massachusetts reported 177 new cases, making the state’s total case count 106,664, upwards of 8,200 of which have been fatal.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie