Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) at home: digital art-based mental health provision in response to COVID-19

This article will provide an example of how the 'Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP): Online psychosocial support through the arts in Rwanda' project used digital art-based workshops to facilitate social and community cohesion and mental health provision. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increased need for psychosocial support due to the economic and social pressures of lockdown and yet many individuals had less access to mental health provision. While many mental health services around the world went online, there was still a gap between the Global South and Global North in terms of digital literacy, access to smart phones and computers, and the variation between psychosocial support through individual vs. collective healing alongside Indigenous and traditional vs. western psychosocial approaches. Implications for the use of art-based digital methods as a tool for mental health provision during and after the wake of the pandemic are explored.

Assessing the risks of SARS-CoV-2 in wildlife.

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged from a wildlife source with transmission to humans followed by rapid geographic spread throughout the globe and severe impacts on both human health and the global economy. Since the onset of the pandemic, there have been many instances of human-to-animal transmission involving companion, farmed and zoo animals, and limited evidence for spread into free-living wildlife. The establishment of reservoirs of infection in wild animals would create significant challenges to infection control in humans and could pose a threat to the welfare and conservation status of wildlife. We discuss the potential for exposure, onward transmission and persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in an initial selection of wild mammals (bats, canids, felids, mustelids, great apes, rodents and cervids). Dynamic risk assessment and targeted surveillance are important tools for the early detection of infection in wildlife, and here we describe a framework for collating and synthesising emerging information to inform targeted surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in wildlife. Surveillance efforts should be integrated with information from public and veterinary health initiatives to provide insights into the potential role of wild mammals in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2.