Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

I really should read my own blog.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Come on, man.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Everybody saw this coming.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Tuesday/Wednesday, April 7/8

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Tuesday/Wednesday, April 7/8

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25Comments

  1. 1.

    Butch

    Can we please agree that the next broadcast reporter who decides to lead a piece with the trite “a glimmer of hope” is given a Sharpie and a cardboard square and told to go live on the street for a year?  It has replaced “what do you need” (asked of medical professionals) as useless.

  3. 3.

    WereBear

    I wish the headline writers weren’t such clickbait. As fast as the shelters emptied, panicked people can fill them up again.

    Even ones who should know better. Like, people who don’t let their cats GO OUT.

  4. 4.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s worldometer numbers for today. 156 new cases, running total 4,119; two deaths, running total 65. We seem to be holding steady here at that level of daily new cases. Health Ministry DG Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said today the war is not lost but it’s still not won, either. He said a few Malaysians here and there are still dodging the movement control order, with the inevitable result: infections.

    In other news, I just broke a string today while practising scales. Feh.

  6. 6.

    Tony Jay

     

    I’m reventing because The Fucking Guardian has pissed me off(again) in the last few minutes.

    You may or may not recall me having a little vent last week when I got shit-canned from The Guardian Live comment board for disgraceful sin of using the word “anti-Semitism” without prefacing it with the phrase “Jeremy Corbyn is the font and source of all…”

    The comment they booted me for included this spooky prophesy.

    Whoever wins the Labour leadership election there’s one cast iron certainty you can take to the bank. There will be an instant resurrection of the anti-Semitism smears, with front paged demands from the usual suspects for “clarity” and a “fresh start” in the form of an internal inquiry with the power to enforce mass suspensions of anyone ever labelled as insufficiently hostile to the previous leadership, an expedited disciplinary system overseen by ‘trusted’ Party figures acceptable to the JLM (Jewish Labour Movement) and BJD (Board of Jewish Deputies)…..If Starmer wins the calls will start slowly. If it’s Long-Bailey they’ll start before the result is announced. And I think we all know where the media campaign will start.

    Starmer won, and we didn’t have to wait long for the other shoe to fall. In a meeting with four of the most vicious pricks to contest the role of AIPAC’s mouthpiece in Britain, Starmer bent the knee and agreed the terms under which the Purge will take place.

    “At today’s meeting, I (Starmer) committed to begin work on setting up an independent complaints process, cooperating fully with the EHRC’s inquiry and asking for a report on all outstanding cases to be on my desk at [the end of] the week.
    “I also discussed with the Jewish Labour Movement my ambition to roll out training of all Labour party staff as soon as practically possible.”

    Now, I’m old enough to remember when these arseholes presented a list of demands to Corbyn that included an ‘independent’ complaints process for anti-Semitism accusations that gave them a veto on its membership (only Friends of Bibi need apply) and included justifications for expulsion from the Labour Party that were lifted more or less wholesale from The Crucible. They fucked that up by simultaneously trying to label anyone who didn’t consider Corbyn to be History’s Greatest Monster as ‘not Real Jews’, and had to back off when the mainstream Jewish Community started tut-tutting their claims to speak for them. But they’ve got a version of it now, and I simply cannot wait to see how ruthlessly they start to expel anyone to the Left of Alan Dershowitz those pesky anti-Semites.

    I’m also old enough to remember when the Labour leader so much as asking for the case evidence behind these anti-Semitism allegations to be run across his desk was cast-iron proof of a sinister plot to bury the truth and hide the Labour Party’s transformation into the National Socialist British Workers Party. The BBC even based an entire cynical hatchet-job prime-time Panorama documentary on it. I’d ask the home of “quality, trustworthy, fact-checked journalism” why it’s suddenly evidence of decisive, fully-tumescent leadership now that Starmer is in the hotseat, but there’s only so much information to be gleaned from “your comment has been removed because it failed to meet our Community guidelines“.

    Thank Jeebus the Party elected the smart, sensible, not at all spineless candidate instead of that dirty little Corbynite (or whatever ‘lifted from the nearest Right Wing rag’ term of endearment the Kool Kidz are using these days). I feel sooooooo confident that this isn’t going to quickly descend into a Fapathon of Guardian-approved expulsions that will never – quite – cleanse the Party of the Sin that Keeps on Giving.

    These fucking people.

    Vent off.

  7. 7.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Amir Khalid:In other news, I just broke a string today while practising scales. Feh.

    Leo Kottke never let a broken string stop him. ;-) I feel your pain. It’s the little things that allow us to go on.

    @WereBear: Pf all the things that might get us, Miss Kitty would be the last. Much to her disappointment I’m sure.

  8. 8.

    Amir Khalid

    @WereBear:

    Yeah, but this is the second high E string I’ve broken in a few weeks on Queen, the Tele. I guess there’s always Lady. She’s the Strat.

  9. 9.

    Ryan

    I love that last tweet. Yes, pet owners need not worry, provided they do not like their cats.

  10. 10.

    Amir Khalid

    @WereBear:

    I have not been isolating from Bianca, who is very much an indoor cat these days. In fact, we are in almost constant contact. I guess the same is true for most other cat-owned people. What I’m hearing from the BBC and other news sources is that while cats of all sizes can catch the coronavirus, there have been no recorded cases of cat to human contagion or cat deaths from covid-19. What does the info you have say?

  13. 13.

    YY_Sima Qian

    As the articles have indicated, the lifting of the lock down in Wuhan hasn’t meant much to me. The residential compounds are still managed with severe restrictions on movement. Each household is allowed one person to go outside per day, for two hours, to shop for grocery or run errands. Most people are relying on online orders, however. This is the level of restrictions saw in Beijing or Hangzhou during the height of the epidemic.

    One can only freely enter and exit the compounds if one has a “Return to Work” letter from the employer. In theory, one can only use that as a pass for commuting between home and workplace. If an employer or employees are found to be abusing the system, the authorities can quickly shut down operations. Of course, as is often the case in China, enforcement can be uneven among the residential compounds.

    Since the nature of my work is work from home, with lots of business travel, I can’t obtain a “Return to Work” letter form my employer, so I will have to wait until the restrictions at the residential compound level is lifted, hopefully in the not to distant future. There won’t be much business travel in the short to medium term, and many cities in China require travelers from Wuhan or Hubei to present a negative PCR test report within the past 7 days, in addition to the green health code, before being allowed to enter. I am sure many  customers and partners would be weary of meeting someone from Wuhan face to face for a while. I think we will find out that many of the travels and face to face meetings aren’t really that critical, after all.

  14. 14.

    WereBear

    @Amir Khalid: Precisely that. Cats exposed in laboratory conditions to high levels of the virus, catch it.

    That’s IT. I’m keeping my cats close. They are locked down with the humans :)

    Besides, they are essential personnel, in what just might become an essential business.

  15. 15.

    Amir Khalid

    @Tony Jay:

    Thanks. That’s useful to know.

    I wonder what you thought of FSG’s recent actions re the pandemic: announcing the staff furlough at Liverpool, getting denounced by fans and club legends, backing down and rescinding the furlough. I reckon it’s good that they can be talked out of their really bad ideas, but not so good that they have the bad idea in the first place.

  16. 16.

    Tony Jay

    @Amir Khalid:

    Couldn’t agree more. If nothing else the entire PR unit needs to be taken out the back of Anfield and beaten with knotted Everton scarves which now read “THE NON-FURLOUGHED PEOPLE’S CLUB”

    Despicable, but worse than that , stupid.

  17. 17.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Bill Gates was on the Daily Show last night and was commenting that people who think there is a choice between lock down and opening up and taking the deaths don’t get it because 80% of the population will lock down and avoid crowds by themselves. Gates point no return to normal until a vaccine. So Austria will see a lot people die and still have a crappy economy.

  18. 18.

    VOR

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: I agree. We need two things to return to normal. First, a vaccine. Second, some way to certify people who have already had COVID as capable of returning to work. But that requires a test to detect anti-bodies to COVID and I’m not clear that test currently exists. (IANAD) It also requires proof that people cannot get re-infected and I’m not clear we know that yet. Indeed, there were stories in the media about people in China getting re-infected. And that people with the anti-bodies can’t still be carriers, not clear we know that either. The certification as Post-COVID also needs to be pretty darn good because you know there will be a black market in fraudulent certifications.

  19. 19.

    TomatoQueen

    @Tony Jay:

     

    @Amir Khalid:

    Unless something has changed dramatically overnight, Mike Ashley’s furloughing of Newcastle employees has been met with little else than bleating and burps.

  20. 20.

    Betty

    The East Caribbean currency was just changed to some kind of synthetic, and they have bee warning people not to iron it. At time it came out, I wondered who would ever iron their money. So the Indian technique won’t work here.

  21. 21.

    Betty

    @Tony Jay: Good you can come here and vent at least. We are in total sympathy. I never thought the UK would reach this level, but I never thought the US would either.

  22. 22.

    Tony Jay

    @TomatoQueen:

    Yeah. And Tottenham. Funny that it’s Liverpool that gets it in the neck (unreservedly deservedly) for following in their footsteps.

  23. 23.

    Tony Jay

    @Betty:

    Thanks. I’d never have imagined that the newspaper at the forefront of reporting on the Israeli Government’s war-crimes would drop that topic like a hot mic the second Labour elected a leader who would actually vote – against – Bibi’s expansionist kingdom if made PM.

    Strange bedfellows make for unpleasant stains.

  24. 24.

    L85NJGT

    All those ventilators they are only starting to manufacture won’t arrive in time to help here, but maybe can do some good for the global poor. Once the appropriate payments are made to the appropriate Trump controlled fund.

  25. 25.

    GrueBleen

    Re the Helen Branswell post, I wonder why Australia didn’t appear anywhere in the lists: 6044 confirmed cases, 50 deaths (=0.8%) and it’s curve is now flattening nicely.

    Still I guess as only the 13th biggest economy in the world and only about 25 million population (plus a million or two “temporary visas”), it’s not particularly noticeable.

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