COVID-19 #13 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Disease

[Guest]

Word out of one region in Russia claims that the actual case and death count is actually 20 times the officially reported numbers.

Quote

Instead of COVID-19, many Russian patients have been diagnosed with the more generic-sounding "community-acquired pneumonia," or CAP, which describes all the symptoms of a coronavirus infection but without an official virus test to determine the cause of the patient's illness.

If the overall rate of infection and death in Russia followed the same pattern as Dagestan's, Russia could have actually been hit by more than a million cases and already suffered more than 50,000 deaths from the pandemic.

 

[Winterfell is Burning]

10 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I have a more cynical take. That man lusts for a dictatorship. And a crisis is a perfect way to establish one. 

Emergency powers are hard to let go of, and people are often all too willing to provide them for a sense of security. 

Yeah, but what Bolsonaro is trying to do, if anything, it's the opposite- while someone like Orban used the measures to give himself and the government emergency unlimited powers, restricting freedom of movement and assembly, Bolsonaro is stimulating people to go out, meet in the streets, go to work, and even have political rallies. If depended only on him, there would be virtually no restrictions to anyone working now, probably not even wearing masks.

Also, COVID-19 is actually having an effect of descentralizing power in Brazil- now the president tries to impose measures and open the economy, lives be damned, and the states, municipalities, and Congress just ignore him and do their own thing. To be fair, that's a continuation of a process that started with Dilma Rousseff and continued with Temer of weaker presidents eroding central authority, but now the crisis is amplifying it.

 

 

[rotting sea cow]

OK. Trump has threatened to withdraw US from the WHO in this letter

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1262577580718395393/photo/1

(forget the fact that he probably didn't write it by himself)

1.- Of course we know it is attempt to sidestep the blame and cover up his own failures, as countries have independence from the WHO to implement whatever policies deem necessary to protect the health of the population. In fact, US received intelligence reports regarding the situation in Wuhan as early as the 3d of January and they didn't do anything.

2.- Regardless of that, there is a nice summary of some of the WHO failures in the response to this crisis. I'd add to the list.

- The WHO insistence in not closing borders as late as mid-March (as far as I recall) despite the virus was clearly spreading between countries and the Italian outbreak was already looking very bad.

- The WHO opposition to the use of masks based on the claim that the virus is not "airbone", countries went their own ways and the WHO gave in after a while.

- Ah... Let's not forget the Ibuprofen blunder. One day was very likely to kill a patient, the next day everything was fine.

Something else?

 

[Which Tyler]

UK Excess death stats: