Coronavirus News (163)

Iraqi hospitals become nexus of infection as coronavirus cases rise dramatically among doctors   On the front lines, Iraq's doctors are contracting the coronavirus by the hundreds, as a rising wave of infections threatens to crush the country's health-care system. ..........  “Our hospitals are meant to treat people. Instead, they’re breeding the infection” .........   “My doctor friends who get it now wait 10 days for test results, even though they know they have it. The management doesn’t care about our safety, they just care that the staff is working.” ...........  Poor medical infrastructure, shortages of personal protective equipment and public skepticism about the severity of the threat are all to blame for the increasing cases across Iraq .............    “I dreamed all my life of being a doctor. I regret that now.” .............   He said his cousin, a doctor in the eastern province of Diyala, died in March, begging for an ambulance to take him back to a facility that would treat him. ........  many in Iraq worry it could bring an already staggering health system to its knees. ...........  “Don’t breathe too much,” said a security guard at the door. “Covid is everywhere here.” ............ In 2019, Iraq allocated just 2.5 percent of its national budget to health care. .........  Zena al-Rubaia, a technician in the Baghdad laboratory that runs coronavirus tests, woke up May 28 to find her limbs were too heavy to move, she recalled in an interview. In the next room, her mother was calling out with a fever. Days later, both tested positive for the coronavirus, and Rubaia felt sure that her work had brought it home. She was hospitalized for a week, and at the height of her pain, she feared her lungs would give up. ..............    Her mother’s breathing was ragged and her limbs were turning blue. Rubaia sat at her bedside for days in the hospital, feeling ridden with guilt as she watched her final breaths. .........  “I am the one who did this to her,” she wrote on her Facebook. Days later, her father died, too.

In countries keeping the coronavirus at bay, experts watch U.S. case numbers with alarm  “It really does feel like the U.S. has given up”    

Trump claims the coronavirus pandemic is ending. Data and the experts disagree.  “Nasdaq hit 10,000 for the first time, an all-time record,” Trump said. “Nasdaq, that was three, four days ago. In the middle of the pandemic, not in the middle, toward the end of the pandemic.” That’s where Trump would like to think the country is: at the tail end of the pandemic. This isn’t really a new impulse for Trump, who has consistently played down the scale of the spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States. ...........   In February and March, such efforts were mostly in service of not spooking the markets, which got spooked anyway. It seems quite possible that Trump’s motivation now is the same, that he seeks to maintain the sense that the country is ready to see a return to normal economic activity to make the outcome self-fulfilling. ........... “If I didn’t act, we would have had 3 million deaths,” Trump claimed. “And instead we’re at 110,000. And we could be heading to a number that’s, you know, higher than 150,000 to 200,000. It could be ending all now depending on how it goes.” .............. Fauci’s broader point wasn’t that there’s been a new surge in coronavirus cases. “We’re still in the first wave,” he said, “because even though there’s variability throughout the country, where some places, like New York City, are going very nicely down, staying down so that they can start to reopen, simultaneously, we’re seeing in certain states an increase in cases and even now an increase, in some of the states, of hospitalization.” .................   Over the entire duration of the pandemic, about 5 percent of those who contracted the virus have died.  .........  If the number of new cases each day holds near 25,000, the eventual toll will depend on how often those cases are deadly. If the mortality rate moving forward is as low as 2 percent, that means we’ll land at 500 deaths per day — or 15,000 more deaths each month. ........... more than 200,000 deaths by Oct. 1. .........  the model predicts an increase in the number of deaths per day toward the end of the summer, when students go back to school and parents are then better able to return to work ......... The efforts to contain the virus that halted the economy, for example, are estimated to have prevented 60 million additional coronavirus infections. .......    One, Trump’s, is based on hope and optimism, while the other, Fauci’s, is based on the data. ........ Time eventually weighed in. The subject of the dispute was the drug hydroxychloroquine, and Fauci and data won the debate.

Coronavirus News (162)

Iraqi hospitals become nexus of infection as coronavirus cases rise dramatically among doctors

Half of the ENTIRE city budget goes to policing while education, hospitals and mental health services are left with crumbs. We cannot continue this way.

Posted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday, June 22, 2020

 

Elites in Beijing see America in decline, hastened by Trump    Mr Trump and Mr Biden may share a capacity for talking (and talking) in pursuit of a deal. But Mr Xi’s grim, security-first worldview leaves little room for foreign friendships, let alone with garrulous Americans. ..........  Mr Trump is called ignorant, erratic and tiresome, but not without his uses. He is praised for an apparent indifference to ideology. He is complimented for his reluctance to condemn Chinese repression in such places as Xinjiang. People familiar with the thinking of Chinese generals assert, approvingly, that Mr Trump dislikes military adventures abroad. ............... Chinese leaders initially mistook Mr Trump for a pragmatic tycoon, a type they have met before. Now he is called a narcissist who cares only about his own interests, starting with his re-election. ..........   Satisfying Mr Trump has effectively parked America’s bipartisan demands for structural reforms. That does not make Chinese elites relaxed, though. They fret that Mr Trump has been “kidnapped” by the truly ideological China hawks who surround him. .............  As for Mr Biden, in Beijing he is called a member of the former ruling establishment that saw economic interdependence with China as a source of stability, not danger. Mr Biden was a player in Obama-era campaigns to seek China’s help in tackling climate change and other global challenges. Yet, in China, there is strikingly little nostalgia for those days. Some grumble that such engagement rested on a mistaken American belief that China would converge politically with the West as it grew richer. ...............  The view in China is that its best scientists and tech firms are busy disproving such boasts, tipping America into a crisis of confidence and anti-China hysteria. ..............    Just as bipartisan opinion in Washington has coalesced around alarm at China’s rise, an elite consensus has emerged in the Chinese capital. Especially in this summer of pandemic and street protests, America is called a nation in decline: a rich country too divided, selfish and racist to keep its citizens safe. Chinese elites see Mr Trump as a symptom and an agent of that decline. ..............    Chinese netizens mockingly call him Chuan Jianguo, or “Build-up-the-country Trump”. Their joke, that he is a double-agent wrecking America to make China strong, prompts lines like “Comrade Chuan Jianguo, don’t blow your cover!” ................   elites focused on the economy fear the premature collapse of a global trading order that has profited China mightily. That prods some to hanker for Mr Biden  

Why China bullies It sees a world distracted by covid-19, and too economically weak to hold it back  .......  China is often called a country in thrall to nationalism. ..........   Chinese nationalism is often compared to a tiger which Communist Party bosses have fed for years—and which they are now condemned to ride, for fear of being eaten if they dismount. .............   In reality, popular nationalism resembles a deep, man-made reservoir, created by the damming-up and channelling of long-existing forces. Most of the time, Chinese leaders can restrain or unleash public rage at will. Only in the biggest crises do they feel constrained to open the floodgates to ease dangerous pressure. ................   Often dismissed by Chinese as poor and chaotic, India is not in the rogue’s gallery of imperialist bullies that China’s young learn about at school. Vitally, two-way trade with India is rather modest: 11 countries are larger trade partners for China. All those factors leave Chinese rulers free to downplay a crisis with India. For even when China appears reckless, it is calculating rewards and risks. .............. China uses coercion “when the need to establish a reputation for resolve is high and the economic cost is low”. ............  China especially likes to inflict asymmetric economic pain, as when it banned imports of bananas from the Philippines during a territorial dispute in 2012, devastating Filipino farmers but barely hurting its own consumers. ..............   Recent Chinese boycotts have targeted things like Australian beef or Houston Rockets games, but not more vital commodities. ..........  Beyond its readiness to skirmish on the Indian border, it has decided to impose a draconian national-security law on Hong Kong, slapped trade boycotts on Australia and other Western nations, and sent coastguard ships to sink or harass foreign vessels in the contested waters of the South China Sea. It is also true that the world is geopolitically distracted. It is hard for governments to chide China over democracy in Hong Kong, say, while also negotiating to buy Chinese ventilators. ..............  Chinese officials are betting on domestic demand to drive their country’s recovery from covid-19. ........ China is also being unusually assertive. ........ having limited economic ties with China may not make other countries safer. India is the latest country to be confronted with that dilemma. It will not be the last.