April 3rd, 2020
Global Cases:1,033,210; Global Deaths:54,442; Recovered:220,017
Yup, we have passed the million mark. Well done global humanity, you are hitting this one out of park! As Donald Trump is famous and much derided for saying, ‘we are going to win so much you’re going to be sick’. And how right he was!
Meanwhile, locally here in Ireland, we had our biggest one day jump in infection numbers. The new case number, 402, was received gloomily, as there was hopes, based on declining numbers in previous days (April 1 cases: 212), we were starting to see a trend of decline. Not so. In fact the messaging this week from Ministers and Health experts is that we are in this for the long haul. After ramping up the social restrictions in the last 3 weeks, clearly the powers-that-be feel they now have us where they want us and the messaging has moved onto one of settle in, these restrictions are going nowhere soon…despite the initial announcement of two weeks duration.
The numbers in the US are unlike anywhere else. Many defenders of Donald Trump spend their time online, not defending his efforts because they are indefensible, no, instead, they spend their time questioning the Chinese numbers. That’s the playbook. When Donald does something really stupid, their defence is whataboutism, that is they accuse somebody on the other side of doing the same thing. When he started separating migrant children from parents, he claimed that Obama did it first; likewise, the Wall Street Journal accused the Obama administration of deporting more migrants than Trump. The unwillingness of the populist right to defend Trump’s policies, primarily because those policies are based on an unpalatable prioritisation of capital over people, is, other than those policies themselves, the populist right’s least attractive quality.
The US will have a longer time of it than most. The virus has hit the globally connected coast states first. These are mostly democrat and have for the most part taken the threat more seriously. The fly-over red, Republican states are yet to see the surge, but will be hard hit when it comes due to their reluctance to embrace socialist concepts such as social distancing.
Our Covidiot award of the day goes to Brian Kemp, Governor of Georgia, who months into the pandemic, announced that he introduced quarantine restrictions yesterday after just discovering that asymptomatic carriers can transmit the virus. As the top rated comment on Reddit put it, ‘when When admitting you’re an idiot is the best defence you can come up with’. Truly one of Trump’s sonderkommandos.