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New words to an old song. How about thinking up a few verses about the USA, or as it is playfully called ‘The United States’.
US not evacuating Covid-19 stricken ship from Guam despite plea
12:48 pm today
The US Defense Secretary Mark Esper says it is not time to evacuate an aircraft carrier docked in Guam which is reeling from an outbreak of Covid-19 despite a letter from the commander of the ship pleading for help.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/413131/us-not-evacuating-covid-19-stricken-ship-from-guam-despite-plea
The song? Flanders and Swann with The English are Best. (Does that sound a bit Trumpian?)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vh-wEXvdW8
6 months ago all those neoliberal apologists who lost it over the big four banks having to put 18% away in capital reserve ratios all of a sudden forget how stupidly wrong they were.
Malcolm Evans cartoon from the other day is as clever as if Baldrick had made it up. Have a look ar March 25.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/category/bloggers/malcolm-evans/
This is not clever. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/413106/people-say-they-re-struggling-to-get-financial-support-from-work-and-income-during-covid-19-lockdown
Mary and her partner are both in their 50s and on the benefit.
Between them, they get roughly $186 a week, plus some temporary additional support to pay off a car.
As the lockdown drew near, their cupboards were almost empty, Mary said.
She applied for an emergency food grant a week ago and heard nothing, so she approached advocacy group Auckland Action Against Poverty (AAAP) for help.
Her advocate applied for them and also heard nothing back.
“She lent me $50 to get bread and butter. We were very grateful for that because we had absolutely nothing in our cupboards or fridge.”
Her emergency grant arrived on Monday – $150 for food and $50 for petrol.
But she didn’t find that out until she called Work and Income about a separate matter….
Auckland Action Against Poverty spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said Work and Income’s system was “chaos”.
“We’re incredibly concerned about the fact that Work and Income’s emails and online systems are completely overloaded,” he said.
“People are going for days without accessing emergency assistance for things like food grants or even get into income support for those that are recently unemployed.”
News today that America’s Covid death total for March 2020 was similar to it’s monthly gun deaths (several thousand suicide and homicides). There have been projections put forward for the number of Covid deaths to be expected in the country and in particular a large increase in mortality has been modelled: upwards of 240,000 to die (Noack et al, 2020). It seems unusual that there should suddenly be an explosion of cases and deaths in the US given that there were more than 600,000 visitors to America at the end of 2019 (Shivdas, 2020) from the supposed epicenter of the outbreak, China, but it is only now months later that the death toll is manifesting and supposedly at an increasing rate. The world death rate per number of positive cases is 5% but the total covid deaths as a proportion of the global population is 10,000 times less (that is, the chance of you dying from Covid are greatly decreased if you don’t know you have it, or coincidentally, more people probably have it but don’t know it). America currently has 189,000 infections. Some research (Verity at al, 2020) suggests the death rate may be as low as 0.66% deaths per positive cases, meaning the US should expect even fewer deaths in projections. One way to avoid crystal ball gazing and substantiate the Covid effect however would be to check any change to absolute death rates in a time period to see if a significant difference is seen from 8.3 baseline deaths per thousand normally seen in the US annually.
Noack, R. et al. (2020). White house task force projects 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in US, even with mitigation efforts. Retrieved from
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/31/coronavirus-latest-news/%3foutputType=amp
Shivdas, S. (2020). Chinese travel to the U.S. Shrinks 4.7% in the first 9 months of 2019. Retrieved from
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSL3N25W2OE
Verity, R. et al. (2020). Estimates of the severity of Coronavirus disease 2019: a model based analysis. Retrieved from
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext
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