That’s from the Kirkus review of Mary Trump’s book on Uncle Donald in her book Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man:
Her mission in the book to be published on 28 July by Simon & Schuster is to take down Donald Trump. Continue reading Trump: The world’s most dangerous man?
Sundry news about COVID 19.
World-wide, the 7-day average of new daily cases is now above 140,000 and rising, with a spike above 150,000. See WHO warns pandemic is ‘accelerating’ with record spike in new infections.
That article also reports that sampling of wastewater in the northern cities of Milan and Turin shows the virus was in Italy last December, at least two months before the country’s devastating outbreak. There is no concrete evidence that the outbreak came from those early infections, although one would hardly think it faded away. Perhaps the infected people were not identified as having a ‘novel’ virus. Continue reading COVID virus news 20/6
During the whole coronavirus period it has seemed to me that Australia has a world class expert on the topic behind every tree. One who stood out to me was Professor Raina MacIntyre, Head of the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute and NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, UNSW. She seemed to tell it like it is, had an appropriate sense of the precautionary principle, and was not on any panel advising politicians. It is well-known that experts advising politicians often end up tayloring their advice to what the pollies want to do.
In Australia the common advice from the authorities is for the plebs to restrict wearing masks to those who have the virus.
To cut to the chase, MacIntyre says she wears a mask whenever she steps outside her home, and wears one inside when anyone comes to visit. Continue reading Covid 19: the importance of face masks
When Queensland behind interstate barriers opened to intrastate tourism, we see that tourism operators were ‘ecstatic’ about easing restrictions if you scroll down this article:
“Over the last 24 hours, the phones have been ringing off the hook with travellers from the south-east corner confirming their accommodation and looking forward to their journeys, ” Mr Olsen said.
It raises the question as to how much scope there is in the intra-state tourist market, and secondly whether business is suffering too much through trying to wipe out the coronavirus. Continue reading Covid, tourism and the value of a human life
Here the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People on January 28 in Beijing, with appropriate distancing. Dr Tedros later commented that Xi had a surprising mastery of the detail of what was going on. Two days later the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern. People have made up stories about this meeting and the sequence, but it seems to me an orderly progression of events, coming 10 days after China had alerted the world to a person to person highly infectious novel coronavirus, then sealing off and locking down Wuhan on 23 January. Continue reading We need to talk about China
We’ve just had three reasons to celebrate the work of nurses:
One would think that Australia’s state premiers have performed well in the so-called war with Covid 19. Newspoll on 27 April found that they had indeed done so in the perception of voters. It’s pay-walled, but here is the graph:
That is a bit hard to read, but the satisfaction rate on the second graph runs from the bottom, Palaszczuk (Qld) 72, Berejiklian (NSW) 77, Marshall (SA) 82, Andrews (Vic) 83, Gutwein (Tas) 89 and McGowan (WA) 94. Continue reading Weekly salon 3/5
Tim Colebatch wrote an interesting article “There is an Alternative to Lockdowns” for Inside Story. The article compares the performance of various countries in their handling of the corona virus pandemic. Tim’s assessment is that the outstanding performer has been Taiwan. It has been the world’s most successful country in fighting the virus. In a land with almost as many people as Australia, only six people have died, and 426 have been infected. This has been achieved without the economic and social collateral damage that has been a feature of the Australian approach.
This post looks at what Tim has reported and asks whether Australia should change the way it is dealing with the epidemic. Continue reading WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM TAIWAN COV19
The wretched virus has stolen our conversation, so I decided to run with it and post some new material here in ‘salon’ style.
The answer is that we don’t know yet, according to the New Scientist. Continue reading COVID 19 salon 3/4
