up and down

@dharang This is what Donald Trump clarification on what he said. He said it is just meant as a sarcastic remark.

@dharang Here is the latest news to clear the air. Donald Trump clarified and said disinfectant remark is a sarcastic remark. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494519-trump-says-remarks-about-heat-light-disinfectant-were-sarcastic Trump says remarks about heat, light, disinfectant were sarcastic President Trump on Friday said he was being sarcastic when he suggested multiple times a day earlier that scientists should consider exposing the body to light, heat and disinfectants as a potential treatment for the coronavirus. "I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen," Trump told reporters at an Oval Office bill signing. "I was asking a sarcastic — and a very sarcastic question — to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside," the president continued. "But it does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands and that would make things much better. That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters." When a journalist in the Oval Office pointed out that Trump had turned to experts next to the stage when he first raised the idea on Thursday, the president claimed he was asking those officials "whether or not sun and disinfectant on the hands … can help us." The president's explanation drew skepticism among those who watched the briefing, where Trump directly turned to other government officials to ask about the idea. "It didn't seem like it was coming off as sarcastic when he was talking and turning to Dr. Birx on the side," Fox News anchor Bret Baier said on air after Trump's walk-back was reported. Trump on Thursday latched on to a presentation from a Department of Homeland Security official who detailed initial findings that the coronavirus deteriorates more quickly when subjected to higher levels of heat, humidity and ultraviolet rays from the sun. "So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it," Trump said. "And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting." Trump also asked if there was a way to use disinfectants on the body "by injection inside or almost a cleaning." Asked later if it was irresponsible to give Americans the impression that going outside amid the pandemic would be safe based on the findings, Trump turned to Deborah Birx, a physician coordinating the White House response to the pandemic, and inquired about using the light and heat as a treatment. "Deborah, have you ever heard of that? The heat and the light, relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?" "Not as a treatment," Birx replied. "I mean, certainly ... when you have a fever, it helps your body respond. But not as — I've not seen heat or light." "I think it’s a great thing to look at," Trump said. The president's remarks were widely and quickly panned by medical experts, elected officials and private companies who warned Americans not to ingest chemicals. Former Food and Drug Administration head Scott Gottlieb said there's "no circumstance" in which an individual should inject themselves with a disinfectant. The company that makes Lysol also warned on Friday against ingesting its products. The White House sought to pin the backlash on the media, issuing a statement that accused the press of taking Trump's remarks out of context. “President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing," press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said.

You are right.

You are right about this.

Latest data as of today, 24th April, 2020. Top best recovery rate (These countries have recorded more than 60% recovery rate) Data counted only for countries with more than 1000 cases. Country Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active Cases Percentage recovered from total cases 1. Thailand 2,854 +15 50 +0 2,490 314 87.25 % 2. Iceland 1,789 +0 10 +0 1,509 270 84.35 % 3. South Korea 10,708 +6 240 +0 8,501 1,967 78.59 % 4. Austria 15,071 +69 522 +0 11,872 2,677 79.39 % 5. Australia 6,675 +8 79 +4 5,136 1,460 76.94 % 6. Iran 88,194 +1,168 5,574 +93 66,599 16,021 75.51 % 7. New Zealand 1,456 +5 17 +1 1,095 344 75.21 % 8. Switzerland 28,677 +181 1,551 +2 20,600 6,526 71.83 % 9. Iraq 1,677 +0 83 +0 1,171 423 69.83 % 10. Germany 153,393 +264 5,575 +0 106,800 41,018 69.63 % 11. Hong Kong 1,036 +0 4 +0 699 333 67.47 % 12. Denmark 8,210 +137 403 +9 5,526 2,281 67.31 % 13. Malaysia 5,691 +88 96 +1 3,663 1,932 64.36 % 14. Azerbaijan 1,592 +44 21 +1 1,013 588 63.63 %

This is the similar to this article. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/trump-coronavirus-treatment-disinfectant The best quote from the article. Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, added: “It is incomprehensible to me that a moron like this holds the highest office in the land and that there exist people stupid enough to think this is OK. I can’t believe that in 2020 I have to caution anyone listening to the president that injecting disinfectant could kill you.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/04/angela-merkel-germany-coronavirus-pandemic/610225/ The Secret to Germany’s COVID-19 Success: Angela Merkel Is a Scientist The chancellor’s rigor in collating information, her honesty in stating what is not yet known, and her composure are paying off. BERLIN—Today, we face the global outbreak of a disease that has the potential to catalyze what the historian Eva Schlotheuber terms a “pandemic of the mind.” As misinformation proliferates and lines between fact and fiction are routinely and nonchalantly crossed, world leaders must, now more than ever, illuminate a thoughtful path forward, one reliant on science and evidence-based reasoning. Indeed, many have. One leader goes further still. Trusted by her people to navigate this outbreak’s murky waters, without inciting or succumbing to a pandemic of the mind, one politician is less a commander in chief and more a scientist in chief: Angela Merkel. For weeks now, Germany’s leader has deployed her characteristic rationality, coupled with an uncharacteristic sentimentality, to guide the country through what has thus far been a relatively successful battle against COVID-19. The pandemic is proving to be the crowning challenge for a politician whose leadership style has consistently been described as analytical, unemotional, and cautious. In her quest for social and economic stability during this outbreak, Merkel enjoys several advantages: a well-respected, coordinated system of scientific and medical expertise distributed across Germany; the hard-earned trust of the public; and the undeniable fact that steady and sensible leadership is suddenly back in style. With 30 years of political experience, and facing an enormous challenge that begs calm, reasoned thinking, Merkel is at peak performance modeling the humble credibility of a scientist at work. And it seems to be paying off, both politically and scientifically. Born in West Germany in 1954, Merkel was raised in a small East German town to the north of Berlin. Her father was a Lutheran pastor and a target of surveillance by East Germany’s security service, the Stasi. A brilliant student, Merkel learned early on “not to put herself in the center of things” lest she expose herself or her family to undue scrutiny, according to Stefan Kornelius, her official biographer and the foreign editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Merkel, who had by then earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry, was working as a research scientist. Soon after, she left her job to join a new political group that had formed in her neighborhood, thus quietly launching her political career. She rose in German politics and, through sheer smarts and a series of well-timed tactical maneuvers, ascended in 2005 to the chancellery, the head of Germany’s federal government. Her trajectory was dramatic and uncommon—for a woman, for an East German, and for a trained scientist with no background in law or civil service. Why did Merkel leave what appeared to be a promising career for the uncertainty of politics? In a New Yorker profile of her, George Packer called the decision “the central mystery of an opaque life.” Kornelius attributes the drastic change to a realization that, as a scientist from poorer and under-resourced East Germany, she would be “outpaced” by her western peers. Merkel has never spoken publicly about why she left science, but perhaps that is because it never really left her. Scientific thinking—her deliberate probing of each new bit of information, her cautious consultation with experts—remains integral to Merkel’s daily decision-making process and her political persona. She is undoubtedly aware that her measured, modest handling of Germany’s affairs is at least partially why she has, for almost 15 years now, enjoyed the support of a country whose historical reverence for scientific achievement and great minds (think Kant, Einstein, innumerable others) is forever balanced by an acute wariness of charismatic leaders with big ideas (think Hitler). Prior to the pandemic, Merkel’s political star had been waning. She had become known, according to Kornelius, as the chancellor “who avoided things, much less as the one who built things.” Yes, she had prevented Europe from falling apart during the financial crisis and led the continent as it grappled with the subsequent migration crisis. But of late, she had been left politically sidelined by the domestic rise of populism, the far right, the far left, and by autocratic leaders around the world. Then came the coronavirus. Germany’s first case was confirmed on January 28, but the threat didn’t truly transform everyday life here until the middle of March. Government-mandated restrictions in Berlin were incremental but more and more disruptive. Few were bothered by the cancellation of large gatherings such as industry conferences, but when the city’s creative centers—its theaters, operas, and concert halls—closed on March 10, something essential went missing. A few days later, Berlin’s notorious and celebrated nightlife scene went dark too. Pedestrians dispersed, spooked restaurant owners closed up shop or erected plexiglass barriers. The very fabric of the capital’s social and cultural life was fraying. Residents of this once-divided city were again reminded just how quickly freedom can be lost. Merkel—for whom, as a former East German, liberty and freedom are known to be paramount—understood all too personally what the lockdown meant for her fellow citizens. On March 18, after the country had closed its schools, its economy, its way of life, she gave a rare televised speech that solidified her leadership. Facing the camera from behind a desk, with both the German and European Union flags to her side, she began on an emotional note, by conceding that “our idea of normality, of public life, social togetherness—all of this is being put to the test as never before.” She emphasized the importance of democracy and of making transparent political decisions and she insisted that any information she shared about the pandemic was based on thorough research. Then, in an astonishing statement for a German leader, one she “must have considered endlessly," Kornelius told me, she made reference to her country’s darkest hour. “Since the Second World War,” Merkel said, “there has not been a challenge for our country in which action in a spirit of solidarity on our part was so important.” What stood out from the address was not so much Merkel’s medical advice, but her unusually direct appeal to the notion of social togetherness and to her own limitations as an individual and as a leader (“I firmly believe that we will pass this test if all citizens genuinely see this as their task”). Her rational assurances and her emotional appeal were crucial at a time of rising panic. While the mood isn’t quite so dark here anymore—thanks to a variety of factors, Germany appears to have dealt with the outbreak better than many other countries—Germans largely continue to heed the chancellor’s detailed directives. The number of people infected by the coronavirus has increased, as it has throughout the world. But unlike in Italy, where more than 22,000 have lost their life to COVID-19, or in the United States, where the death toll has surpassed that figure and continues to rise rapidly, total deaths in Germany have been inching up from 4,000. To put this in perspective, more than twice as many New Yorkers have lost their life to the coronavirus as have individuals in all of Germany to date. While country-level comparative data may be somewhat unreliable, and the numbers can certainly take a turn for the worse in Germany as anywhere else, experts cite a number of possible factors for the country’s relatively low number of deaths: The average age of coronavirus patients has been lower here than elsewhere, which limits the risk; the number of people tested for the virus is higher than in other countries, and cases are for the most part carefully tracked; and the public health-care system has been efficient enough to ramp up the number of available intensive-care units to meet potential demand. Given her longevity, any resulting successes are at least in some degree attributable to Merkel’s leadership. The chancellor has a way of bringing “divergent interests together in compromise,” Kornelius said. Her ability to admit what she doesn’t know, and delegate decisions, has been a particularly good fit for post-war Germany’s federalized political structure. Merkel has relied on experts from well-funded scientific-research organizations, including public-health agencies such as the Robert Koch Institute and the country’s network of public universities. The Berlin Institute of Health, a biomedical-research institution, has, like other organizations, recently pivoted its efforts in order to study the coronavirus. Its chairman, Axel Radlach Pries, told me that Germany’s research institutions are currently working closely together to “establish nationwide systems” of research. The federal government, with Merkel at the helm, plays a convening role, recently gathering all of the country’s university medical departments into a single coronavirus task force. When I spoke with him, Pries stressed the significance of receiving honest communication from the highest levels of leadership during the outbreak. Merkel has relied heavily, and very publicly, on the expertise of a handful of experts, including the now famous Christian Drosten, the head of virology at the Charité hospital in Berlin. From the perspective of the public, Pries said, the chancellor and the virologist “are very trustworthy.” People know “that what they get from both Drosten and Angela Merkel are real and very well-considered facts” and that the two also “share information about what they don’t know.” Because they are “honest with respect to their information,” he said, that information is seen as credible. This honesty, at a time of widespread disinformation, Pries told me, was playing a big role in persuading Germans to largely continue to follow the rules and maintain, even now, “a very calm situation in Germany.” The virus is still far from defeated, and no one knows what challenges lie ahead for Germany, or the rest of the world. But judging by Merkel’s approach—her rigor in collating information, her honesty in stating what is not yet known, and her composure—she may someday be remembered not as Germany’s greatest scientist, but as its scientist in chief: the political leader who executed, celebrated, and personified evidence-based thinking when it mattered most. We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

The title of the article below sounds very harsh. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/ We Are Living in a Failed State The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken. When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government? This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together. Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.” All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse. This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s. Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist. Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen. Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying. Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end. This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future. If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot. The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face. When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval but added, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.” Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals. We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home. The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay. The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter. Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model. So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death. In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors. To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat. The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning. We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

There is also another interesting article here. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/apr/10/world-health-organization-who-v-coronavirus-why-it-cant-handle-pandemic The article above is very long so I will not post the content here. What the article stressed is the failure of WHO and why it cannot handle the pandemic well.

The best quote from the article above. Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, added: “It is incomprehensible to me that a moron like this holds the highest office in the land and that there exist people stupid enough to think this is OK. I can’t believe that in 2020 I have to caution anyone listening to the president that injecting disinfectant could kill you.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/trump-coronavirus-treatment-disinfectant Donald Trump has stunned viewers by suggesting that people could receive injections of disinfectant to cure the coronavirus, a notion one medical expert described as “jaw-dropping”. At Thursday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing, the US president discussed new government research on how the virus reacts to different temperatures, climates and surfaces. “And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump said. “One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.” Dr Deborah Birx, the task force response coordinator, remained silent. But social media erupted in hilarity and outrage at the president, who has a record of defying science and also floated the idea of treating patients’ bodies with ultraviolet (UV) light. Several doctors warned the public against injecting disinfectant or using UV light. Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a former labor secretary, tweeted: “Trump’s briefings are actively endangering the public’s health. Boycott the propaganda. Listen to the experts. And please don’t drink disinfectant.” Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, added: “It is incomprehensible to me that a moron like this holds the highest office in the land and that there exist people stupid enough to think this is OK. I can’t believe that in 2020 I have to caution anyone listening to the president that injecting disinfectant could kill you.” Trump was already facing a backlash over his championing of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, as a therapy for the coronavirus, a quixotic effort amplified by the conservative network Fox News. Research has found no evidence that it is beneficial and a government vaccine expert has claimed he was fired for limiting its use. Hydroxychloroquine: how an unproven drug became Trump’s coronavirus 'miracle cure' Undeterred, on Thursday he showcased an “emerging result” from the Department of Homeland Security research that says coronavirus appears to weaken more quickly when exposed to sunlight, heat and humidity, raising hopes that it could become less contagious in summer months. William Bryan, the acting homeland security under secretary for science and technology, testified at the briefing: “Our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the virus, both surfaces and in the air. We’ve seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well, where increasing the temperature and humidity or both is generally less favorable to the virus.” Researchers found that the virus survives best indoors and in dry conditions, and loses potency when temperatures and humidity rise. Bryan said: “The virus dies quickest in the presence of direct sunlight.” He showed a slide summarising the results of the experiment that were carried out at National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center. He also said tests had been carried out with disinfectants. “I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing.” Trump prompted awkwardness when he asked if Dr Birx had heard of heat and light in relation to coronavirus. ‘Not as a treatment,’ she said. Trump seized on the findings to refer back to a claim he made on 14 February that warm weather might kill the virus, like common flu, noting that he had been criticised by the media. “I think a lot of people are going to go outside, all of a sudden, people that didn’t want to go outside,” he said. And he asked Bryan an extraordinary question: “So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you’re going to test that too?” UV rays are an invisible type of radiation that can penetrate and damage skin cells, and overexposure can cause skin cancer. How much sunlight would be needed to have an effect on the coronavirus is unknown. The virus has caused heavy death tolls in warm-weather areas such as Louisiana and Florida, and Singapore has seen a recent surge in cases. A Washington Post reporter asked if it was dangerous for Trump to make people think they would be safe by going outside in summer heat. The president turned to Bryan and said: “I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure. “Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Again, I say, maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor.” In a cringeworthy moment, he asked Birx if she had ever heard of heat and light in relation to the coronavirus. “Not as a treatment,” she said, explaining that the body responds to the virus with a fever. When the Post reporter pressed further, Trump retorted: “I’m the president and you’re fake news ... I’m just here to present talent, I’m here to present ideas.” Experts questioned why the homeland security report had been promoted at the briefing. Dr Irwin Redlener, the director of the Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told the MSNBC network: “Everything that this scientist talked about from homeland security was basically incoherent, nonsensical, not really supported by evidence and really quite contrary to a lot of things that we do know about some of the things he was saying. “First of all, people do get Covid, have been getting Covid in warm climates, including New Orleans but also other countries that have a warm climate right now. Second of all, this issue with UV light is hypothetical but also UV light can be very harmful and we did not hear anything resembling a balanced discussion of what the evidence is for and against UV light, but it’s certainly not ready for prime time.” He added: “The very fact that the president actually asked somebody about what sounded like injecting disinfectants or isopropyl alcohol into the human body was kind of jaw-dropping.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-pandemic-testing-world-leaders-stepping-200402201221844.html COVID-19 pandemic is testing world leaders. Who's stepping up? Whether millions live or die depends on the decisions the world's leaders take in the coming days and weeks. In just three months, more than a million people in 180 countries have fallen sick from the viral illness, while at least 50,000 have died in a public health emergency the United Nations is calling the world's "most challenging crisis" since World War II. In large swathes of the globe, lockdowns aimed at stemming the virus's spread have brought life and economic activity to a virtual standstill. In the worst-hit regions, hospitals are overwhelmed with the sick and dying, while the poor and vulnerable everywhere are facing severe food shortages and starvation. Highlighting the risk this poses to peace and stability in the world, the United Nations' Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued an urgent appeal for action on Tuesday, calling on politicians to "forget political games" and come together for a "strong and effective response". "The world is facing an unprecedented test. And this is the moment of truth," he said. Indeed, the stakes could not be higher. Whether millions live or die depends on the decisions the world's leaders take in the coming days and weeks. But analysts say the early signs are worrying. In some countries, responses from heads of governments have been marked by dithering and denial, driven by personal interests, distrust of science or fears of wreaking economic havoc. "It's been disappointing in many countries - too many," said John M Barry, a historian who studied the Spanish flu pandemic that killed as many as 100 million people in 1918. "In some countries, it's been outright reprehensible - some leaders' actions will unnecessarily kill many of their citizens." How should health workers fighting the pandemic be protected? (24:23) In Xi Jinping's China, where the illness was first detected in late December, authorities are accused of engaging in a cover-up and punishing doctors who sounded the alarm in the early days of the outbreak - moves critics say allowed the virus to spread out of the central city of Wuhan to every corner of the globe. In the United States, President Donald Trump initially downplayed the severity of the threat, predicting the virus would "disappear" like "a miracle" one day, and dismissing growing concerns over the disease as a "hoax" by his political rivals. He only changed tack last week after polling showed an increasingly worried public and modelling predicted that 200,000 people could die in the US without drastic containment efforts. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro continues to dismiss the illness as a "fantasy" and a "little flu". Just last week, he defied the advice of his own health officials on avoiding social contact by touring the streets of the capital, Brasilia, in a campaign to get his countrymen back to work. Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, meanwhile, held political rallies late into March, kissing his supporters and urging Mexicans to "live life as normal". That came even as his health minister called on citizens to stay home to contain the virus. Charles Call at the Washington DC-based Brookings Institute said Bolsonaro and Lopez Obrador's approaches are marked by "an aversion to scientific inquiry and state institutions". Their cavalier attitudes are attracting widespread criticism, he wrote in a blog post, predicting the crisis will pose a "test for populism" in both countries. In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo admitted last week to deliberately withholding information on the outbreak; a strategy he said had been used to prevent panic. In the early days of the epidemic, some of his ministers said prayer would keep the disease away, while others said the country's warmer weather would slow the virus's spread. Writing in The Diplomat, Asmiati Malik, assistant professor at the Universitas Bakrie in Indonesia, said the government's "unscientific" approach was based on concerns over the economy in the world's fourth-most populous country. But engaging in the politics of denial and limiting the public's access to information on the virus's spread could "cost thousands of lives", she wrote. China fears second wave of COVID-19 outbreak (2:05) The denial and delays will hurt these countries if and when tougher restrictions are required to stem the epidemic, said Barry, the historian. "If you expect public compliance with calls for social distancing, the public has to believe in them. If they don't trust those who advocate them, they won't, and compliance will not be as good and they will be less effective." That is why the single most important lesson from the 1918 pandemic is "to tell the truth", he said. There are some leaders who have done that. On March 11, as infections began to spike in hard-hit Italy, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel said some 70 percent of her country's population would contract the virus - a sober warning that stood in stark contrast to pronouncements from other politicians at the time. A week later, the chancellor appealed to Germans in a dramatic television address to respect tough restrictions on movement and social contact. "The situation is serious; take it seriously," she said. In a democracy, such curbs "should not be enacted lightly - and only ever temporarily. But at the moment they are essential in order to save lives." Germany has since led the way in Europe with large scale testing for COVID-19, collecting nearly a million samples since the start of the crisis. And although the country now ranks fifth among territories with confirmed cases - recording more than 80,000 infections - it has a much lower fatality rate than most. Praising Merkel, Judy Dempsey of Carnegie Europe said the chancellor's approach "points the way forward to the unified, decisive response that is necessary and how democracies can best deliver it". In Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is also winning plaudits for an aggressive testing and tracing campaign that has kept the number of infections in the country low - about 1,000 cases since the beginning of the outbreak. In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Lee said transparency and trust were key to his country's battle against the virus. "We are transparent - if there is bad news, we tell you. If there are things which need to be done, we also tell you," he said. "If people do not trust you, even if you have the right measures, it is going to be very hard to get them implemented." South Korea's President Moon Jae-in, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele are also receiving praise for similar decisive and transparent action. Europe's healthcare systems pushed to brink (2:30) Then, there are those leaders accused of using the crisis as a cover to amass power. Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Monday obtained the open-ended right to rule by decree in a new law that also imposes jail terms of five years on those who spread "false information" - a move critics say could be used to muzzle journalists. Similar concerns are being raised in the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte secured emergency powers that grant him the authority to crack down on false claims about the coronavirus. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using a state of emergency over the pandemic to authorise intelligence services to step up surveillance of the public and to close down the country's courts ahead of his trial on corruption charges. "We recognise that this pandemic is posing an unprecedented test for world leaders," said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Our problem is that some leaders have adopted authoritarian approaches. This is not the time for politics... any emergency powers must be proportionate, and states must always protect people's rights." In addition to the covert power grabs, observers are also concerned by fighting between world powers, particularly between the US and China. Officials in Beijing, angered by Washington's insistence on labelling the coronavirus the "Chinese virus", are now engaged in a propaganda offensive, with some claiming - without evidence - that the US military had brought the virus to Wuhan. The deteriorating US-China ties - as well Washington's retreat from the world stage under Trump's "America First" policy - are jeopardising a coordinated response to the pandemic. "There isn't a global response. And it's a huge problem in the sense that this a crisis that is much better handled if key countries came together," said Charles Kupchan of the US-based Council on Foreign Relations. "Whether the Ebola crisis of 2014 or the financial crisis of 2008, the US was a country that stepped up and said 'How are we going to manage this together?' But those days are over. The Trump administration has been extremely slow at responding to crisis at home, and its leadership abroad has been minimal." This could be disastrous for the world's most vulnerable, Kupchan said. "Core issues that need addressing include procurement and distribution of medical equipment, sharing of best practices on testing and isolation, and dealing with lower-income communities," he said. "I fear the worst if this virus hits refugee camps and countries with less-developed healthcare systems. It could be quite devastating."

https://thediplomat.com/2020/04/covid-19-is-a-test-for-world-leaders-so-far-japans-abe-is-failing/ COVID-19 Is a Test for World Leaders. So Far, Japan’s Abe Is Failing. The pandemic has exposed feeble leadership on the part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Like many world leaders, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has not managed the COVID-19 outbreak very well. On April 7, Abe belatedly declared a national emergency in seven prefectures. On April 16 he extended this nationwide, but only after public pleas from prefectural governors and public opinion polls indicating broad dissatisfaction with his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. A mid-April Kyodo poll found that 80 percent think Abe waited too long to declare a state of emergency. His support rate has dropped by almost 10 percent since early March, landing at 40 percent. Abe’s move was an acknowledgement that the half-measures taken so far have not worked. Back in early February, when the Diamond Princess cruise ship was transformed into a coronavirus incubator due to botched quarantine procedures, Japan had a wake-up call about the coming pandemic. Alas, the government has not used the time to adequately prepare. Since then the Abe government has come under fire for limiting testing and downplaying the crisis in what critics see as a bid to save the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. This limited testing left the government shooting in the dark in trying to contain the outbreak, while prioritizing the Olympics slowed the pandemic response. The Japanese are now paying the price for this negligence. Numerous media reports warn that Japan’s healthcare system is on the verge of collapse. The governor of Osaka pleaded for the public to donate raincoats because doctors have resorted to wearing trash bags as protective gear in dealing with COVID 19 patients. In response, the local Hanshin Tigers baseball team donated 4,000 ponchos — not ideal, but more than the central government has managed. And at Tokyo’s gateway Narita Airport, after incoming travelers are tested many are now forced to stay in cardboard boxes for a couple of days until they get the results. Raincoats and cardboard boxes? Really? This is not the Japan most imagine. Many nations have shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks, gloves, and face shields, but the plea for raincoats was shocking given that Osaka prefecture at the time had just 900 COVID-19 cases. How could that overwhelm the healthcare system for the nation’s third largest metropolis in a prefecture of 9 million residents? This is a national problem, as in 43 out of 47 prefectures hospitals are already running out of coronavirus-care capacity. Japan has only half as many ICU beds per 100,000 people as Spain does; Germany has six times more. By ignoring early warning signs, the government failed to beef up preparations, leaving frontline healthcare workers scrambling to cope with an escalating outbreak. A majority of Japanese are critical of Abe’s crisis management. In a recent Mainichi poll, 70 percent believe that he waited too long to declare an emergency, losing precious time to manage the outbreak. In an Asahi poll from April 18-19, 57 percent said Abe has failed to provide leadership during the outbreak and 77 percent believe he should have declared a national emergency sooner. In declaring a limited state of emergency on April 7 Abe acknowledged the healthcare crisis, one that emerged due to his unwarranted complacency about COVID-19. That complacency set the tone for the government’s tardy crisis response. Compared to resolute regional leaders in Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, New Zealand, and Australia, Abe dithered and failed the COVID-19 leadership stress test. At a time when the public sought clarity, Abe sent a mixed message, stressing the need for social distancing to lessen transmission but in the same breath endorsing business as usual. His government’s stimulus package left many disappointed and others forgotten. Subsequently, Abe flipflopped on household support payments, moving from targeting the neediest to a one-time $900 payment for everyone. With no income replacement program, and limited telecommuting options for many workers, as of mid-April 60 percent of workers in greater Tokyo are still commuting because they must, with many riding trains where social distancing is impossible. Another survey found that only 18 percent of people nationwide have stopped going to work as people balance the transmission risks of commuting against losing their incomes. Abe has also been savaged on social media for his mask distribution policy, dubbed Abenomask, a reference to his sputtering Abenomics policy. The gesture to send two cloth face masks to each household in Japan was announced soon after NHK aired a documentary that showed how Taiwan distributes masks far more efficiently and has outperformed Abe’s crisis response across the board. Abe’s wife didn’t help matters by attending a cherry blossom party when everyone else was told to stay home. Then Abe tweeted a video of himself coping with the lockdown by cuddling his dog, sipping tea, and channel surfing, provoking a torrent of criticism zinging a leader seemingly oblivious to public anxieties and deprivations. This is reminiscent of his blasé approach to lost pension records back in 2007 when he downplayed the issue and ignited a fierce backlash from worried citizens who hammered the LDP in the Diet elections. At the time Abe’s sobriquet was KY (kuuki yomenai), meaning clueless. Leaders around the world are often prickly about criticism, and indeed Abe is fighting back. Buried in the government’s coronavirus stimulus package is $22 million to fund AI monitoring of his overseas critics so that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can correct any “wrong information.” Allocating taxpayer money to contain the plague of criticism is indicative of a government that has handled COVID-19 more as a PR challenge than a profound public health crisis. Tokyo should be using AI to better deal with the pandemic, not to massage perceptions. Containing the outbreak, treating patients, and helping all those whose lives have been derailed by this crisis should be the priority, rather than going to war with the press.

Another interesting article below. https://thediplomat.com/2020/04/did-xi-jinping-deliberately-sicken-the-world/

https://thediplomat.com/2020/04/the-missing-link-in-singapores-covid-19-strategy/ The Missing Link in Singapore’s COVID-19 Strategy Singapore is held up as a model of pandemic management, but that success doesn’t extend to its migrant workers. Nothing is more global than a pandemic. And there is no individual more quintessential to globalization than the migrant worker. Today, Singapore has 1.4 million foreigners working in-country, out of a total workforce of 3.7 million. Of these, 981,000 are low-wage migrant workers on temporary visas, many of whom remain in Singapore even though most work has ceased. International commentators deem Singapore a success story in pandemic management, but the extent to which this success extends to migrant workers is doubtful. On April 6, in a widely-shared Facebook post, a prominent civil servant called migrant dormitories a viral “time bomb waiting to explode.” He was referring to the migrant workers quarantined in dormitories after authorities noticed COVID-19 transmission on the premises. By now, the government has fenced off four dormitories containing 50,000 workers, in effect protecting the surrounding local population while risking the health of the migrants. This is not the first time that the Singapore government has treated migrant workers as a threat to be contained. In 2013, an Indian migrant worker was killed in a bus accident, reportedly causing 400 workers to react violently. The Singapore government immediately instituted a two-day alcohol ban in the vicinity. Today, alcohol sales are still restricted in the area, while recreational facilities in dormitories have been built to divert migrant workers from public spaces. COVID-19 has heightened similar anxieties over the need to restrict migrant workers to designated spaces. But the pandemic has also exposed a longstanding callousness toward this population. A letter by the local NGO Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) pointed out the “undeniable” need for the government to announce plans to rehouse workers to “give reassurance to the resident and non-resident community.” The letter was prescient, appearing in the national newspaper a week before cases first appeared in migrant dormitories. The coronavirus has revived concerns for the health and safety of workers crammed onto the backs of open-deck lorries, yet these concerns have been voiced for at least 10 years. Migrant dormitories have contributed 345 COVID-19 cases so far. On April 8, the Singapore government announced that all migrant workers staying in “non-quarantined” dormitories would “not be able to move out” for at least a month. Singaporeans, too, are now largely confined to their homes, but can access parks, supermarkets, and “essential services.” Pandemics Exacerbate Precariousness The primary risk that the pandemic poses to migrant workers is, of course, infection itself. Dormitories usually house male construction and shipyard workers from India and Bangladesh. Building codes indicate that workers in these facilities need only have 4.5 square meters of “living space,” including living quarters, dining, and toilet areas. In practice workers share showers and sleep on bunk beds, separated from each other by less than a meter. The WHO’s social distancing guidelines are near-impossible to achieve under these conditions. These living conditions affect approximately 200,000 workers in purpose-built dormitories and 100,000 in “temporary dormitories” converted from disused industrial sites. Schematic sketch of a stereotypical dormitory room, based on Singapore’s building codes. (Source: Transient Workers Count Too) In the photo above we get to see 10 double deck bunk which can fit up to 20 people in one room. Unlike hundreds of thousands of travelers who have flown home to wait out the pandemic, most of Singapore’s migrant workers remain there. One reason for this is the debt incurred by incoming migrants. Bangladeshi migrants to Singapore pay up to S$17,000 (US$12,000) for their first job in Singapore. This can take between one to two years to pay off, with 74 percent of Bangladeshi migrants earning less than S$25 a day. Another is migrant families’ reliance on remittances, with nearly half of Bangladeshi migrants providing for their families’ basic needs. Wages are hence of utmost importance to migrants and their families. Singapore’s pandemic containment strategies may amplify pre-existing wage issues. The Ministry of Manpower has announced that “affected workers” will continue to be paid basic salaries in dormitories officially designated as quarantine sites. However, it is unclear whether salary deductions will be used to pay for catered food in these dormitories. This is concerning as employers are known to take unauthorized deductions, including for food and lodging, from workers’ wages. Existing research criticizes Singapore’s labor laws for condoning errant employer behavior, such as the manipulation of evidence for salary claims. Debbie Fordyce of TWC2 is concerned that workers living outside of the quarantined dormitories are falling through the cracks. “The government says they will get food,” she says, “but this is on the assumption that employers are providing food.” Indeed on April 7, authorities announced that “employers should be able to continue to pay their salaries and provide accommodation and food,” urging employers to pass support measures onto workers. This statement shifts responsibility for the basic needs of migrant workers onto employers, without saying whether authorities will enforce their provision. Migrant workers who are recuperating from a workplace accident are in a particularly precarious position. As they cannot work, employers are disincentivized from providing them with food. “We know of many people like this who are not getting food,” Fordyce says. “We are overwhelmed with requests.” The Mental Health Toll Singapore’s migration regime ensures that migrant workers do not sink roots in the country. Work Permits, issued to workers earning less than S$2,200 a month, bar migrant workers from applying for permanent residency or citizenship, and must be renewed every two years. This deters migrant workers from forming permanent social bonds in Singapore. The coronavirus affects migrant workers’ relationships with parents, children, and spouses in their home country. A migrant worker interviewed by TWC2 recounts how his mother calls several times a day, to ask if he is washing his hands and going out. Precarious wage situations also create significant emotional stressors: migrants are out of work, in crowded living conditions, and uncertain of how they can provide for families. Research shows that 62 percent of Indian and Bangladeshi migrant workers exhibit signs of significant psychological distress. Most in this group had unpaid debt or were off work due to a workplace injury. Current conditions reproduce these problems for an even larger proportion of migrant workers. Phone calls are a lifeline for migrant workers in difficult times. To stay in touch with family, most migrant workers rely on WiFi where they can find it. This, too, is a livelihood strategy that allays the costs of debt-financed migration. However, workers in dormitories have little or no WiFi access, nor do they have the money to top up prepaid SIM cards. In response, TWC2 launched a SIM card campaign, aiming for S$20,000 in donations. The response was astronomical: in five days, TWC2’s SIM card campaign raised S$127,000. More broadly, concerns that quarantined migrant dormitories would become “Diamond Princess all over again” – referencing the quarantined cruise ship in Japan that became a hotspot for infections — created a groundswell of sympathy for migrant workers. A spreadsheet collating cash and kind donation drives for migrant workers is circulating among Singaporeans. It attests to the range of initiatives seeking to alleviate migrant workers’ needs, ranging from masks and hand sanitizer to legal help and counselling. However, organizers worry that a lack of transparency hampers relief efforts. Besides the four dormitories designated as quarantine sites, the government has not set clear guidelines for migrant dormitories, where individual dormitory operators decide what donations can be received. Organizers coordinating donations are constantly catching up with the dos and don’ts enforced on each site. The migrant worker situation is symptomatic of Singapore’s model of economic growth. Migrant workers cannot buy SIM cards and worry constantly about remittances because they make barely enough to save. Densely packed dormitories result from an unflinching desire to keep wages low and profits high. Hence, the threat that large coronavirus clusters in migrant dormitories pose to the larger population directly relates to Singapore’s economic strategy too. Moreover, the current crisis exposes how the costs of this model are externalized into the public domain. “Now the costs are here, in terms of infection and costs to protect against infection,” Alex Au from TWC2 points out, “and they are public costs. This is the big picture.” Live-in Domestic Workers Are Especially Vulnerable Like migrants in the construction and shipyard sectors, migrant domestic workers face debt issues and maintain long-distance relationships with families back home. Singapore’s 256,000 domestic workers come predominantly from Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines. They live with their employers, and remain under this roof as social distancing measures tighten. Domestic workers bear the brunt of housework in one-fifth of Singaporean households. This means that extra cleaning and sanitizing work is likely to fall onto their shoulders. Employers are understandably anxious about the pandemic, and hygienic homes benefit domestic workers too. However, domestic workers are unsure if they will be overworked and undercompensated. At present, Singapore does not have provisions for overtime work for domestic workers, but the law does stipulate that domestic workers be paid for work done on weekly rest days. In March, the Ministry of Manpower advised that domestic workers remain in their employers’ homes on rest days. The Humanitarian Organization for Migrant Economics (HOME) has observed an increase in coronavirus-related calls to their helpline since. Domestic workers were unsure if they would be paid for working on rest days. Some felt compelled to work as they did not have their own room, and were under the constant scrutiny of employers, who were working from home themselves. A small number of domestic workers also reported salary issues and terminations as a result of the coronavirus. Employers have understandably been hit hard by the pandemic too. This is where government “advisories” are insufficient. Clear enforcement of rest days and wage protections for workers — and their employers — are critical to mitigating the impact of the pandemic on domestic workers. The pandemic is particularly concerning for the minority of domestic workers subject to abuse. In the past, HOME’s shelter received domestic workers who had run away from these conditions and asked strangers to help them call HOME. Now safe distancing guidelines and “circuit-breaker” regulations make this impossible: domestic workers do not know where to run to, as few people are out on the street. Already, domestic abuse is on the rise in countries under lockdown. For domestic workers that are restricted from making phone calls, the pandemic poses the risk of abuse going unnoticed. Domestic workers’ role in care work and housework is critical during these times. Yet whereas migrant dormitories draw public attention due to anxiety over rates of infection in crowded quarters, pandemic containment strategies shunt domestic workers into homes and out of sight. Without appropriate regulations that protect domestic workers’ wages and living conditions, tensions will rise in homes, hurting both employers and domestic workers in the process. Migrant Workers Require a Redefinition of Vulnerable Groups COVID-19 lays bare the relationships that sustain us. Around the world, people feverishly discuss trust in government, the place of family and friends amid crisis, and how Skype helps to weather the storm. Labor migration turns these issues on their head: the pandemic asks migrant workers to trust governments that are not their own, and to connect with family members at a distance, even when access to the internet is limited. Right now, countries all over the world are turning inward, to protect the most vulnerable among them. Singapore too has sought to protect the elderly and the unemployed. But Singapore’s demography is unique: one in four members of its workforce are low-wage migrant workers, who are exceptionally vulnerable but not citizens. Moreover, vulnerability in coronavirus terms tends to be defined by age and immune systems. This obscures how the pandemic worsens migrant workers’ existing vulnerabilities to precarious work, mental health issues, and abuse. Indeed a limited, technical definition of health seems out-of-sync with everyday life itself. News outlets hurry to publish epidemiological models and pharmaceutical advances, as if these offer solace. Everyday life in isolation, sustained by being cared for and caring for others, says otherwise. Societies should redefine pandemic management in wider terms. COVID-19 does not distinguish between migrant and citizen; hence migrant workers require the same access to safe distancing strategies as everyone else. However the coronavirus, and strategies to contain it, can have particularly adverse effects on this vulnerable group. For governments, this means tackling the pandemic in a way that addresses its toll on migrant workers’ livelihoods and wellbeing. Migrant workers must be assured that their wages are protected and that their basic needs for food and rest will be met. It is not enough to pass this task on to employers, who are also experiencing trying times. As Dr. Stephanie Chok points out, in Singapore the taxes that employers pay to hire migrant workers amount to more than S$2 billion per year. This money can sustain the welfare of migrant workers during this time. Migrant workers expose the boundaries between the beneficiaries of Singapore’s coronavirus “success story,” and those who are systematically excluded from it. Sadly this is business as usual in a system that pursues growth at the expense of workers’ wellbeing.

https://thediplomat.com/2020/04/where-in-the-world-are-there-no-coronavirus-cases/ Of the 200 or so countries and territories in the world, 181 have reported at least one case of the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, according to the count being kept by the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus resource center. The pandemic, which emerged in late December in Wuhan, China, has spread across the world at an alarming rate — topping 1 million cases as of April 2. The virus is nearly everywhere. What should we make of the countries that have not reported cases? Are they unable to test? Are they lying? Are they that isolated? The bulk of the states that have not yet reported cases are small Pacific Island nations, followed by a handful in Asia and Africa. The Pacific Island states appear to have been largely spared so far, but regional governments have not been complacent. In late January, the Federated States of Micronesia declared a public health emergency and on March 14 enacted strict border control measures, including banning travelers from countries with COVID-19 cases and prohibiting citizens from traveling abroad to countries with recorded cases (with an exception carved out for Guam and Hawaii). On March 31, President David W. Panuelo put out a press release reflecting on two months of emergency. In it, Panuelo encouraged citizens to “Wash your hands; avoid large social gatherings; and, above all, maintain your Micronesian sense of empathy and compassion for your fellows.” He went on to urge Micronesians abroad to “heed the advice of your host Governments and their medical professionals as if their commentary were from the Bible itself.” The largest of the Oceanic states to not have a confirmed COVID-19 case is the Solomon Islands. With a population just over 600,000, the country’s government has not sat idle. On March 25, a state of public emergency was declared and Honiara has been sending samples to Australia for testing (so far 10 tests have come back negative, with three more suspected cases pending confirmation). At present, only Papua New Guinea and Fiji have domestic testing capabilities. It’s not surprising that both have identified cases — one and seven, respectively. Guam has also logged cases, 82 as of April 2 and not counting the rising number of cases aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt docked at the mouth of Apra Harbor. Besides the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, Kiribati, Micronesia, Tonga, the Marshall Islands Palau, Tuvalu, and Nauru have no reported cases of COVID-19, though many have restricted travel and taken other steps to prevent the arrival or spread of the virus. Elsewhere in The Diplomat’s coverage area, it’s less easy to believe governments denying cases and taking few steps to prevent COVID-19 from spreading. North Korea hasn’t reported any cases. The already isolated state took preventative steps early, sealing its border with China in January, denying all foreign travelers from entering, but North Korea watchers are skeptical of the state’s no-case claim. A lack of testing capacity, a situation arguably worsened by international sanctions; a weak healthcare system; and a high degree of state secrecy are all reasons for reasonable skepticism. Whether North Korea just can’t tell if it has cases or is blatantly lying are both reasonable options. Elsewhere in Asia, there are similar reasons for skepticism. Turkmenistan and Tajikistan both claim to have not confirmed any cases, and that may very well be true. Turkmenistan is on par with North Korea in terms of state secrecy and isolation, but much more distant from the source of the virus, China. With objectively few travelers passing through the country, the virus may not have arrived yet. And with a poor healthcare system, Ashgabat may not have capacity to test for the virus. We just don’t know: While Turkmenistan hasn’t banned the word “coronavirus,” it hasn’t bothered to use it very much or enact preventative measures. There have been reports of some internal movement restrictions and, per the U.S. State Department, Ashgabat has barred entry of non-citizens and there are no scheduled commercial outbound international flights. Tajikistan, for it’s part, has fiddled with various externally oriented travel restrictions, but President Rahmon continues to appear at large public gatherings, surrounded by crowds of women dressed in traditional garb or being hugged by throngs of children. Tajikistan announced it would block the entry of citizens from 35 coronavirus-hit countries in early March, but walked the restrictions back almost immediately. The U.S. government has provided aid to Tajikistan, including personal protective equipment, to deal with coronavirus reportedly at the request of Tajikistan’s Ministry of Health. So, in the end, what should we make of the countries that have not reported cases? Are they unable to test? Are they lying? Are they that isolated? The reality looks likely to be a mix. The Pacific, in my mind, has benefitted from a kind of isolation and early efforts to head off what could be a total disaster. Regional governments are well aware of how bad a contagious virus in their islands could be, having fresh in mind the measles outbreak that originated in Samoa last year. North Korea and Turkmenistan may also be benefiting from their isolation as well. With few travelers in and out, the virus has fewer opportunities to enter these countries. But this is only reasonable up to a point: Analysts believe smugglers continue business with North Korea, and Turkmenistan doesn’t necessarily have the strongest border controls. In the “they might be lying” column, both states are heavily authoritarian, not transparent and lack typical accountability mechanisms. In brief: they can lie and get away with it (political) consequence-free. Tajikistan also falls closer to this category than the Pacific, as an autocratic state with a demonstrated history of difficulty with the truth. Tajikistan also is far less isolated than Turkmenistan. It should deeply concern Dushanbe that the first cases in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, identified in mid-March, sprung from individuals who had recently traveled to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Tajiks make the same pilgrimages, thus posing the same risks, but Bishkek has enacted lockdowns, encouraged social distancing, set curfews and is actively testing individuals whereas Tajikistan’s leadership has been less forceful with such prevention and mitigation measures. Time will tell, but arguably no inhabited corner of the globe will be spared.

Thank you very much for your updates.

Thank you very much for your updates.

Anyway how is India now? How is everything? Still under lockdown? Is India progressing well?

Yes you are right about it. Thank you for telling me.

Latest data as of 23rd April, 2020. Top best recovery rate (These countries have recorded more than 60% recovery rate) Country/Other Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active Cases Percentage recovered from total cases 1. Greenland 11 +0 0 +0 11 0 100.00 % 2. Thailand 2,839 +13 50 +1 2,430 359 85.59 % 3. Iceland 1,785 +0 10 +0 1,462 313 81.90 % 4. South Korea 10,702 +8 240 +2 8,411 2,051 78.59 % 5. Austria 15,002 +77 522 +12 11,694 2,786 77.95 % 6. Australia 6,661 +12 75 +1 5,045 1,541 75.74 % 7. Iran 87,026 +1,030 5,481 +90 64,843 16,702 74.51 % 8. New Zealand 1,451 +3 16 +2 1,065 370 73.40 % 9. Switzerland 28,496 +228 1,509 +0 19,900 7,087 69.83 % 10. Germany 151,022 +374 5,334 +19 103,300 42,388 68.40% 11. Hong Kong 1,036 +2 4 +0 699 333 67.47 % 12. Denmark 8,073 +161 394 +10 5,384 2,295 66.69 % 13. Malaysia 5,603 +71 95 +2 3,542 1,966 63.22 %

This website listed down a full chronicle about the pandemic. Can check it out. https://project-evidence.github.io/ Here is the content of the website. Evidence SARS-Co V-2 Emerged From a Biological Laboratory in Wuhan, China 1 Abstract 2 Authors 3 Correction Policy 4 Contribution Policy 5 Sourcing Policy 6 Purpose 6.1 If We’re Right 6.2 If We’re Wrong 6.3 Either Way 7 Nomenclature 8 Claim 1: Was SARS-Co V-2 Present At A Bio-Laboratory in Wuhan, China? 8.1 The Huanan Seafood Market 8.2 Suspected Laboratories 8.3 A Note on Biowarfare 8.4 A Note on Bio-Safety Levels 8.5 The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 8.5.1 Paper 1 8.5.2 Paper 2 8.5.3 Paper 3 8.5.4 Paper 4 8.5.5 Paper 5 8.5.6 Paper 6 8.5.7 Paper 7 8.5.8 Paper 8 8.5.9 Paper 9 8.5.10 Job Postings 8.5.11 Conclusion: Highly Likely 8.5.12 Shi Zhengli’s Response 8.6 Wuhan Centre for Disease Control 8.6.1 There Are Few Bats in Wuhan 8.6.2 Horseshoe Bats Were Once Present in WHCDC Labs 8.6.3 Researcher Was Once Attacked By Bats 8.6.4 Surgery was Performed On Live Animals 8.6.5 Conclusion: Plausible 8.6.6 Botao Xiao’s Response 8.7 Outside of Wuhan 9 Claim 2: Did SARS-Co V-2 Begin From an Infected Lab Worker or Animal in Wuhan? 9.1 Hypothetical Spillover Events 9.2 Bio-Laboratory Accidents Are Not Impossible 9.2.1 "Biohazard" 9.2.1.1 Aral Smallpox Incident (1971) 9.2.1.2 Self-Inflicted Marburg Virus Infection (1979) 9.2.1.3 Sverdlovsk Anthrax Leak (1979) 9.2.1.4 Accident at Chinese Bioweapons Facility (1980s) 9.2.2 Self-Inflicted Ebola Virus Infection (2004) 9.2.3 Smallpox Outbreak in the United Kingdom (1978) 9.2.4 Plague Outbreak in Chicago (2009) 9.2.5 SARS Outbreak in Taiwan (2003) 9.2.6 H1N1 Re-emergence in Humans (1977) 9.2.7 See For Yourself 9.2.8 Bio-Laboratory Accidents in China 9.2.8.1 SARS-Co V-1 Escaped A Lab in Beijing (Twice) 9.2.8.2 Brucella Outbreak In Students Following Anatomy Course (2011) 9.2.8.3 Brucella Outbreak in Over 100 Students And Staff (2019) 9.2.9 Peer-Reviewed Papers on Bio-Laboratory Accidents 9.2.9.1 Paper 10 9.2.9.2 Paper 11 9.2.10 Relevance to SARS-Co V-2 9.3 State Department Cables 9.4 Post-Outbreak Biosafety Guidelines 9.5 Arrest of Lab Animal Seller 9.6 Disappearance of Huang Yanling 9.7 Chen Quanjiao’s Weibo Message 9.8 Wuhan Legal Response 10 Addressing Counter-Claims 10.1 Paper 12 10.2 @trvb Twitter Thread 11 Miscellaneous Coincidences 11.1 Lijian Zhao vs. Cui Tiankai 11.2 Removal of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and Dr. Keding Cheng From Canada National Microbiology Lab 11.3 Arrest of Dr. Charles Lieber and Two Chinese Nationals 11.4 Event 201 11.5 2019 Military World Games 11.6 "HIV Inserts" 11.7 Map Manipulation 12 Conclusion 13 References Bibliography

Good and great news. So happy to hear about it. Thank you very much for sharing this information.

Latest data as of 22nd April, 2020. Top best recovery rate (These countries have recorded more than 60% recovery rate) Country/Other Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active Cases Percentage recovered from total cases 1. Greenland 11 +0 0 +0 11 0 100.00 % 2. Thailand 2,826 +15 49 +1 2,352 425 83.23 % 3. Iceland 1,785 +7 10 +0 1,462 313 81.90 % 4. South Korea 10,694 +11 238 +1 8,277 2,179 77.40 % 5. Austria 14,925 +52 510 +19 11,328 3,087 75.90 % 6. Australia 6,649 +4 74 +3 4,920 1,655 74.00 % 7. Iran 85,996 +1,194 5,391 +94 63,113 17,492 73.39 % 8. New Zealand 1,451 +6 14 +1 1036 401 71.40 % 9. Switzerland 28,268 +205 1,478 +0 19,400 7,390 68.63 % 10. Germany 148,766 +313 5,102 +16 99,400 44,264 66.82 % 11.Hong Kong 1,034 +4 4 +0 678 352 65.57 % 12. Denmark 7,912 +217 384 +14 5,087 2,441 64.29 % 13. Malaysia 5,532 +50 93 +1 3,452 1,987 62.40 %

This becomes a very common photo now.