SpankyMcFarland

Apparently, the South Koreans have tested thousands already which has bumped up their number of positive cases considerably. Do we have enough of the following: testing kits; protective equipment; ventilators; drugs; beds? I kinda know we don’t have enough beds if a big surge happens. This is the sort of situation where you’d like to still have someone like Jane Philpott as Minister of Health or at least in the Cabinet...

I see the Australian government has published its plan to deal with COVID-19. Where is ours?

Pence could have managed the HIV outbreak better in his state. Trump’s best strategy to reassure the public and the markets would be to leave technical details about fatality rates, potential vaccines etc. to the experts or Pence. Nobody has said Trump is responsible for COVID-19.

What about his response to an HIV outbreak in his state? https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pences-pray-it-plan-combat-indiana-hiv-outbreak-resurfaces-after-trump-taps-vp-lead-1489344 Trump is already trying to play this pandemic down and has made multiple erroneous statements about it. For maximum credibility, the person in charge should be at arm’s length from the president's re-election campaign.

Why not appoint somebody who is able to devote 100% of their time to this and who has expertise in the area? There must be a lot of people who fit this basic description.

What special skills or expertise does Pence bring to his new role leading the fight against COVID-19? Let’s hope he’ll be better prepared for a grilling than Chad Wolf was here: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/02/25/coronavirus-trump-wolf-kennedy-kth-ac360-vpx.pool

Very little can be said with certainty at the moment. The mortality rate may be less than 2% given that many of those infected were asymptomatic and missed so far. Even if it’s ‘just’ 1% it would still be more dangerous than regular flu.

First, let's see if he jumps in.

I suspect most politicians have claimed a lack of ambition for the top job at some point: If Baird thought he might return to politics after he left office, he should have used the intervening time to create a coherent personal narrative. That’s more difficult (although not impossible) to do in the heat of a leadership campaign. He certainly has the charisma and a solid record of accomplishment in cabinet posts to win the race.

Britain and the US have multiple issues to sort out before a trade deal can be considered, e.g. Huawei, the proposed UK digital services tax, US chlorinated chickens, the whole GM issue and the Sacoolas case where the wife of a CIA officer killed a young man in a traffic crash because she was driving on the wrong side of road, absconded to the US and now, with the support of her government, refuses to return and face justice in the UK. That’s some special relationship.

Dictatorships are ponderous contraptions. Error control ain’t their strong suit. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/coronavirus-chinese-rage-death-whistleblower-doctor-li-wenliang

The British press are hysterical about anything related to the monarchy. She knew that going in.

I know many nice people in Britain who voted for Brexit, my brother among them. I still don’t think it’s worth the trouble.

I can understand how lonely old ladies in Margate get drawn into this story line but do grown men in Canada have nothing better to do?

What are they going to get for that price? It’s an awful lot of hassle to go through, involving the expenditure of large numbers of civil servant years of work, to get back to where they were essentially. Both the EU and UK are weakened as political entities given that Scotland and NI voted Remain by clear margins. At least Putin is pleased.

They’re going to find out what it’s like to be a medium-sized country negotiating with behemoths like China, the EU and the US.

Brexit is only starting. Either way the British economy will do OK but why put your country through painful negotiations with the US, China and the EU etc. when there are so many other pressing issues to address? The Brits are going to have a truly Canadian experience here and they’re not going to like it.

Chinese dietary traditions predate the PRC by a long way and ‘learnings’ will take a nice while too. Bats deserve much more study. They seem to be able to tolerate viral infections more effectively than most mammals and the longevity of some species is quite extraordinary in view of their size.

Beech forests are one of my favourite places to visit in Europe, green worlds enclosed by enormous trees with those strange, smooth trunks - natural cathedrals of a sort - and carpeted by bluebells in the spring. Unfortunately, the German word for them, buchenwald, carries other associations for us now.

Many of you may already be aware of this remarkable man, Witold Pilecki, who volunteered for a mission in Auschwitz: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nazis-auschwitz-volunteer-holocaust-witold-pilecki-a9302581.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki

A smidgen of credit should be given where it’s due. A few decades ago, China had a GDP per capita similar to many African countries. It has advanced extraordinarily since then but progress has inevitably been uneven. Yes, China is a totalitarian state (with all that entails for tardy reporting of disease outbreaks) and hygiene remains appalling by our standards but the Chinese authorities have reacted more quickly this time than they did to SARS and are taking dramatic steps to contain the epidemic, including building and refitting hospitals on a timescale we can only dream of. Although the Chinese public generally accept their lack of political freedom, they have been more vocal over issues like earthquake preparedness (when you lose your kids in a shoddily built school, what have you left to lose?), pollution and corrupt planning decisions that wipe out communities. In the face of this new challenge, the govt will dearly wish to demonstrate some semblance of competence.

Yang is one of the few candidates with more than a DNR rating who gives the appearance of candidly answering questions without making a campaign speech at the same time. In that sense he is Mayor Pete’s opposite. He clearly addresses the circumstances that led to Trump’s election and for that deserves a lot of credit.

This strain seems to have a fairly long incubation period: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/480067-coronavirus-could-be-much-more-contagious-than Meaning that you could be infected by apparently healthy people.

No doubt we could learn something from them but it’s unlikely we could import their model wholesale. Israel is a tiny, ethnically homogeneous state with two main ethnocultural groups. I’m not sure their way of doing things would be practicable in Canada for reasons of cost and law.

What?