Covid-19 is being under-estimated.

 

Trump is desperate for good news for the sake of his electoral position.

Unfortunately, his hubris has spread across the Atlantic.

 

Keir Starmer, In seeking a government statement on the way out of lock-down, is being premature.

The government, too, is living in fantasy land.  The figures are all going in the wrong direction. We cannot even provide enough PPE to front-line NHS and social care staff. We are nowhere near having the mass testing for infection that the government keeps talking about, let alone tests for immunity,  and a vaccine could still be years, yes, years away.

It is false optimism that leads some silly people to ignore the dangers and risk picking up and spreading the virus. The Tory cabinet appears to have divisions on the matter. Some want at least a partial return to normal as soon as possible, for the sake of the economy and the standing of sterling. Others appreciate the dangers of a resurgence of the virus. Unless we have the whole population vaccinated and strict curbs on global travel, then it would take only a handful of non-symptomatic carriers to restart the epidemic.

It has become every country for itself, ignoring the plight of most of the world. Within the EU, the north Europeans are fending off pleas for help from the southern countries. On a wider scale, we are all simply cutting ourselves off from the failed states that make up most of the world. There are the countries devastated by war, economic failure or gross endemic corruption and with weak health services.  In the category of such failed states we can put the whole of Central and South America, the whole of Africa and much of Asia, including the massive populations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as Afghanistan, Iran and Israel/Palestine. Then we have the countries led by barmy dictators, such as Belarus, Tajikistan and the other throw-backs of Central Asia.

Even if we beat the virus in this country, most of Europe and the USA, the rest of the world will act as a reservoir for the virus from which it can repeatedly break out anew. As the frequent-flyers take to the skies after suffering months of denial, the contagion will be spread anew.

Keep the fossil fuels underground and keep the passenger jets on the ground.  That is my wasted scream into the hurricane.

The crisis has served to remind us that we have massive social problems which will turn on us and bite us by means of the virus. The millions of rightwing church-goers in the USA, having selfishly chucked out Obamacare, now have large, disadvantaged populations, mainly African-Americans and Hispanics, who may act as virus reservoirs.  Italy, Greece, France and the UK have fluid populations of poverty-stricken migrants, living in crowded, insanitary conditions, who could maintain  the virus as an active threat.  Just think of all the potential for social strife fostered by such reservoirs within national borders.

If we come out of this, the government will bask in the reflected glory of the NHS. I, for one, have not forgotten that a Tory government placed strict limits on the numbers medical school could take in, closed hospital wards, took away the training bursaries of nurses and midwives and applied austerity to the NHS, just as much as to other public services.