Coronavirus Hoax
Another day, another story about how badly Trump is handling the Coronavirus outbreak.
The basis of the story relates to the kits used for testing. Three or more weeks ago, the kits in China were found to give false positive and false negative results. Which in turn led to stories, and arguments, (and still does) as to whether or not Covid-19 can remain dormant.
In the meantime, new kits have been developed that supposedly give 99% accuracy; and the time needed to process the samples has come down from days to minutes…. and may, or may not require labs… and those labs may or may not have the required certifications etc…. it’s all very fascinating for those fascinated by such things…
But for our purposes, America (for whatever reason) was stuck with the old unreliable kits (even though new kits, made by American companies, were sent to China). There was also an argument about labs, that at one point meant only three labs in the country could perform testing. Also a turf-war with the FDA over the approval of the new, reliable, kits didn’t help matters, and as always there were various wrangles about money.
Now how much of this is politics, and how much is poor planning: or inherited structural problems within the bureaucracy, is purely a matter of taste.
Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic has an interesting article (Epidemics Reveal the Truth About the Societies They Hit) which perhaps throws light on the situation. As an outsider, and a humble satyr, there is something very American about this spat….
Mr Trump declares that no country is more prepared to fight the virus. His opponents… who until a week ago had no interest in the issue (with Elizabeth Warren switching priorities, seemingly overnight, from appointing a nine year old trans-person as her education secretary to her ‘well thought out’ plan of not building a ‘racist wall’ ?!?) … say he isn’t, and is doing everything wrong.
Mr Trump having spent nearly four years fighting the ‘swamp’, inevitably blames his successor (with some justification, Crossfire Hurricane, Russiagate, Douma, Impeachment etc) for the inertia, and journalists (who all think they are Woodward and Bernstein (and given the nature of the ‘swamp’ most of them probably are)) pretend to not know what Mr Trump is talking about when he says…
In steps (anti-science) Mike Pence, to do his Christian duty…
All the while U-boats are running riot off the eastern seaboard, the Japs are menacing the Dutch in Java, and Mrs Miniver is playing at the flicks to win over hearts and minds of the isolationists.
What no one will point out, despite FEMA being activated weeks ago, is that far from dragging people off to camps to disappear them (as the Alex Jones’ of the world would have you believe) is that perhaps the reason for the lack of testing is that Amerika is a fiction. And America is the reality.
And that as a country America so catatrophises everything, in it’s schizophrenic identity crisis between global empire and pastoral idyll, that the paltry 400 tests is simply denial… for fear of what may be found lurking and imperfect in ‘the greatest country ever’.
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Previous posts…
March
March 1st — Coronavirus Comes to Town
March 2nd — Coronavirus by Numbers
March 3rd — Coronavirus Bombshell
February
Feb 3rd — Coronavirus May Be Serious
Feb 4th — Coronavirus Spreading, But Rumours Contained
Feb 5th — Report Says Thousands Killed By Coronavirus in China
Feb 6th — Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories
Feb 7th — Coronavirus Misinformation
Feb 8th — Coronavirus ‘Self Isolates’ China
Feb 9th — China Comes Clean on Coronavirus
Feb 10th — Britain Braces for Coronavirus
Feb 11th — Coronavirus: Chinese Market News
Feb 12th — Coronavirus Relaunches As COVID19
Feb 13th — Coronavirus Figures Explained
Feb 14th — Coronavirus Phoney War
Feb 15th — Coronavirus And AIDS
Feb 16th — Creating the Coronavirus
Feb 17th — Coronavirus Kamikaze
Feb 18th — Coronavirus Conundrum
Feb 19th — China Coronavirus Crisis
Feb 20th — Debunking Coronavirus Conspiracies
Feb 21st — Coronavirus Goes on Tour
Feb 22nd — Coronavirus Grimoire
Feb 23rd — Coronavirus Cannibals
Feb 24th — Coronavirus Facts
Feb 25th — Matt Hancock’s Coronavirus Chaos
Feb 26th — Will Coronavirus be Donald Trump’s Waterloo
Feb 27th — ‘HIV-like’ Coronavirus Found
Feb 28th — The Politics of Coronavirus
Feb 29th — Coronavirus Hits France
