(Source: Pixabay)
Table of Contents:
Wreck an Economy, Wreck a People: William Watson, National Post, Mar. 24, 2020
Conrad Black: Coronavirus’ Political Toll: Conrad Black, National Post,Mar. 13, 2020
We Thought We Were in Control of Our Lives. The Virus Shattered That: Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, Mar. 19, 2020
Inside an Israeli Coronavirus Hospital: Hillel Kuttler, Tablet, Apr. 1, 2020
______________________________________________________
Wreck an Economy, Wreck a People
William Watson
National Post, Mar. 24, 2020
Just a couple of numbers give you an idea of how hard it would be to deal with any long- term suspended animation of the Canadian economy. Round numbers: last fall’s federal fiscal update had Ottawa spending $350 billion on programs, including grants to the provinces, this coming fiscal year.
Round numbers again: in the fourth quarter of last year, wages and salaries for all employees in Canada amounted to $ 260 billion. The income of corporations, their “net operating surplus,” was $80 billion. And the net income of everybody who was not a corporation or an employee — farmers and landlords, mainly — was $55 billion. So, total income for the quarter was $400 billion, give or take. Any economy is a “circular flow of income and expenditure”: my income becomes my spending, which becomes your income, which becomes your spending, which becomes my income, which becomes … I’m getting dizzy so I’ll stop.
The goal in a crisis is to try to keep this circle unbroken. The virus causes two problems: declining income, because people get fired, and declining spending, both because people are scared and won’t spend on anything other than canned goods, cleaning products and toilet paper but also because in many cases what they’d like to spend on is either forbidden or unavailable due to problems in the supply chain.
Supply chain problems are knotty. Physicians and production engineers will have more to do with overcoming them than economists. Keeping people’s incomes up until the crisis has passed is more our line of work. But the two numbers quoted indicate the size of the problem. The federal government was planning to spend roughly $ 350 billion a year. The income it wants to try to maintain is roughly $400 billion a quarter.
Mind you, not everybody’s income will have to be supported. Most of us are still working and (touch wood!) hope to continue. Many people have rainy- day savings. But put together two widely cited numbers — U. S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s speculation about unemployment rates spiking (very briefly, we all hope) at 20 per cent and Denmark’s plan to pay people 75 per cent of their incomes — and the money adds up fast. Three-quarters of one-fifth of $400 billion is $ 60 billion. And that’s just for one quarter. Suppose you had to spend that for a whole year. You get to $ 240 billion, which is two- thirds of planned program spending.
That number is almost certainly wrong. The calculations are not even back of- the- envelope, more like back- of- a- tweet. And we all hope the worst lasts only weeks. But the point is that Canadian income is a big number and buttressing it in any serious way will be expensive.
… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
______________________________________________________
Conrad Black: Coronavirus’ Political Toll
Conrad Black
National Post, Mar. 13, 2020
The greatest long-term significance of the coronavirus pandemic, as will be elaborated a few paragraphs along in this piece, will be the injury to the credibility and prestige of China and the European Union. It need hardly be emphasized now that there is no choice in any advanced country but to apply drastic measures to reduce the likelihood of members of its population being infected with coronavirus. As the average age of those who have died from that illness in the United States is 80, and the mortality rate in the U.S. for those beneath the age of 70 who are afflicted by the coronavirus is approximately a quarter to a fifth of one per cent of those that are afflicted, the greatest and most urgent effort must be to shield elderly people in fragile health from any exposure to it. The massive closures of institutions and public entertainments are designed to reduce the overall incidence of the coronavirus — to diminish the possibility of people catching it, rather than to focus on the danger of mortal encounters with it, since 99.75 per cent of people under the age of 70 who are in good health are not in significant danger of dying — they are just being urged to take and comply with unusual measures to reduce drastically the likelihood of a possibly very nasty virus.
The level of danger this illness presents to a sophisticated country in public health terms such as Canada and the United States does not justify the level of media and public hysteria that has assaulted the financial markets and unhinged most of the media of the United States. Since the imagination is often more torturing than reality, it is easy to leap to a state of acute spontaneous nervosity over a virus that can kill people, (though very rarely thoroughly healthy people). And in the United States, the national media which is overwhelmingly hostile to the president, (who openly requites their contempt), are naturally trying desperately to find grounds to attack him and reduce his chances of re-election in November. In this respect, the authentic coronavirus crisis is the successor to the confection of the monstrous fraud that U.S. President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election, and the spurious effort at impeachment of him, in which a drumhead kangaroo court in the House of Representatives accused him of offences that are not impeachable and without any probative evidence that he had committed the acts alleged anyway. At least here there is a real public health crisis; it is not a complete fiction like the previous episodes, and in this round, Trump botched the early public relations, seeming complacent, and rather ignorant. But it has at times seemed like a negative medical version of the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 1630s, in which a tulip bulb could sell for the current equivalent of about $500,000. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
______________________________________________________
We Thought We Were in Control of Our Lives. The Virus Shattered That
Margaret Wente
Globe and Mail, Mar. 19, 2020
On Tuesday, the little airport in Palm Springs was unusually crowded. It was packed with snowbirds eager to get home. There were parents with their kids and wagonloads of luggage. There were sprightly older people in running shoes and tracksuits.
Nobody was particularly panicked or upset. Instead, people looked relieved. As the borders hardened and the planes stopped flying, all of us wanted to get out of Trump’s United States before things completely shut down. We knew we were the lucky ones. A middle-aged dad told me he had to get back to his landscaping business in Vancouver so that he could figure out how many people he’d have to lay off. A white-haired woman from Winnipeg said: “I’ve always liked apocalyptic movies. But I never thought I’d be in one.” Another man – a health-care consultant – said he and his wife had been on the verge of retiring, but that was off now. They’d planned to travel. But now, they had a lot less money and nowhere to go.
A few hours after we took off, Palm Springs shut down. Everybody but essential workers has been urged to “shelter in place” – which means, stay home. Many people think more drastic measures are called for. They want mandatory quarantines, with stiff penalties for those who don’t comply. China has them. Israel has them. What was unthinkable here is now well within the realm of possibility.
On the plane, I thought about the delicious restaurant meal we’d had the evening before we left. We knew it would be our last time dining out for quite a while. It turned out to be the last one for the restaurant, too, which closed the same day we left. We kicked ourselves for only leaving a 30-per-cent tip.
When we got home to Toronto, we found that government assurances of “enhanced” screenings weren’t as expected. Nobody took our temperature or assessed our health. We had a 20-second encounter with someone who asked if we were aware that we were supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days. He gave us a piece of paper with directions on how to do it. It said to avoid people and wash your hands. It was not very helpful.
Our world has changed utterly in a week. Last week, COVID-19 was something that happened to other people somewhere far away. Last week, we could meet our friends for a cup of coffee, arrange play-dates for our children, go out for a meal, see our moms in the assisted-living home. This week, we’re wondering how some of our friends and family will get by. Their livelihoods are vanishing. Their old-age income is drying up. We are living in suspended animation, where the pleasures and routines and structures of ordinary life have been ripped from us, and nobody knows what will happen next. The future has become a black box.
This catastrophe isn’t 9/11. It’s way more transformative. Unlike terrorist attacks, plagues attack the structure of everyday life. Plagues are capable of killing far more people. Some have devastating economic effects that make everybody poorer. They can shatter people’s belief in authority, or God. Unlike terrorist attacks, there’s no human enemy or terrible regime to go to war against. There is only a virus. And it’s infinitely easier to kill a tyrant than a virus.
Things aren’t entirely hopeless, we’re told. If our leaders do everything right, if they stay united, if they target their responses in the correct ways, if they can execute as well as plan, then we’ll be okay. And if you have confidence that they can do all this, then you’re far more confident than I am.… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.[
______________________________________________________
Inside an Israeli Coronavirus Hospital
Hillel Kuttler
Tablet, Apr. 1, 2020
This is the eight-step dressing regimen of Adham Abdalrazik, a nurse at the Galilee Medical Center in the northern Israel town of Nahariya, before seeing patients in this COVID-19 era. In a cramped supply room, he grabs a pair of thin shoe covers from a plastic bin and slips them over his feet. At the next bin, he pumps a sanitizer jug and cleans his hands. He continues to his left, progressively donning blue gloves, a blue gown, hair netting, an N95 mask, a face shield, and another pair of gloves.
Abdalrazik normally works in the hospital’s geriatrics department. But these are not normal times, so the geriatric patients were relocated from here to the internal medicine department three weeks earlier and a COVID-19 department was configured in its place. Abdalrazik’s patients now—three patients on this day—are solely those with COVID-19.
It is Wednesday, March 25, and we are in the department’s Yellow Zone. Abdalrazik’s patients are maybe 10 steps away in the hermetically sealed Red Zone. The department has 24 beds and nine rooms, including a six-bedroom reserved for critical-care patients, of which there haven’t been any yet. Only five patients have been hospitalized here with COVID-19, all with mild cases of the highly contagious virus. Each patient has been young: a 49-year-old and the rest 23 to 29.
“Oh, Prince Charles now has coronavirus,” said Sharon Mann, who works in the hospital’s international-affairs department, of the news appearing on her smartphone.
A few buildings to the north, in the complex’s rehabilitation center, sits the COVID-19 department’s 30-bed intensive care unit. The unit is empty for now. This is the calm before what the hospital’s medical officials expect, and what Israeli leaders have cautioned for weeks, will be the storm of this global pandemic. “We have to prepare ourselves for much more,” said Dr. Masad Barhoum, GMC’s chief executive officer, who stopped in at the department during my visit. “This is just the opening stage.”
Walking between the two buildings on this glorious spring day, Mann and I follow a sidewalk along a narrow, interior road. A newly installed gate closes the road to vehicular traffic to keep it free for ambulances transporting COVID-19 patients. The patients are then taken inside via a recently constructed side door, a portal meant for them alone. Staff and non-COVID-19 patients access the building, the women’s health center, only through the main entrance.
The arrangement typifies the refitting of 37 existing wards throughout Israel, including in two psychiatric hospitals, with COVID-19 departments. There’s more to the approach than architecture. Physicians and nurses at the Nahariya hospital care directly for COVID-19 patients, of course—but rarely in immediate proximity. Nearly all of their communication with patients occurs through a window, using an intercom system. Patients are instructed in taking their own pulse, blood pressure, and temperature; if they can’t manage those tasks or are in any distress, the medical professionals don their garb and enter the Red Zone. Meals one way, and urine and stool samples the other way, are conveyed through separate slots that must be closed by the initiating person before the receiving person gains access. Adjacent to the supply room is a control room, where staff members monitor every bed, 24 hours a day, on multiple screens of closed-circuit television.
Abdalrazik calls this a “minimum-touch policy” for providing care while reducing the risk of his and his colleagues catching the virus, too. In 10 shifts since the COVID-19 department opened on March 13, Abdalrazik estimated venturing into the Red Zone just four times, most recently to take a patient for a CT scan. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
______________________________________________________
For Further Reference:
Watch: Raymond J. de Souza: When the Going Got Tough Due To COVID-19, Justin Trudeau Showed His True Authoritarian Colours: Father Raymond J. de Souza, National Post, Mar. 27, 2020 –– Critics of Donald Trump have speculated that he might exploit the crisis to move in an authoritarian direction.
Food for Thought during the Corona Crisis: Ten Potential Negative Scenarios in Israel’s Strategic Environment: Itai Brun, Yoel Guzansky, Daniel Rakov, Sarah J. Feuer: INSS Insight No. 1289, Apr. 1, 2020 — The corona crisis has become a multidimensional shockwave reverberating beyond solely medical parameters, and is emerging as a watershed event in international relations in general and the history of the Middle East in particular.
The Two Pandemics: Robert J. Shiller, Project Syndicate, Mar. 31, 2020 — We are feeling the anxiety effects of not one pandemic but two. First, there is the COVID-19 pandemic, which makes us anxious because we, or people we love, anywhere in the world, might soon become gravely ill and even die. And, second, there is a pandemic of anxiety about the economic consequences of the first.
China Says It’s Beating Coronavirus. But Can We Believe Its Numbers?:Charlie Campbell, Shanghan and Amy Gunia, Time, Apr. 1, 2020 — If you believe the Chinese authorities, the country’s battle against the novel coronavirus is all but won. But that claim is clouded by a fog of skewed data, political imperatives—and unreported cases and possibly deaths.
