COVID-19 pandemic

"The pandemic, explained the Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, was the definitive ‘end of the neoliberal era inaugurated by Thatcher and Reagan’. We don’t just hear that from Social Democrats these days. Now right-wing populists, journalists and economists also claim that ‘the Reagan/Thatcher era is over’. These two leaders are often used as symbols of the era of economic liberalization in the early 1980s, and I agree that it feels an awful lot like that era has come to an end. Donald Trump’s advisor Stephen Moore declared that the Republicans are no longer Reagan’s party but Trump’s, and that’s exactly how the party comes across in their recent agitation against free trade, immigration and tech companies, not to mention lies about election fraud. (Reagan once called the peaceful transfer of power the ‘magic’ of the free world.) Thatcher’s Tories have abandoned the European single market she was once instrumental in developing, and have simultaneously abandoned many other economic orthodoxies, toying with more active industrial policies and ‘Buy British’ slogans – a new attitude that Boris Johnson in an unguarded moment happened to summarize as ‘fuck business’. His short-lived successor, Liz Truss, who famously declared that large-scale imports of cheese were ‘a disgrace’, tried to invoke the Iron Lady, albeit through her boldness rather than her policies. Instead, Truss railed against the ‘consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times’ that budgets should be balanced and went on to doom her premiership with a massive, unfunded package of energy subsidies and tax cuts, which markets refused to finance."

"You might remember Covid! It's the Stephen Miller of diseases, in that we were all very worried about it a few years ago and have since moved on even though it's still extremely dangerous."

"In fact, de Oliveira says that compared to the wealthy nations of the Global North, countries of the Global South actually have a leg up: "We have more experience dealing with epidemics in the Global South," he says. He gives a rueful chuckle. "It's one of our only scientific advantages." It's why Brazil has some of the foremost experts on mosquito-borne outbreaks like Zika and Chikungunya. Why Uganda is so good on viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola. In South Africa the scourge has been HIV. To deal with it de Oliveira didn't just study up on genomic surveillance, he helped pioneer its use. "Yeah, very early on," he says. "Probably in 1995. When the field was just starting." In other words, it wasn't a fluke that South Africa stood up their COVID genomic surveillance so fast. They were building on years of prior work."

"De Oliveira says those early efforts included developing methods to minimize the number of samples that clinics would need to send in so that South Africa's already strapped health workers could contribute. And yet, de Oliveira says, the burden those health workers face is something many of his Global North colleagues overlook. "They come with these great ideas of setting up these really advanced computer systems in the clinic." De Oliveira's response: First try spending a day at one of our rural clinics. "Most of them just burst into tears during the process," he says. "And they're like, 'Oh! I didn't realize that that clinic would have like, 500 people in the queue. And like, people almost dying and the doctors didn't have the tools. And that if I put in an advanced computer system that tries to get [hundreds of samples], not only is it going to have no effect, but it will disturb the clinicians who are overworked.' ""

"And so as the world mobilizes to catch future pandemics, de Oliveira has a request: Let the Global South take the lead. "Why not take advantage of the knowledge of the Global South?" he says. "If we work together this way, then we can protect the whole globe.""

"The situation with the coronavirus is different from the Charlie Hebdo incident, because this is neither a religious nor a political conflict. In 2015, the political opposition was looking for a way of stirring up an uprising in order to be able to overthrow the government of the day, and the Church was a handy scapegoat. But I believe that with the coronavirus they will not venture to attack the Christians in the same way."

"The whole messaging of this pandemic is you're stuck at home teleworking, that must be really tough so here are some recipes for sourdough starter, and here's what you should catch up on Netflix," Papageorge said. "But what about the people who aren't teleworking? What are they going to do?" People with access to the outdoors at home were 20% more likely to maintain social distance. "It's not shocking that if you don't live in a comfortable house you're going to be leaving your house more often," Papageorge said. "But the point we want to push is that if I'm a policymaker maybe I really need to think about opening city parks in a dense neighborhood during a pandemic. Maybe that's something that's worth the risk. This is why we want to understand these details -- they can eventually suggest policies."

"A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America's blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them."

"Even among the experts I’ve spoken to over the past few weeks, there’s wide disagreement on how much risk is tolerable, when milder precautions like masking are warranted, and at what point harsher measures, like lockdowns and school closures, are needed. There’s not even agreement on what the endgame is; some say that, from a policy standpoint, the goal should be to keep caseloads manageable for hospitals, while others call for doing much more to drive down Covid-19. One big problem identified by experts: “I don’t think we’re having those conversations enough,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me. Instead of the public and officials openly discussing how much risk is acceptable, the public dialogue often feels like two extremes — the very risk-averse and those downplaying any risk of the coronavirus whatsoever — talking past each other."

"If I had to sum it up, I would say sheer madness. It's obscene. It's strictly political, really, an attempt to divert from what we all know has been a gross mismanagement of the prevention phase of this in the United States and the response phase, and it's tragic because the World Health Organization now is moving into a phase where it is going to try to help avert a catastrophe in the developing world. If we think about how difficult it has been for us in the United States with our sophisticated healthcare system to manage this crisis, imagine living in a slum in a developing country or in a refugee camp. And in places like that, the only place you really have to turn for expertise and for financial support is the World Health Organization when governments themselves can't provide the resources. So the timing of this is particularly catastrophic because it is just about to wallop parts of the world in vulnerable communities that really can't handle it. I mean, Trump has a point about aspects of the World Health Organization's response that have been problematic. The problem is his very criticisms are ones that you could levy just as easily at him, overreliance on China, flattery of China, sucking up to China, to put it in an undiplomatic way. I mean, that's something that we saw it characterize the early phase of the U.S. response led by President Trump, and downplaying the crisis until it was too late, missing the month of February, as he did, to get the testing apparatuses in place and put in place the kinds of guidelines that we have now but at the time when it's already spread across the country."

"The moment that the Chinese scientists and doctors announced that the coronavirus could be transmitted between human beings on Jan. 20, 2020, the socialist governments went into action to monitor ports of entry and to test and trace key parts of the population. They set up task forces and procedures to immediately make sure that the infection would not go out of control amongst their people. They did not wait till the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11. This is in stark contrast to governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and other capitalist states, where there has been a hallucinatory attitude towards the Chinese government and the WHO. There is no comparison between the stance of Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and U.S. President Donald Trump: the former had a sober, science-based attitude, while the latter has consistently laughed off the coronavirus as a simple flu as recently as June 24."

"If the government continues with its ‘zero-COVID’ policy, Foxconn would only be the beginning. There is Foxconn today, but other factories will face similar situations"

"People inoculated against Covid-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus to contacts in their household as those who haven’t had shots, according to new research."

"It is not yet clear whether the people concerned [in the earlier cases] have also been to southern Africa"

"Vaccines against the coronavirus may impair the body’s ability to produce a key type of antibody, thus potentially limiting the immune system’s defenses against mutated strains of the virus, a new study suggests."

"Successful vaccine rollouts have failed to stop Covid transmission, with new data showing the prevalence of the virus increasing in fully jabbed individuals, according to a medical study in The Lancet. Examining new infections in Germany, researchers found that the rate of cases among fully vaccinated individuals aged 60 and older has risen from 16.9% in July to 58.9% in October."

"It is only a matter of weeks before Omicron is dominant here (in Germany)."

"I think it's really important people have an accurate sense of the reality in order to go about their lives. If their risk assessments are being driven by or influenced by these overestimated hospitalization and death rates, I think that's problematic."

"It may take four to five years before we finally see the end of the pandemic and the start of a post-COVID normal,”"

"The fight is far from over"

"COVID-19 is a terrible warning against complacency in the face of global threats to all human life. The past twelve months have served to reinforce the messages that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been saying for decades: that it is only through collective action and responsible leadership that we can secure a peaceful and habitable planet for future generations. The new Presidency of Joe Biden has a chance to reassert US commitments to the values and institutions of multilateralism; there is no other way for humanity to overcome the dangers posed by pandemics, climate change and the risk of nuclear war."

"The pandemic-related economic slowdown temporarily reduced the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. But over the coming decade fossil fuel use needs to decline precipitously if the worst effects of climate change are to be avoided. Instead, fossil fuel development and production are projected to increase. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations hit a record high in 2020, one of the two warmest years on record. The massive wildfires and tropical cyclones of 2020 are illustrations of the major devastation that will only increase if governments do not significantly and quickly amplify their efforts to bring greenhouse gas emissions essentially to zero."

"A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it's because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened? There is a that, historically, {pandemics have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities. The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm."

""If we did so poorly with something like COVID-19, you can imagine how poorly we would do with something like a 1918-level event," Adalja said, referring to the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed an estimated 50 million people around the world, according to the Cleveland Clinic."

"In India there have been reports of deaths among unemployed returning home in search of food; many countries, including the US, have seen workers taking industrial action, and anger has been expressed in rural communities over wealthy city-dwellers retreating to their second homes for the duration. Governments should keep an eye on these developments, in weighing up when and how to lift the lockdown, because even if it's difficult to argue today that the cure is worse than the disease, the cure might provoke an entirely different malaise – and history teaches us that no society is immune to that. That's the . In the long term, of course, they – and we – should address the dreadful inequality in our societies, which this pandemic is picking apart with a lethal scalpel."

"We believe that Spain will not have, at most, beyond a diagnosed case. Hopefully there will be no local transmission. If there is, it will be very limited and very controlled"

"Humans wield more power over the planet than ever before. In the wake of COVID-19, record-breaking temperatures and spiraling inequality, it is time to use that power to redefine what we mean by progress, where our carbon and consumption footprints are no longer hidden."

"During lockdown... and hedgehog walkabouts were a lot safer"

"People in quarantine should not think they won't be fined for leaving their hotel room."

"The Corona crisis will shrink the inflow of dollars. Hopefully, this is temporary, no more than a few months. CBN can allow some downward pressure on the naira without energetically intervening to defend the exchange rate. Only if and when the rate seems that it might dip precipitously should the CBN intervene."

"If one word could sum up the experience of 2020, it would be disbelief. Between Xi Jinping’s public acknowledgment of the coronavirus outbreak on January 20, 2020, and Joseph Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States precisely a year later on January 20, 2021, the world was shaken by a disease that in the space of twelve months killed more than 2.2 million people and rendered tens of millions severely ill. As of the end of April 2021, when this book went to press, the global death toll exceeded 3.2 million. The danger it posed disrupted the daily routine of virtually everyone on the planet, stopped much of public life, closed schools, separated families, interrupted travel both within and between countries, and upended the world economy. To contain the fallout, government support for households, businesses, and markets took on dimensions not seen outside wartime. It was not just by far the sharpest economic recession experienced since World War II, it was qualitatively unique. Never before had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down. It was, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put it, “a crisis like no other.”"

"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that."

"His Majesty the (Bhutan) King's leadership and guidance have been key to the vaccination program's success. Earlier this year (2021), Bhutan was able to inoculate more than 80% of the total population (12 years old and above), with timely and generous support from countries in the region, Europe and the United States. And currently, Bhutan is preparing for a nationwide third, booster, dose. Despite being a resource-constrained economy, Bhutan did not compromise on the quality and standards of COVID-19 measures. With strict containment measures and successful vaccination programs, Bhutan did not have any positive cases from the community as of mid-December 2021 and was also able to open the economy for business. The good news is that the economy is estimated to achieve 3% GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth in 2021 from –10.8% in 2020."

"In an interview with The Economist last month, Bill Gates stated that millions of people in developing countries would die before the COVID-19 pandemic was over. He noted, importantly, that 90 percent of the deaths would not result from the virus itself, but from “indirect” effects. These include most prominently the economic impact of the pandemic, as well as other causes such as the overwhelming of medical and public health resources, which increases fatalities from other diseases. Gates was not exaggerating at all. It’s easy to see how this horror will materialize, if we project forward from the current situation."

"The World Food Program projects that the number of people facing acute hunger will nearly double this year, from 135 to 260 million. This is mainly a result of the economic impact of the pandemic: as the World Bank has noted, this is the worst global recession since the end of World War II, and the worst ever (since 1870) in terms of the number of countries pushed into recession. It creates poverty, extreme poverty and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people in developing countries."

"Pregnant women do not seem to be at higher risk of getting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, studies have shown an increased risk of developing severe COVID-19 if they are infected, compared with non-pregnant women of a similar age. COVID-19 during pregnancy has also been associated with an increased likelihood of preterm birth."

"​In the light of the coronavirus pandemic, I focus criticism on capitalism and the vulnerabilities it has accumulated for several reasons. Viruses are part of nature. They have attacked human beings—sometimes dangerously—in both distant and recent history. [...] Alternative systems—those not driven by a profit-first logic—could manage viruses better. While not profitable to produce and stockpile everything needed for a viral pandemic, it is efficient. The wealth already lost in this pandemic far exceeds the cost to have produced and stockpiled the tests and ventilators, the lack of which is contributing so much to today's disaster. Capitalism often pursues profit at the expense of more urgent social needs and values. In this, capitalism is grossly inefficient. This pandemic is now bringing that truth home to people."

""...Who do you know that has ever said, “I’m going to get really drunk and then drive around on public roads?”; Who do you know that has ever said, “I’m going to go out in public, but I refuse to wear a face mask?”"

"The pandemic must be tackled together, united, and following science. Any attempt to politicize or stigmatize the pandemic must be rejected."

"In dealing with the Covid-19 epidemic that suddenly exploded, we have given expression to the great love that unites human beings by adhering to the principle according to which people and human life must be put first, and we have written an epic of the struggle to the epidemic with intrepidity, aware of the fact that unity is strength."

"Pandemics don't always trigger , but they can do, by throwing into relief the very inequalities that caused them. That's because they hit the poor hardest – those in low-paid or unstable employment, who live in crowded accommodation, have underlying health issues, and for whom healthcare is less affordable or less accessible. This was true in the past and remains so today. During the the death rate was three times higher in the poorest fifth of England's population than in the richest. Covid-19 is showing no signs of departing from the pattern, which, because of the way the socioeconomic dice fall, also has a racial dimension. But there is something brand new about this pandemic, which has never been seen before in the history of humanity – and that is our unprecedented global experiment in . These lockdown measures are designed to slow the spread of the disease, relieve the burden on s and ultimately save lives – and it looks as if they may be doing that. But they may also be exacerbating social inequalities themselves."