WE’LL GET TO THE LATEST PLAGUE NEWS SOON, BUT FIRST, HOW IS ISRAEL DOING?

When last I wrote about Israel, they were stuck in an endless cycle of elections and… yeah, that more or less seems to still be the case.

Israel had its most recent election - the third they have had in the last twelve months - on March 2nd, and it was basically the same as the last go-around. Benjamin Netanyahu’s incumbent right-wing Likud party gained a few seats this time, but Likud doesn’t have enough seats to form a government, and the right-wing religious parties don’t have enough seats for Likud to form a coalition government, and the super-right-wing-but-very-secular Yisrael Beiteinu party won’t ally with the religious parties, and all of the centrist and left-wing parties together don’t have enough seats to form a government either. So Likud and the second-largest party, the Blue and White coalition, have been sorta-kinda negotiating to form a unity government because they think that would be awfully handy to have right now what with the whole Covid-19 crisis going on (see, even this bit of news is about the plague!).

The problem, really, is that so far as Likud is concerned, Netanyahu has to be in charge, because it’s Bibi’s party entirely now and there’s a definite cult of personality thing going on with Likud now. As far as Blue and White is concerned, Netanyahu absolutely cannot be in charge of anything and should almost certainly be in jail. (Bibi’s corruption trial was supposed to start today, but whoops, Covid-19, it got postponed.) Bibi and Benny Gantz - the leader of Blue and White - have promised to renew talks on Monday and there have been rumours of a compromise government where they would basically take turns being Prime Minister, which - I don’t even know how that would work and it sounds like a terrible idea, so I suspect there is a good chance it will happen because it’s 2020 and this is the worst year.

OKAY, NOW THE PLAGUE PART

So life continues apace in the world that Covid-19 hath wrought, and this was the week where it felt, for a little bit at least, like North America was finally going to start taking it seriously. I suspect I don’t need to tell you about every major sports league suspending games and Tom Hanks getting sick and Sophie Trudeau getting sick and the subsequent hoarding rushes at supermarkets; you probably know that all already, because those were the things society learned via the societal equivalent of osmosis, so even if you didn’t hear about directly from the news somebody told you.

The problem, though, is that despite all of that, it seems to be taking its time to stick. There is a whole lot of “oh well what is there to be done, we will all get sick eventually” fatalist sentiment out there (working in concert with a much smaller but more malicious sentiment of “it’s all liberal media hysteria” from certain conservative segments of the populace), which meant that this past week even as shit got cancelled and shut down left and right people were still going out in public and going to bars and restaurants and generally doing all the things about which medical experts were saying “sweet lord don’t do this” even as stories started to filter out from hospitals that, yes, they were already working under serious logistical strain because too many people were sick.

Partially, I think, this is because the reported death rate of 1-3 percent sounds small. I mean, one percent doesn’t sound like a lot, because you think “one in a hundred” and, well, that means 99 people are fine. But one in a hundred means over 350,000 people in Canada! Over three million in the USA! And the problem with the one percent figure is that we got it during the initial Chinese outbreak, which A) nobody’s entirely sure if the numbers are right and B) happened when the Chinese government was able to care for everybody who was sick by devoting enormous resources to one specific region of the country. We’re well past that, because Covid-19 is, as I wrote last week, everywhere now.

A more worrying scenario is unfolding in Italy (which had the bad luck to be about a week ahead of most other countries on the plague curve). As of today, Italy has had 24,747 reported cases of Covid-19 and 1,809 deaths. That’s a mortality rate of 7.3 percent, and that might turn out to be closer to the actual lethality rate of Covid-19 when medical systems aren’t able to care for everybody adequately. Granted, that number is still heavily skewed towards the elderly: over eighty percent of Italian deaths from Covid-19 are for people over the age of 70. But even a disease with a mortality rate of 0.3% - which is what it is for people under 40 - is still an order of magnitude more dangerous than the regular flu.

Anyway, herein are quick summaries of the good news and the bad news about the pandemic this week.

GOOD NEWS: The United States still has no serious testing regime and no serious federal response, but they do have smart responses from a number of individual states like California, Washington and Ohio. Researchers in a number of hospitals, led by Toronto’s own Sunnybrook, have managed to isolate the actual Covid-19 virus, which will be key in developing useful vaccines. (Some pharmacorps have claimed they have Covid-19 vaccines already, but at this stage most vaccines will be general antiviral loads rather than specific antibodies.) Carbon emissions dropped quite a bit, because nobody is going anywhere.

BAD NEWS: A lot of people have died, obviously. More are going to be in serious danger of poverty because as the necessity for social distancing grows a lot of people are going to just not have paying work, be they freelancers or shift workers without guaranteed pay or what have you. There’s been an outbreak of avian flu in the Philippines, which is much deadlier than Covid-19 is. (Luckily, avian flu is a lot less contagious than Covid-19 is, so the measures already being taken to stop Covid-19 spread will work even better on avian flu.) Stock markets around the world have taken steep hits already and that doesn’t seem likely to stop any time soon. There aren’t enough protective facemasks anywhere, because most of them were being made in China, Japan and South Korea and those countries have all said, quite reasonably, that they’re only going to be producing for themselves for the time being to protect their populaces. (The fact that facemasks actually aren’t that useful for protection outside of hospitals is sort of besides the point, really.) We all keep having articles pop up on our social media about hoarders or dipshits or hoarder dipshits. Et cetera.

Just keep on keeping on, everybody.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019, Jake Castorena, Blu-ray) - 3/5

Oh, God! (1977, Carl Reiner, Google Play) - 3/5

We’re also watching all of Superstore and finishing up the final season of Mozart In The Jungle, because we’re stuck here at home like everybody else, so it’s a good time to binge through things.

See you in seven.