THE LATEST ON THAT PANDEMIC THAT HAS THE WHOLE WORLD FREAKING OUT

Seeing as how Covid-19 (or “the coronavirus” if you’re not cool, like those of us who use its proper name) is basically the only story in the world right now that has everybody everywhere losing their shit, let’s (sigh) talk about it some more.

The Chinese CDC released their case estimates for Covid-19 this week, which were reviewed in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and which represent the biggest amount of data that we have about the virus’ effects. The four big numbers that you probably care about are what percentage of cases were classified as “mild” (81 percent), what percentage of cases were classified as “severe” (14 percent), what percentage were “critical” (5 percent), and what the overall lethality rate so far is (2.3 percent). The lethality rate increases significantly for people in their 70s (rising to 8 percent), and 80s or older (nearly 15 percent), as well as for diabetics and people suffering from heart disease or chronic lung diseases (ranging from 6-10% depending on malady). These numbers come with good news and bad news.

The good news is that these numbers, if genuine, are probably overestimates. Nobody simply has enough data on Covid-19 yet to really determine if these numbers are accurate, and the odds are that they aren’t simply because we’re still very early in this crisis, which means that a lot of people who would otherwise be classified as “mild” probably simply weren’t caught at all because they were never reported as suffering from Covid-19, because they probably just thought they had a cold or a mild flu and stayed home and got better. So, in all likelihood, all of the more serious numbers are probably higher than they will be by the end of the year when there’s just a lot more data to work with.

The bad news is twofold. Firstly, it’s been confirmed now via multiple studies that Covid-19 is potentially asymptomatic - which means you can carry it without developing symptoms, which is why it’s spreading so fast. (The question of whether you can be asymptomatic and then develop symptoms after a while is still sort of up in the air.) The second problem is that when Covid-19 hits hard, it really hits hard: about a quarter of all patients who were hospitalized with it needed to be put in intensive care, and half of those ended up needing ventilators, which means that wider spread of the disease will most likely severely tax or even overload public health resources, since there are only so many ventilators to go around.

(There is also a conspiracy theory floating around that the Chinese government is providing “expected” lethality numbers and that many more people than believed have died from Covid-19. This is probably unlikely, but we’ll know in a couple weeks depending on how many people die outside of China. Which isn’t really a fun way to find this sort of thing out, of course.)

Of course, when I say “the bad news is twofold,” I’m just talking about the disease itself, because the real problem with most pandemics isn’t the actual disease but rather humans and governments panicking and doing the worst possible things in response to the disease. The winner of the Worst Response So Far award unsurprisingly goes to North Korea, which is literally just executing people testing positive for the virus, but only marginally less surprising is that Donald Trump is utterly unequipped to deal with an Actual Problem, as he is now dealing with the fallout of having fired most of the people in the government trained to deal with pandemics two years ago and is making noise about closing the Mexican border because he thinks Mexicans are dirty. (Mexico has fewer confirmed Covid-19 cases than the USA does, of course.) Meanwhile the review of early American efforts has been suboptimal, in part because the CDC is working with relatively minimal resources and in part because there’s just been a whole lot of bungling in the early response, involving a lot of letting potentially infected people mingle with uninfected people without any screening or protection so as to create many more infected people.

On the other hand, South Korea, Japan and Singapore have all immediately put in place efficient and large-scale testing regimes (you can literally do a drive-thru testing swab in South Korea). So organized response to a pandemic is, in fact, possible! Which is heartening. On the other hand, though, there’s a massive outbreak in Iran and popular distrust of the Iranian government is so great that nobody believes anything the government says about Covid-19, not a single damn thing other than the fact that it exists. So that’s great.

In conclusion, wash your damn hands.

MEANWHILE IN NON-PANDEMIC NEWS, THIS WEEK IN PROTESTS

Large protests in the Dominican Republic (or, as Canada thinks of it, “the cheap place for a sunny winter vacation that isn’t Cuba”) this week, marking a gradual escalation in the protests that have been happening since mid-February after the government cancelled municipal elections.

Quick backgrounder: the Dominican Liberation Party (centre-left) has been in charge of the DR for the last sixteen years, and the municipal elections were considered to be a prelude of sorts to the general elections that will be held in May, where for the first time in 26 years every federal public office that can be elected is having their election at the same time. The current favorite in polls, however, is Luis Abinader of the Modern Revolutionary Party. (Pretty much every Dominican political party tries to tie itself to the overthrow of the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship that took place in between 1957 and 1961, since the other option is identifying one’s party with the Christian Social Reformists who took power with American support shortly thereafter and basically just kept doing the same thing with somewhat less overt violence, which is not really that popular these days.) Abinader has hired Rudy Guiliani as a political consultant, which is not a great look.

Anyway, the municipal elections were scheduled for February 16th and in fact started normally, but a few hours in the government abruptly just cancelled/postponed the elections outright in mid-vote. The official story is that there were computer glitches preventing the voting machines they were using from working, which is one of those “okay, it’s possible but not that plausible” stories, especially considering they didn’t simply go to paper ballots as a backup, which do not glitch as a rule. (Paper ballots: all this time and they’re still the best way to vote and it’s not close.)

Anyway, the combination of “cancelled minor election” and “opposition candidate is polling well pre-major-election” is not one that left anybody feeling optimistic about Dominican democracy, hence the large protests. The government, for their part, has requested the assistance of the Organization of American States, but it became clear this week that the OAS’s recent claims about election fraud in Bolivia last year were, in fact, total bullshit so that’s not really that helpful. New elections have been scheduled for mid-March, though, and hopefully this time there won’t be any “glitches.”

ALSO THIS WEEK IN PROT- NO, SORRY, THESE ARE VIOLENT RIOTS

I’ve written before about Narendra Modi’s India becoming more and more firmly anti-Muslim, but the last week has been especially bad, with Hindu nationalist mobs attacking Muslims in Delhi.

Of course, there have been flareups of Hindu-on-Muslim violence for months now, since the anti-Muslim refugee laws have been massively protested by Muslims and also many younger Indians of various creeds and sects (religious minorities like Sikhs and Jains who are worried they’ll be next, Hindus who just aren’t down with religious fascism, that sort of thing), and those protests have sparked counter-protest riots by Hindu nationalists who are basically sort of offended that the protesters are mad. But the current riots are a new level of awful.

What happened was that a jolly piece of shit named Kapil Mishra, a recent convert to the BJP (after getting kicked out of both his prioer political party and Delhi’s regional government for being a grandstanding liar laying baseless charges against his political opponents), lost his race to win back his seat in the Delhi regional assembly following a campaign where he claimed the election would be a fight between India and Pakistan. (Read: Hindus and Muslims.) The BJP also got badly trounced in this election, which didn’t help matters.

Following the loss, Mishra then addressed an anti-protester rally, threatened the police in attendance and incited the crowd to attack nearby protesters. That got the tinderbox going, but it only got worse when Hindu nationalists from neighboring Uttar Pradesh drove into Delhi to attack Muslims as well. And… well, now we’re at over 40 dead and hundreds injured and countless stories from survivors who are quite certain they are only alive because the crowd trying to beat them to death thought they were dead already.

It’s a mess, and India has never exactly been calm when it comes to Hindu/Muslim relations but the BJP being in power makes it all so much worse.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Birds of Prey And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn (2020, Cathy Yan, theatre) - 3/5

I’ve been playing Arkham Knight this past week, because now is the time to play a game that came out five years ago which I bought two years ago in a Steam sale for five dollars. And… it’s fine! It’s better than Arkham City was, to be sure, but as Batman vidyagames go I’ll be glad to see the weird mix of comic faithfulness and uber-gritty-everybody-is-so-scarred-and-armored ethos be done with once I finish this one.

See you in seven.