So I missed last week, mostly because last week was a comparatively slow week in news around the world, mostly because there's only so many iterations of "pandemic still ongoing, people are locked down, some nitwits are complaining loudly" you can type and it gets truly depressing after a while. But over the last week we've seen some significant changes, some for the better and some for the worse. So let's do all of that.

THE "FOR THE BETTER" BIT

Just after I was deciding last week not to write a week's worth of barely-a-newsletter, New Zealand's government announced that it had "eliminated" Covid-19, by which they meant that new infections had trickled down to almost nothing - they announced later in the week they had hit zero new infections. This being basically the goal everybody wants to reach, it's important to understand that New Zealand's lockdown protocols were more strict than the vast majority of countries: every business that wasn't essential was completely shut down beyond remote work, and "essential" was strictly defined, all the way down to takeout food places being shut down (a step most countries haven't yet taken beyond those worst hit, like Italy and Spain). They shut down early and they shut down comprehensively, and a lot of the rest of the world didn't manage both.

At the same time as they were locking everything down, they were also massively increasing testing capacity to a degree a lot of other countries haven't yet approached, to the point where they've tested more than one out of every forty people in the country. No, that's not everybody, but that's not the point: the point is to get a large enough sample (geographically dispersed enough, of course) that you can see how fast the disease is spreading, and New Zealand can now see that the disease's spread has been cut down to nothing.

And they're not easing up, which is the other smart thing. Jacinda Ardern didn't say "we're down to zero infections, time to party" - and let's be honest, they all wanted to party - because zero infections found doesn't necessarily mean zero infections existing. Instead, they're easing up a bit on lockdown protocols - people can get takeout food now, more jobs are allowable to work non-remotely, that sort of thing, but it's by no means a quarantine-is-over scenario. They're opening up very cautiously and carefully, just in case somewhere there's a dozen Kiwis who don't know they're sick with Covid-19 yet.

It's basically a model for how to deal with Covid-19 or pandemics in general, and before you say "but they're an island!" like everybody does when they want to dismiss New Zealand's success, literally every country has shut down travel by this point so whether or not one is surrounded by water is sort of besides the point.

(Incidentally, right now lots of other countries are duplicating New Zealand's coronavirus curve with just slightly less success, so this good news is hardly limited to them. They're just the poster children right now.)

THE "FOR THE WORSE" BIT

The last two weeks of Covid-19 news, really, has mostly been "what has America fucked up this week" and I'm not really going to talk about much else either. I mean, sure, I could talk about Sweden's terrible herd immunity strategy, which has been both costly and also pointless (because you can compare Sweden to Norway pretty easily, since they're basically the same country divided in half because of Vikings a long time ago, and Norway locked down and Sweden didn't and as a result we know that Sweden's "do nothing and take the punch" strategy hasn't resulted in greater herd immunity), or I could talk about Brazil, which increasingly is looking like more of a disaster zone with every passing day thanks to their government's denial that the pandemic is, like, a thing, or I could talk about India, where the government is more or less insisting that India is miraculously plague-free compared to everybody else and that whatever Covid-19 they have is strictly regional (it's now prominent in every major state in India).

But the USA is sort of special, because although most first world countries of course want the pandemic to just be over already, there's a distinct mindset in a portion of the American populace that they can just sort of have the pandemic end if they wish hard enough. Granted, this sort of idiocy is pretty much everywhere. I mean, last weekend on a shopping trip I passed by Queen's Park here in Toronto and what did I see but an idiot rally for plague vectors, and every country has its own version of the dumbass brigade demanding the right to get sick and die - or, more accurately, the right for other people to get sick and die on their behalf, given the number of "I want a haircut" and "I miss eating out" signs at these bloody stupid things.

But the USA is more or less unique among developed countries in that everywhere else in the "first world" the idiots are mostly being treated like idiots. The USA, on the other hand, is currently being run by idiots who want to hear good news regardless of all else, which is why every press conference Donald Trump does now includes some variation of "look, we only have X deaths, people said we'd have millions, we're doing pretty good" at the same time as they announce new policy likely to get the country to the millions level of dead.

And I understand that people want the economy to not, like, be on pause. It's a huge problem, and countries are all dealing with it in their own ways, most of which include massive public spending. But the Republicans in charge of the USA are ideologically opposed to massive public spending on poor people (and a lot of the Democrats are kind of wary of it, let's be honest), so the only other policy answer that can potentially work is re-opening the economy.

The problem with this plan, though - and of course there's a problem - is that re-opening the economy is a classic supply-side strategy in that the working theory behind it is "if we do THIS, then people will just start buying things again." The problem with this theory is that we already know at this point that it doesn't work, because a few individual states have been open for a few days and most people have not returned to shop at the newly opened businesses, because they don't want to get sick and die. Supply-side economics have been sort of a joke for almost as long as I've been alive, because demand, not supply, is what drives economies - and in a pandemic there isn't demand for the usual things.

(Oh, and Quebec is being stupid too in most of the same ways. Bad Quebec.)

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

A lot of movies, of course (go look at my Letterboxd for the current tally), and also my wife asked if we could rewatch old seasons of Top Chef, which she hasn't seen and which I'm fine with because I enjoy Top Chef, even if it means rewatching some chefs who were terrible television people. (As opposed to terrible people, who are terrible all the time, terrible television people are people who might be quite nice in real life - but on television you wish to murder them.) We also watched the first episode of Hollywood on Netflix and we were thoroughly nonplussed, although it's shot very nicely and the cast is good so we might give it one or two more episodes before giving up on it.

In videogames, it's mostly been XCOM 2 for me lately. I have murdered many aliens.

See you in seven. Possibly fourteen. We'll see.