Fighting Fake News with REAL,3/4/20; Coronavirus and Murdoch media's cry back to work!! The new Normal

 
A lone jogger runs on a partially empty 7th Avenue in New York last week. Credit:AP

Isolated in a small Brooklyn apartment, she’s been told by her doctor (via a messaging app) that she has symptoms of the devastatingly infectious virus which has driven New Yorkers off the once thronging streets.

But she can’t get a test. Without being badly ill, "no one can get tested in this city" she says. "I haven’t touched a human in a month, and I probably won’t for another month. My entire social network has become digital." Among the city’s more than 1400 dead is an acquaintance from her local gym. A friend of a friend has succumbed as well. "We are all going to know someone who dies from this," she says.

 "The US feels that it knows better, it always feels it knows better and it wants to tell the rest of the world what to do," Slutkin says. But that’s been a costly error in this pandemic. "Not being able to tool up with widespread and systematic testing, that was a massive mistake."

 US was finding one positive for every two tested, while in Australia it was only three out of 100 – a testament to our much more extensive testing regime.

 Given the rapid rate of infection seen globally the risk of not containing the virus is too great. The cry "go back to work makes no sense in a globalised world when everywhere else in the world has shut down. Thought after COVID-19 will now need to address what is essential to a  fully functioning economy when an emergency like this happens. Capitalism has dramatically failed. What we are prepared and not prepared for will need to be reconsidered rather than allow this chaos we saw evolve again.

Murdoch media in Australia and America showed it wasn't part of any "Team Australia" fast losing its advertising revenue it is demanding a return to work while sketchily providing the logistics of Taiwan and a failing Sweden as examples on how it should be done. Never asking for a moment what our starting was or our differences. Andrew Bolt sketchily describes the "herd immunity model" as the appropriate wat to go but without mentioning it by name as it was totally rejected by all the global experts except Sweden and the Netherlands who aren't faring too well. They never seem to ask about or question our starting point or whether we even had the capacity to jump to their tune. The gist of their argument really is so what if 1-2% of the population dies the cost "to them" is far more important. So life should return to normal that a herd immunity approach would have been less costly "for them". After all, the indispensable staff could always social distance.

The amusing thing is News Corp and Sky are already hemorrhaging money and are dependant on the US to survive. It's why Fox News is warning that a lockdown is an overreach and it hasn't happened yet. They are not the most affected nation an leading the world but are rudderless and incapable of preventing the spread or the deaths. All we hear in Australia is the Fox News tune so what if people die our economy is of more importance.

In Britain, the news grows darker by the day. On March 5 the UK had no deaths from the virus. By April 2, the number of deaths had risen to almost 3000, from around 34,000 documented cases (a case fatality rate of just over 8.5 per cent).

The puzzle of coronavirus: huge variation in rates of death, disease across the globe

Australia your 8th not 1st when it comes to Testing. Then the bigger question who and how long for the results?

 

Now is our chance to create a new normal

Robin Tennant-Wood 3 Apr 2020

If we take lessons from history, we can use this chance to emerge from the pandemic with a world changed for the better.

 Our concept of work will change. How many people are now working from home who, for years, have commuted without question to offices and other workplaces? How many jobs can be undertaken efficiently and flexibly via the incredible technology we typically to use to play games, look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers?
If a secular education was the legacy of the 14th-century Black Death and nationalised healthcare that of the 20th-century Spanish flu, we have time now to consider how we can ensure a positive social legacy from 21st-century coronavirus. We owe it to those who follow us.