The greatest long-term significance of the coronavirus pandemic, as will be elaborated a few paragraphs along in this piece, will be the injury to the credibility and prestige of China and the European Union. It need hardly be emphasized now that there is no choice in any advanced country but to apply drastic measures to reduce the likelihood of members of its population being infected with coronavirus. As the average age of those who have died from that illness in the United States is 80, and the mortality rate in the U.S. for those beneath the age of 70 who are afflicted by the coronavirus is approximately a quarter to a fifth of one per cent of those that are afflicted, the greatest and most urgent effort must be to shield elderly people in fragile health from any exposure to it. The massive closures of institutions and public entertainments are designed to reduce the overall incidence of the coronavirus — to diminish the possibility of people catching it, rather than to focus on the danger of mortal encounters with it, since 99.75 per cent of people under the age of 70 who are in good health are not in significant danger of dying — they are just being urged to take and comply with unusual measures to reduce drastically the likelihood of a possibly very nasty virus.
The level of danger this illness presents to a sophisticated country in public health terms such as Canada and the United States does not justify the level of media and public hysteria that has assaulted the financial markets and unhinged most of the media of the United States. Since the imagination is often more torturing than reality, it is easy to leap to a state of acute spontaneous nervosity over a virus that can kill people, (though very rarely thoroughly healthy people). And in the United States, the national media which is overwhelmingly hostile to the president, (who openly requites their contempt), are naturally trying desperately to find grounds to attack him and reduce his chances of re-election in November. In this respect, the authentic coronavirus crisis is the successor to the confection of the monstrous fraud that U.S. President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election, and the spurious effort at impeachment of him, in which a drumhead kangaroo court in the House of Representatives accused him of offences that are not impeachable and without any probative evidence that he had committed the acts alleged anyway. At least here there is a real public health crisis; it is not a complete fiction like the previous episodes, and in this round, Trump botched the early public relations, seeming complacent, and rather ignorant. But it has at times seemed like a negative medical version of the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 1630s, in which a tulip bulb could sell for the current equivalent of about $500,000.
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See Also:
(1) European Union: Closing the Borders?
(2) Coronavirus: France Shuts Down Cafes, Restaurants, Cinemas, Non-Essential Retail
(3) Coronavirus: Spain Limits Public Movement, Shuts Down Bars, Restaurants, Hotels, and More
(4) Brexit Britain Galls Gallic Gumption
(5) Scotland is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
I go for coffee every morning with the same group and I can not believe the hatred (yes hatred) towards Trump. What is the matter with Canadians? I would rather have him as a friend than an enemy. They keep saying that he is a liar but when you ask them about which lies they are accusing him of they don’t have an answer. I wish we had a leader that would clean up our swamp instead of making larger.