A Journal of the Plague Year (16)

I’ll start with a few links right off…

Dr Bhattacharya on how the ignorance of the number of possible infected people who have antibodies in their blood (but may never have developed disease) is essential to knowing how widespread the disease is and what the infected fatality rate is. This greatly affects how many people are now basically immune. Immune people are free to go back to work.

In news from the Back of Beyond in the Frozen North, Ottawa, our responders are dealing with pretty much the same problems they all are around the world: bureaucratic delays and red tape.

An article in the Ottawa Citizen says that many of the shortfall problems are due to various shortfalls that….

“…have been exacerbated by the country’s heavy reliance on a network of foreign-based suppliers who make everything from laboratory equipment to specialized throat swabs used to extract specimens. Post COVID-19, the idea of developing vital technologies in-country will resonate profoundly.” No kidding.

And in Britain, the land of the National Health Service, “the envy of the world”, the situation is way more chaotic and paralyzed. Here again, the fault seems to lie with a Soviet style of decision making. Since the health service is run by a bureaucracy, it us populated by the kind of people who cannot make a decision in an emergency because they have been trained to think only in terms of regulations and paper work¬¬¬—not in terms of the lives they have to protect. There is no capacity in the organization for innovation, no matter how much prattle there is in gov-speak about it.

As an article in the Daily Mail pointed out, when NHS staff arrived at work expecting to be tested…

And even though there were empty spaces at the testing bays NHS staff were refused entry as they did not have an appointment. A doctor flashed his NHS laminated ID pass at the security guard but was told to turn around and leave.
The medic, who did not want to be named, told MailOnline he had a letter from his head of department requesting a test but without an email from Public Health England with a specific appointment time he would not be tested.

This kind of soviet-style paralysis beggars belief, but it is the current arrangement of much the British health service.

[Meanwhile in the US, federal regulations on centralized testing have been rapidly swept aside to allow all state, local and private sector laboratories to carry out testing were possible.]

This why the private sector companies have been saying that have the materials and resources to deliver what the NHS wants, but red tape is holding things up. Now? Surely, in a global emergency, this can be swept aside for once. One has to wonder what material is between the ears of some of these bureaucrats—it’s not brains. President Trump in the US has been showing the way on this. The “We want it not now, but yesterday” kind of approach.

And something one would have never thought possible even a few weeks ago, “Russian Aid Aircraft Land In New York”. We are living in strange times.

And last, but not least, nothing could be complete without mentioning the cretins at CNN:

In an attempt to squeeze the Covid-19 crisis for all its worth, networks like CNN are letting agenda-driven celebs such as Sean Penn and Stephen King exploit the situation to promote themselves as offering real expertise.
Even quarantines in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak have not been enough to keep celebrities from virtue-signaling and preaching to the rest of the world.
From bizarre renditions of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ to messages from their mansions and hottubs shaming others for daring to live lives during this pandemic, one could even argue celebrities are more insufferable right now than they have ever been.
What makes matters worse is a mainstream media that can’t get enough of it. Not only do they want to cover every celebrity’s coronavirus messages with puffpieces, but they also want to prop these people up as experts that we should be listening to.

Thank you RT.

Rebel Yell