Claustrophobics and Coronavirus
April 1, 2020
“For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.”
“Money has an even darker side. For although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities or sacred values, but in money itself and in the impersonal systems that back it. We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbour – we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust.”
– Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (Additional read: Yuval Noah Harari: “The best defense against pathogens is information“)
A Claustrophobic Country Meets Coronavirus: See No Covid, Hear No Covid, Speak No Covid in the Hermit Kingdom
IN A NUTSHELL: MUST READ
While nations world-wide stagger under the weight of coronavirus, North Korea claims not to have a single case. Hard to believe, and you shouldn’t. “It’s a blatant lie when they say they have no cases,” said an official of the Seoul-based Association of North Korean Defectors. “The last thing the North wants is a social chaos that may erupt when North Koreans realize that people are dying of an epidemic with no cure.”
Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Kee Park has worked alongside North Korean doctors helping to improve the country’s decrepit public health system. He says a lack of testing equipment may mean it literally hasn’t detected a single case. Plus the North took some of the earliest and most drastic actions against the virus. It sealed its borders in January, shutting off business with neighboring China, and clamping down on smugglers who keep its unofficial markets functioning. It quarantined all diplomats in Pyongyang for a month. And as a totalitarian state, its ability to control people’s movements also bolsters its disease-control efforts.
Conversely, when Washington announced last month it would allow coronavirus-related humanitarian shipments, North Korea made a rare request for urgent help from relief groups. Russia donated 1,500 test kits; China is thought to have sent diagnostic tools. The UN waived sanctions for aid groups like the Red Cross to ship testing machines, diagnostic kits, ventilators and protective equipment.
North Korea’s information blackout and the inability of outside health workers to have access mean the rest of the world doesn’t know for sure how it’s coping. But last month anonymous informants inside the country reported the deaths of 200 soldiers and 23 others, all suspected of having contracted Covid-19.
- US ignores calls to suspend Venezuela and Iran sanctions amid coronavirus pandemic (Guardian)
- Link used in yesterday’s edition but also relevant again here: U.S. spies find coronavirus spread in China, North Korea, Russia hard to chart (Reuters) Coronavirus makes this quote seem even more pertinent and relevant: “Keep your friends close [but more than six feet away] and your enemies closer [to see just how negatively they are being impacted].”
- US sailors will die unless coronavirus-hit aircraft carrier evacuated, captain warns (Guardian)
- North Korea reacts to Pompeo ‘insult’ with threat to cut off talks (Guardian)
Live Everyday Like It’s Sabbath Day
- Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Israel are crowded, insular communities. Urgent public health messages have failed to penetrate a population isolated by cultural, religious and language barriers. But these communities have also recorded some of Israel’s highest rates of coronavirus infection.
- As a result, Israeli authorities have taken drastic measures to crack down on residents who continue to ignore stay-at-home orders and bans on gatherings meant to stem the pandemic. Police raided synagogues and deployed helicopters, which hover over streets filled with black-clad religious students.
- On Monday young ultra-Orthodox men threw rocks at police in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood after officers broke up a gathering at a synagogue and cited residents for straying more than 100 meters from their homes. On Tuesday the army sent patrols into the neighborhood.
- Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, himself an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, was criticized earlier for not clamping down more vigorously. But after an ultra-Orthodox funeral in the city of Bnei Barak drew hundreds of mourners in defiance of police, Litzman called on security forces to control access to the city. “There is no public that is exempt from the regulations, and there is no population that can stand aside and not participate in the law,” he said. (WaPo)
Additional World News
- Remember, the line is not sell low and buy high: Coronavirus: Stock markets suffer worst quarter since 1987: Stock markets around the world suffered historic losses in the first three months of the year amid a massive sell-off tied to the coronavirus. (BBC) &
- China’s Ren Zhiqiang Vanishes, in a Blow to Reform (NYT, $)
- Antarctica: what it means when the coldest place on Earth records an unprecedented heatwave (Guardian)
- The World Pushes Back Against E-Cigarettes and Juul (NYT, $)
- Plastics: the boom of one generation becomes bust to the next.
COVID-19
- Who’s Sickest From COVID-19? These Conditions Tied To Increased Risk (NPR)
- The evidence for everyone wearing masks, explained: There is some evidence that the public should wear masks. But let doctors and nurses get them first. (Vox)
- Trump warns of ‘painful two weeks’ as officials predict up to 240,000 US coronavirus deaths: President offers unusually sombre press conference with projections that take physical distancing measures into account (Guardian)
- Governors Fight Back Against Coronavirus Chaos: ‘It’s Like Being on eBay With 50 Other States’: A chorus of governors from across the political spectrum is challenging the Trump administration’s assertion that the United States is well-stocked to test and care for coronavirus patients. (NYT)
- States Have Enacted Measures To Contain The Virus. Here’s What Each Is Doing (NPR)
- Seven of Donald Trump’s most misleading coronavirus claims: As US deaths rise, the president seems unable to grasp the severity of the problem – and he’s made multiple false claims along the way (Guardian)
- A coronavirus economic depression isn’t inevitable (Vox)
- ‘Never Thought I Would Need It’: Americans Put Pride Aside to Seek Aid: With coronavirus-related job losses, many workers are reluctantly seeking charity and unemployment benefits for the first time in their lives. (NYT)
- From bartering to begging for relief, struggling Americans confront April rent (Reuters)
- Start-ups cut nearly 4,000 jobs in March as coronavirus impact ripples through tech (CNBC)
- A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs: All economic downturns increase automation. This one will be worse. (Vox)
- India coronavirus: Migrant workers sprayed with disinfectant in Uttar Pradesh (CNN)
- Why Asia’s New Coronavirus Controls Should Worry the World (NYT)
- Coronavirus in Russia: Putin Fades From View as Country Braces for Pandemic (NYT)
- Viruspolitik at Play as Moscow Sends Soldiers to Help Italy (WSJ, $)
- Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus Spreaders: The C.D.C. director says new data about people who are infected but symptom-free could lead the agency to recommend broadened use of masks. (NYT)
- Zoom meetings aren’t end-to-end encrypted, despite misleading marketing (The Intercept) and maybe we aren’t hip but we are still Skyping: Microsoft’s Skype struggles have created a Zoom moment: Skype is missing out to Zoom and others during the coronavirus pandemic (The Verge)
Tasos Katopodis via Getty Images
Donald Trump and the Chamber of Republican Secrets
- In an appearance on Fox and Friends Monday night President Trump admitted that if it were easier to vote, Republicans would “never” be elected again. The comments were made as Trump dissed voting reform measures Dems had unsuccessfully pushed to include in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus aid package, reforms such as vote-by-mail, same-day registration and early voting as states seek to safely run elections amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
- “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said.
- The Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a statement Monday that Trump’s comments showed he saw voter suppression as part of his re-election strategy. “Ensuring that Americans can vote during the Covid-19 crisis is fundamental to maintaining our democracy,” a DNC spokeswoman said. “Trump knows that suppressing the vote is the only way he and Republicans win in November.”
- Then as if on cue, Kentucky lawmakers quietly tightened and approved a new photo identification requirement that would make it harder to vote. (Guardian)
Amazon’s Unofficial Slogan: Work Harder. You Are On Your Own.
- When a New York City warehouse worker organized a strike to demand greater protections for employees amid the coronavirus outbreak, Amazon fired him. Chris Smalls was a management assistant at a fulfillment center in Staten Island. After a worker tested positive for coronavirus last week, Smalls and at least 50 other employees walked out Monday to call attention to the lack of protections for warehouse workers and to demand that Amazon close the facility for sanitizing.
- Workers also claimed managers weren’t being transparent about how many people were actually sick.
- Amazon called the workers’ accusations “unfounded” and claimed Smalls had received “multiple warnings” for violating social distancing guidelines and refusing to remain quarantined after coming into close contact with the associate who tested positive for the virus. The company also disputed the number of employees who participated in the strike, saying just 15 workers had walked out. (NBC)
Additional USA News
- Biden Faces a Cash Gap With Trump. He Has to Close It Virtually. (NYT, $)
- Problems in F.B.I. Wiretap Applications Go Beyond Trump Aide Surveillance, Review Finds (NYT, $)
- Fracking Once Lifted Pennsylvania. Now It Could Be a Drag. (NYT, $)
- Trump to roll back Obama-era clean car rules in huge blow to climate fight (Guardian)
- To Fight Coronavirus, States Call on Retired Medical Staff and New Graduates (WSJ, $)
How Much Wood Would A Shipworm Eat If A Shipworm…You Get It
- Off Alabama’s Gulf Coast lies an ancient underwater forest — a grove of bona fide cypress trees, with roots and leaves. For thousands of years this cypress grove lay silent, preserved within an oxygen-less tomb of sand and sediment. In 2004 it was awakened by a category 5 hurricane. Ivan ripped through the Gulf of Mexico, with winds up to 140 mph, kicking up 90 foot waves and scooping up nearly 10 feet of sand from the seabed.
- In 2005 the forest was discovered by a fisherman, who contacted a local dive shop. A diver found the forest, which eventually led to a team of research scientists who dated the forest at two ice ages old. Fast forward to a more amazing phenomenon, not the forest itself, but what lives in it: shipworms and related marine organisms. Scientists say these aquatic wood-lovers are critical for drug discovery, serving as incubators of unexpected medicines, churning out new lifesaving formulas and compounds not found anywhere else on earth.
- The symbiotic bacteria living in their gills send enzymes to the shipworms’ gut, helping them break down the wood. Somehow this process leaves the gut nearly sterile, suggesting antibiotics might be at play. Researchers studying shipworms found elsewhere have already discovered compounds that are now in the early stages of drug development.
- And since every species of shipworms has distinct and different bacteria, every unstudied specimen could open a treasure chest of unimagined chemical combinations, eventually leading to novel drugs to treat conditions like cancer and chronic pain. (NYT)
Additional Reads
- The hidden impact of your daily water use (BBC)
- Is marriage over?: Marriage is practised in every society yet is in steep decline globally. Is this it for longterm intimate relationships? (Aeon)
- This might be Marriott’s worst month ever: Marriott discloses new data breach impacting 5.2 million hotel guests: Marriott says a hacker gained access to the accounts of two employees. (Zdnet)
- There needs to be more regulation here otherwise real life privacy will be as meaningless as Facebook’s approach to privacy: Microsoft president calls Washington state’s new facial recognition law ‘a significant breakthrough’ (GeekWire)
PNUT Positivity
A New Alternative To DoorDash: DogDash
- With the rules of social distancing in effect and some elderly neighbors in need of help, Karen Eveleth took on the challenge. Eveleth trained her dog, Sundance, to help deliver meals and groceries to her neighbor of ten years, a 71-year-old with heart problems, who has spent nearly three full weeks isolated inside her home.
- The idea came to Eveleth after seeing the story about a dog comforting people at a hospital in Denver. Calling Sundance a “humble hero,” she has trained him to do an assortment of tasks including gathering mail from the mailbox and picking up fallen items. (CNN)
- A doctor got pulled over for speeding. Instead of a ticket, the officer gave her masks. (NBC)
- This sweet photo of health care workers flying to New York is what we need right now (CNN)
- A police officer is wearing a coronavirus helmet to warn people to stay inside (CNN)