The world population is getting close to 8 billion people (8 thousand million), so the coronavirus has resulted in the death of a tiny, tiny proportion, most of whom would have died from something or other in the near future. MSM loves hyping a disaster, as it sells copy, in this case advertising space. Governments love this sort of panic as it makes them seem useful. And doctors love it because it gets them on TV.
The UK's government's worst scenario (80% of the population getting the virus, 1% of those dying) sounds bad: it would mean half a million people dying from the virus, although not an increase of half a million deaths, because other causes of death might well be down. But this worst-case scenario doesn't reflect the global reality, which is that the number of people with coronavirus is now going down, day to day. It seems unlikely that, if we've had less than 4,000 deaths so far, now that the virus is active in fewer people we're going to see half a million deaths in just the UK alone.
We constantly see “coronavirus cases reach 95,000” in the headlines, without adding the corollary that 54,000 of those people are already better.
In the US, the same Senate that blocks over and over again the possibility of universal healthcare, saying it can't be paid for, has just almost unanimously approved 8.3 BILLION dollars in emergency spending for the coronavirus. That’s 56 million dollars per infected US citizen.
The good news is that China has totally shut down the $74 billion wild animal farm industry, some 20,000 farms. And has 500 million people currently under restricted movement.
Now this IS good news, although people will be fretting about the economy, because there is a bigger picture. NASA maps shows a huge reduction in air pollution in China over the coronavirus timescale. Given that 2,740 people die in China every day from air pollution, we can expect far more people to live rather than die from the coronavirus. There are also 700 traffic deaths per day in China. There will be fewer as a result of the decreased economic activity.
All this shows that the economy as a man-made construct is not an unmitigated force for good, and certainly not for everyone. And that we would do well as a species to stop cramming animals into horrible spaces in order to mistreat them.
As a last observation, here are some empathetic words from the Australian journalist John Pilger:
A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America's blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.
