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(that’s it, I’ll stop now)
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Aaaa, what’s with this embedding Oklahoma tries to return $2m worth of hydroxychloroquine | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera
This is like people who bought tons of grains only to realize there’s no apocalypse and they don’t like grains. But bigger.
Apocalypse? Apocalypsis? Let me check. An apocalypse is a disclosure or revelation of great knowledge. Wut?
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Just to clarify, are you asking me to butt in?
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Canada has decided that travellers coming into Canada will have to self isolate at a hotel on your own dime… $2000+ on your own dime btw, not even a month AFTER multiple elected politicians went to the Carribean and Hawaii and whatnot for a vacation paid for by taxpayers…
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Liz Truss (UK international trade secretary): “it’s vital … we resist vaccine nationalism”
Liz Truss (UK international trade secretary): “We first need to make sure our population is vaccinated”
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Maybe Ragnarok would be a less ambiguous term 
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Etymology. Borrowed from Old Norse ragnarǫk (modern Icelandic ragnarök), from regin (“gods”) + rǫk (“fate, judgment”).
I’d say it rings closer.
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I find that very funny. I would have found it even funnier if the same stuff hadn’t happened to a medicine that a relative of mine is taking sometimes, which was once dirt-cheap and easy to find and now I had to go door to door knocking on every pharmacy in the region.
All thanks to morons that announce “promising results” for PR and marketing, without any actual conclusive scientific data. 
It is just saying "we do not want anyone coming here for the time being … it is like what some contractors do, when they do not really want to take up on a job. They offer a totally overpriced offer (e.g. some times more than the actual competitive cost) and create a win-win situation by either having the client drop out and pressure them to take up on the job OR the client accepts the offer and they win quite a bit of extra money.
Same thing here. This way the government either reduces the amount of incoming people OR the people keep coming and the government doesn’t have to spend money on them and the local economy gets some extra external cash.
The scandal you mention aside, that is actually not an illogical policy, if that was their intention.
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Taiwan
Coronavirus Cases: 911
Deaths: 8
Recovered: 830
How is this even possible?
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when statistics can’t be trusted and everyone wear masks at the same time
- small country
- good and quick emergency management
- experience with previous pandemic(s) (SARS 1)
- politicians actually listening to experts
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And we wear masks even when there is no flu and before covid-19. Several past flu over the years taught the lessons for medical emergency to be extra careful with establish emergency response units stay by for decades. We expect no outside help would come, since we are not part of the WHO. And even though we sent warning to WHO and they did nothing to warn the world.
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That’s a very important point, imho.
Here in Europe, we didn’t have that much of a problem (or it wasn’t noticed by most…) with flu waves, and we were never actually threatened by Sars 1 or Mers or so, because it felt so far away. It actually wasn’t, because in a globalized world, nothing is far away, but that was the prevalent thinking. Plus, a good portion of Western arrogance.
Hence, there was a feeling of being invulnerable, while there were no good emergency plans in place.
I know that Germany, where I live, had only emergency plans designed for a pandemic of a new flu strain, but not for other viruses for which no vaccines would be available at first. And I even doubt that these existing plans would have worked that well for a flu pandemic. E.g. there used to be widespread skepticism regarding everyday masks even among experts. (Btw, if I remember correctly, I cited this opinion in one of my first posts in this thread, summarizing a leading German virologist - - he fortunately changed his mind soon after that.)
And most European countries, as far as I know, did not take countries like South Korea or Australia or so as a role model (and especially not some other successful countries - like Taiwan - for political reasons). In Germany, politicians and also the media mostly just made comparisons to other European countries, which made us look pretty good… but only before the second wave hit as if nobody had seen it coming. 
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I think Europe just made a bet at the time. Those viruses where deadlier in a faster way, so the authorities calculated the transmission time and decided not to annoy the stockmarkets.
This one is a slow burner, so they ostriched (is that even a verb) for as long as they could until death costs overcame the financial benefits of pampering the Markets and they decided a lockdown (stay at home except for tourism, shopping, church going, skiing).
Fortunately for the world, people of one country always like mingling with people from other countries, so we citizens got wind of the covid before we needed WHO to come and tell us.
Coincidentally, many covid-denier nations and governments started clutching their pearls only when there was rumor of vaccine-money to be made.
Re-quoting, just because I like the sound of it 
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I’m not convinced the authorities really did a proper risk assessment before deciding to react too late to a pandemic. What I remember from January and February, is mostly arrogance and ignorance (including my own, to be honest).
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Yes, in hindsight we should have canceled Carnival in late February 2020. That turned out to be quite the spreading event, but it took us 3 weeks to realize that and go into lockdown.
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If governments were indeed ignorant (intelligence-wise) of the situation, I would be truly astonished!
(Also, when it comes to insurance costs and lost taxes from workforce irregularities, even the silliest governments can calculate the hair on a hairy spider’s second front-right leg in under 3".)
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I meant it more as in, they had the information (both about the pandemic and from experts, like virologists and epidemiologists), but they chose to ignore it.
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