Manic of a panic is geopolitical

[Prime95]

Originally Posted by Prime95

Leaving the land of LaurV today. Cambodia and Vietnam are next.

Correction. Rest of cruise is essentially cancelled. Heading to Manila where we will be thrown off the boat on March 1.

Sigh, was looking forward to seeing Asia and Japan.

No need to fell sorry for me, I'm sure the cruise line will "make it right".

[Prime95]

Originally Posted by Prime95

Correction. Rest of cruise is essentially cancelled. Heading to Manila where we will be thrown off the boat on March 1.

Correction. Being evicted tomorrow in Bangkok.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Prime95

Correction. Being evicted tomorrow in Bangkok.

Ben better hurry up and announce his new Prime before you get forcefully repatriated to the states.

[ewmayer]

Coronavirus: South Korea declares highest alert as infections surge - BBC News

Additional worrisome outbreaks in Italy and Iran, as evidence mounts of carriers who remain asymptomatic beyond the 14 days of the currently-standard quarantine regimen. I'm starting to think the odds of Japan being forced to cancel the upcoming Tokyo summer olympics are non-negligible. Of course the wider economic impacts are more important - proxy measurements such as air those of air pollution over China indicate to a huge % of industrial production there being shut down. In 2019 China had a net trade surplus with the rest of the world of roughly $1 trillion, i.e. the world sourced that net amount of good and services from China. What % of the production involved in that massive net outflow is currently idled due to the Coronavirus?

Looking just at the U.S., sure, we could go without much of the made-in-China stuff we buy every day for either the rest of the year or forever, but there are some crucial subcategories which will lead to major pain, if not outright crisis – notably pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and a huge fraction of our industrial equipment and tooling. Sure, in the very long run some kind of global trade rebalancing and reshoring would be good for much of the neoliberalism-afflicted West, but in the near term, some very critical goods supply lines which will be difficult and time-consuming to recreate elsewhere will be significantly impacted. You better hope that any key prescriptions you or yours relies on to manage some nontrivial medical condition are not sourced in a now-shut-down part of China or rest of Asia, for example.

[ewmayer]

o Possibly very bad news: You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus | The Atlantic

o Possibly good news: Moderna ships first batch of its rapid-developed experimental vaccine | CNN

Drugmaker Moderna Inc. has shipped the first batch of its rapidly developed coronavirus vaccine to U.S. government researchers, who will launch the first human tests of whether the experimental shot could help suppress the epidemic originating in China.

Moderna on Monday sent vaccine vials from its Norwood, Mass., manufacturing plant to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., the company said. The institute expects by the end of April to start a clinical trial of about 20 to 25 healthy volunteers, testing whether two doses of the shot are safe and induce an immune response likely to protect against infection, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci said in an interview. Initial results could become available in July or August.

o Potential Presymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2, Zhejiang Province, China, 2020 Emerging Infectious Diseases | CDC

o The ever-so-helpful World Health Organization, apparently concerned that talk of a Coronavirus pandemic might alarm hoi polloi, has decided to retire the word "pandemic" from its official lexicon. So from now, one can discuss, say, "a set of largely overlapping regional outbreaks", but the dreaded P-word is verba non grata. (Or would it be verbus non gratus? Or maybe E pluribus unum? Or possibly Romani ite domum? Latin speakers, please help me out!)

o Interesting op-ed in The Lancet: Facts are not enough (PDF)

[W]e must ask questions usually considered outside the scope of international health. A Public Health Emergency of International Concern gives us a unique opportunity. First, what are the supreme guiding values of global health? Hitherto, the answer has been equity. But, as we have seen from China’s efforts to contain COVID-19, perhaps we should consider liberty an equally fundamental value. Without liberty of expression—for health workers, policy makers, the public, and media—there is no means to forge a common view about the future (including the future health) of a society. Second, how important is the political system for health? Global health is typically agnostic about the kind of political system a country chooses to adopt. Global health and its institutions see health systems as separate—technically, socially, economically—from the political ideologies of nations. This view is not sustainable. We cannot say that the terms of political engagement within a country are irrelevant to our hopes for health. Third, what is prosperity? Conventionally, prosperity means monetary wealth. But could we redefine prosperity to mean something else, something more? Prosperity as the well-being of the community in synchrony with its environment. Fourth, how should we consider the place of the human body in society? How do we better connect the social to the biological? How do we incorporate the world in which we live into our biological selves? Our bodies and the illnesses they express tell stories about our lives. Our task is to uncover those stories and to link them back to our bodies and our health. Fifth, what do we mean by health anyway? Whatever we say about the absence of disease or a state of complete wellbeing, the idea of health is also related to our sense of what our lives have been and what they might be in the future. Isn’t health contingent on the purpose we envision for our life, and the possibilities we have for enacting that purpose? In other words, isn’t health also about our capacity to achieve meaning in our lives?

Here in the US, with its profoundly broken - but oh so profitable for the corporate for-profit breakers - healthcare system, perhaps the Cornavirus pandemic will help bring into much sharper focus the huge stakes in the Medicare For All debate going on in the run-up to this November's presidential election. As with the "common wisdom" about the "lifts all boats" benefits of a globalized economy and rich countries offshoring all their nasty, dirty "making stuff" industries to low-wage/low-environmental-standards which has resulted in the very extended supply chains whose vulnerability is being exposed by the current viral outbreak, perhaps reframing universal healthcare not just as a social justice imperative but as a national-security one will help.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

................................................
o Interesting op-ed in The Lancet: Facts are not enough (PDF)

Here in the US, with its profoundly broken - but oh so profitable for the corporate for-profit breakers - healthcare system, perhaps the Cornavirus pandemic will help bring into much sharper focus the huge stakes in the Medicare For All debate going on in the run-up to this November's presidential election. As with the "common wisdom" about the "lifts all boats" benefits of a globalized economy and rich countries offshoring all their nasty, dirty "making stuff" industries to low-wage/low-environmental-standards which has resulted in the very extended supply chains whose vulnerability is being exposed by the current viral outbreak, perhaps reframing universal healthcare not just as a social justice imperative but as a national-security one will help.

Won't happen unless Mega-Giganto-Super Pharma gets their cut up front, guaranteed for a century, at least. Consider: "Making people healthier means we can't sell as great a volume of drugs. This is Discrimination! We demand Compensation!"

[ewmayer]

[I split off the this-Latin-parrot-is-not-dead-he's-resting discussion into its own thread.]

o Former CDC director: A coronavirus pandemic is inevitable. What now? | CNN

o Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics | Matt Stoller, Wired

[T]he coronavirus is going to introduce economic conditions with which few people in modern America are familiar: the prospect of shortages. After 25 years of offshoring and consolidation, we now rely on overseas production for just about everything. Now in the wake of the coronavirus, China has shut down much of its production; South Korea and Italy will shut down as well. Once the final imports from these countries have worked their way through the supply chains and hit our shores, it could be a while before we get more. This coronavirus will reveal, in other words, a crisis of production—and one that’s coming just in time for a presidential election.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

[I split off the this-Latin-parrot-is-not-dead-he's-resting discussion into its own thread.]

Thanks!

o Former CDC director: A coronavirus pandemic is inevitable. What now? | CNN

o Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics | Matt Stoller, Wired

Don't worry about a thing! Il Duce has put Mike Pence in charge of the US response to the new coronavirus.

I guess his fumbling and bumbling an HIV outbreak while he was governor of Indiana proved "he has a certain talent for this."

[a1call]

I recall reading somewhere at some point in time that Rare-Earth-Magnet manufactures in US all went bankrupt because they could not compete with cheap prices from Chinese manufacturers. The same mentioned that this left US in a vulnerable situation and dependant on China for the supply of this important to many businesses item.
I wonder how true this was/is.

[VBCurtis]

The main American rare-earths mine was closed for many years, but re-opened (along the 15 freeway between LA and Vegas) in 2018 or so. Alas, the processing of the ore still mostly happens in China, so our self-reliance is still suspect. I wonder how difficult it will be to onshore such processing.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Now, it seems an HHS employee has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that HHS workers sent to meet the first US evacuees from Wuhan had neither protective gear nor proper training. And that when she raised her concerns with her superiors, she was disregarded, apart from being given a choice between reassignment and termination.

From what I read in the article, if everything it says about the whistleblower is accurate, I imagine the higher-ups at HHS already know her identity.