Coronavirus News (250)

 

Jacindarella A fairy-tale election result beckons for New Zealand’s prime minister But the more popular she gets, the less transforming Jacinda Ardern becomes  ...........  She closed their borders to foreigners and rallied a “team of 5m” (ie, everyone in the country) to support one of the toughest lockdowns in the world. As a result, New Zealand has seen only 25 deaths from covid-19. ........... All this puts the prime minister on track for a big victory in an election on October 17th. The latest polls suggest that Labour may win 47% of the vote, which would give it 59 seats in the unicameral parliament. It needs 61 seats in the 120-seat chamber for an outright majority—a feat never achieved since New Zealand adopted a proportional voting system in 1996. ............ before the pandemic, Ms Ardern was on track to lose the election. She came into office with lofty plans to “build a fairer, better New Zealand” by reducing child poverty, ending homelessness and erecting 100,000 cheap houses—none of which she has managed to do. .......... Ms Ardern positioned herself as a transforming leader. But to win enough seats to bring about sweeping change, she must secure votes from centrists who are wary of grandiose ideas. The more successful she becomes, the less radical she is likely to be. 

ELON MUSK: I REFUSE TO GET A COVID VACCINE  But it’s undeniably been a weird turn for the scientifically-minded entrepreneur, who’s spread misleading information about the virus and infamously tweeted in early March that he predicted there to be “close to zero new cases” by the “end of April.” He also opined that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.” ......... To Musk, it seems as though the pandemic is essentially just nature taking its course. When Swisher pushed him, telling him that “this storm is coming again,” Musk retorted with a blunt “everybody dies.”  

CHINA PLANS TO LAUNCH AN ANTITRUST PROBE INTO GOOGLE  In an echo of the Trump administration’s crackdown on the Chinese app TikTok, the Chinese government just took aim at Google — preparing to launch an antitrust probe into the tech giant over alleged monopolistic behavior. ........... The probe itself was launched at the request of the Chinese tech corporation Huawei .......... Google could face a similar fate as it did in 2018, back when the European Union fined it over $5.1 billion for stifling Android’s competitors. 

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE WARNS OF “ZOMBIE STORMS”  the rare weather phenomenon occurs when strong tropical climates cause storms to come back from the dead. .......... That’s essentially what happened to Hurricane Paulette. The storm landed in Bermuda weeks ago as a Category 1 storm, intensified to a Category 2, and then lost speed. Then last week, Paulette joined the living dead by strengthening into a tropical storm once more, according to the National Hurricane Center. She made yet another reappearance about 300 miles off the Azores islands.  

This Tiny Electric Car Is Selling Like Hot Cakes in China  The no-frills model of the Hong Guang goes for 28,800 yuan (about $4,200 at current exchange rates). That’s less than a tenth of the cost of a Tesla Model 3 (291,800 yuan). ......... GM markets the car as “small on the outside, big on the inside.” It’s 9.5 feet long by 4.9 feet wide, and 5.3 feet tall. ..........  Its max speed is 62 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour), which isn’t quite fast enough for long trips on highways, but works great for moving around a city and its environs. Drivers can go about 105 miles on a single charge, and can monitor and control the car’s battery functions on a smartphone app.  

COVID VACCINES CAN HAVE SOME NASTY SIDE EFFECTS — BUT ONLY FOR A DAY BEATS DYING, THOUGH.  ..........  The entire world is waiting with bated breath for an effective and safe COVID-19 vaccine. ........... take the day off after receiving a second dose. Plenty of other participants only experienced mild symptoms .............   Experts also worry that young people simply will take their chances with the virus rather than experience the side effects of a vaccine — which, of course, leaves them at risk of passing it along to more vulnerable populations.

Coronavirus News (249)

Trump sees approval rating increase, majority expect him to beat Biden: poll The poll was conducted in the two weeks before the first presidential debate  

'This was avoidable': Trump has been downplaying the virus from the start In recent weeks, Trump has put himself and others at risk by holding mass gatherings, some indoors, and shunning mask use while claiming the end of the virus was just around the corner.

Trump's tweet on positive coronavirus test is his most shared ever

Drudge Report, a Trump Ally in 2016, Stops Boosting Him for 2020 A rift between the president and the online news pioneer Matt Drudge is playing out in pithy headlines and needling tweets as the campaign heats up.

Bidenomics: the good the bad and the unknown Joe Biden should be more decisive and ambitious about America’s economy ..........  President Donald Trump set out to make it a brawl, even throwing a punch at the validity of the electoral process itself ......... When Mr Trump took power in 2017 he hoped to unleash the animal spirits of business by offering bosses a hotline to the Oval Office and slashing red tape and taxes. Before covid-19, bits of this plan were working, helped by loose policy at the Federal Reserve. Small-business confidence was near a 30-year high; stocks were on a tear and the wages of the poorest quartile of workers were growing by 4.7% a year, the fastest since 2008. Voters rank the economy as a priority and, were it not for the virus that record may have been enough to re-elect him. ............... The confrontation with China has yielded few concessions, while destabilising the global trading system. ........ As the 46th president, Mr Biden would alleviate some of these problems simply by being a competent administrator who believes in institutions, heeds advice and cares about outcomes. Those qualities will be needed in 2021, as perhaps 5m face long-term unemployment and many small firms confront bankruptcy. Mr Biden’s economic priority would be to pass a huge “recovery” bill, worth perhaps $2trn-3trn, depending on whether a stimulus plan passes Congress before the election. ............ He is keen on a giant, climate-friendly infrastructure boom to correct decades of underinvestment: the average American bridge is 43 years old. ....... Government research and development (r&d) has dropped from over 1.5% of gdp in 1960 to 0.7% today, just as China is mounting a serious challenge to American science. .......... He would scrap Mr Trump’s harsh restrictions on immigration, which are a threat to American competitiveness. ................. a $15 minimum wage, helping 17m workers who earn less than that today. .......... he has too little to say on boosting competition, including prising open tech monopolies. Incumbent firms and insiders often exploit complex regulations as a barrier to entry. .......... His plan to cut emissions involves targets, but shies away from a carbon tax which would harness the power of capital markets to reallocate resources. That is a missed opportunity. Just last month the Business Roundtable, representing corporate America, said it supported carbon pricing. ............... by 2050 public debt is on track to hit almost 200% of gdp 

Is Pakistan really handling the pandemic better than India? It appears to be, though the official data do not tell the whole story ........... According to both countries’ official tallies, every week of the past month has claimed more Indian lives than the entire nine months of the pandemic have in Pakistan—some 6,500. ....... Whereas India’s burden is still rising by 70,000 new cases a day, Pakistan’s caseload seems to have peaked three months ago. Its daily total of new cases has remained in the mere hundreds since early August. India’s economy has also fared far worse. The Asian Development Bank predicts that its gdp will shrink by fully 9% in the current fiscal year, compared with a contraction of 0.4% for Pakistan. ........... “We have not only managed to control the virus, stabilise our economy, but most importantly, we have been able to protect the poorest segment of our society from the worst fallouts of the lockdown,” crowed Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, in a recent video address to the un General Assembly. ...............  Rather than shut down the whole country, Pakistan adopted a piecemeal approach that focused on isolating areas where there were outbreaks and on providing cash handouts to the poorest. ............  Mr Khan’s supporters say this policy’s success was aided by the creation of a national command centre to co-ordinate regional policies and by enlisting the army, including its tentacular security apparatus, for contact-tracing efforts. Others say efficient redeployment of a national polio-eradication campaign provided more vital boots on the ground to combat covid. ............. “Basically, it is undertesting on a massive scale,” contends Ramanan Laxminarayan of Princeton University. He notes that Pakistan tests for covid at less than a quarter of India’s rate, per person, adding that the relatively poor Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, with a population equal to Pakistan’s and a similar failure to test widely, has also registered similar numbers of cases and fatalities (see chart). “Test not, find not,” says Mr Laxminarayan. “It’s the same with authoritarian regimes the world over.” ........  Just 4% of Pakistanis are over 65, for example, compared with 23% of Italians. Yet the median age in Pakistan, 23, is four years lower than India’s, and its average life expectancy, 67, is two years shorter. This puts a far smaller proportion of Pakistanis in the age bracket most vulnerable to covid. ........ Some 160m Indians travel by air annually compared with fewer than 10m Pakistanis; passenger traffic on Indian railways is 130 times greater. Mr Modi’s lockdown, ironically, first bottled tens of millions of migrant workers inside cities that were often reservoirs of covid and then, as pressure mounted to let them return to their villages, distributed the epidemic more widely. ............. the adb foresees India’s more sensitive economy springing back next year with 8% growth, whereas Pakistan’s is expected to grow just 2%. ...............  “Our lockdown may have hurt India more than the disease itself ............ A study in Islamabad in June estimated that 14.5% of the 2m people in Pakistan’s capital had already been infected ........ Health professionals warn that Pakistan, like its other big neighbour Iran, could soon find itself experiencing a second wave. ........ “At this point in time nobody should be crowing, and nobody should be declaring game over.”