AS of April 15, 2020, the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases worldwide has reached 1,998,111 with the death tally at 126,604 and recoveries at 478,659. The United States tops the list with 613,886 confirmed cases, 26,047 deaths, and 38,820 recoveries.
Here at home, the Department of Health (DOH) has reported 5,223 Covid-19 cases as of April 14 with the death toll at 335, and 295 recoveries.
If we go by the latest pronouncement of President Duterte, the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) may not be lifted as long as no vaccine is made available to stop the spread of the disease. Presidential Adviser for Entrepreneurship Joey Concepcion, however, offers selective lockdown at the barangay level, reopening of some industries, and allowing some forms of public transportation. Concepcion also represents the private sector in the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF).
The urgency of restarting commerce has also not been lost on the private-sector representatives in the IATF. The private sector has taken its cue from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, which says the world could plunge into its deepest recession in a century, cutting world output by 3 percent this year. The lockdown, meant to contain the virus, could also result in “severe risks of a worse outcome, due to the extreme uncertainty around the strength of the recovery.”
As the IMF report cautions, “Much worse growth outcomes are possible and maybe even likely if the pandemic and containment measures last longer, emerging and developing economies are even more severely hit…or if widespread scarring effects emerge due to firm closures and extended unemployment.”
This scenario is particularly and understandably worrisome for local business and millions of Filipino workers who have been most affected by the brunt of the Luzon-wide ECQ. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that the vaccine could be had in a year’s time or maybe longer. If the government is relying on a vaccine’s availability, experts believe that a local catastrophic business meltdown never seen before becomes a possibility. There is, however, some hope as pharmaceutical companies race to develop such a vaccine. Seattle’s Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute recently administered to a 44-year-old Seattle mother the first experimental Covid-19 vaccine. Called mRNA-1273, the vaccine has shown promise after being tested on animals. In the clinical trials, participants would receive two doses of the experimental vaccine 28 days apart, and would then undergo a year of monitoring. Since the results of the experiment will take time, should we brace ourselves for the worst in the meantime?
What’s in the name?
Communist China has become allergic to how some people are referring to the source of the pandemic as either “China virus” or “Wuhan virus.” The WHO, which some observers say is being “soft” on the communist state, has coined the name “Covid-19” allegedly to “erase the stigma” of the pandemic being named after the origin of the virus.
American comedian, political commentator, and Home Box Office (HBO) television host Bill Maher believes otherwise. On Friday, he argued that scientists “have been naming diseases after the places they came from for a very long time.” Broadcasting from his home, the HBO Real Time host said: “Zika is from the Zika Forest, Ebola from the Ebola River, hantavirus the Hantan River. There’s the West Nile virus and Guinea worm and Rocky Mountain spotted fever and, of course, the Spanish flu.” There’s also the African swine fever if I may add. Maher pointed out how public advisories against MERS [which stands for “Middle East respiratory syndrome”] are “plastered all over airports, and no one blogs about it. So why should [Communist] China get a pass? Can’t we even have a pandemic without getting offended? When they named Lyme disease after a town in Connecticut, the locals didn’t get all ticked off.”
He later added, “This is about facts. It’s about life and death. We’re barely four months into this pandemic, and the wet markets in China—the ones where exotic animals are sold and consumed—are already starting to reopen.”
US stops WHO funding
US President Donald J. Trump has turned off the country’s funding pipe to the WHO, as he censured it for helping Communist China in the cover-up of the gravity of Covid-19. Trump announced that he would discontinue the $400-million and $500-million funding to the United Nations-backed body, which he said lied about the “spread and mortality rate of coronavirus at face value.” Trump alleged that WHO blundered and allowed the virus to spread and cause avoidable deaths: “Today I am instructing my organization to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the WHO’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. [WHO] failed to investigate credible reports from sources in [the Chinese city of] Wuhan that conflicted government accounts and credible reports of human-to-human transmission in December [2019]. From the middle of January [2020] it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was no human-to-human transmission, despite reports to the contrary, and cost [us to lose] valuable time. The world received all sorts of false information on transmissibility and mortality.” Trump himself has also been criticized for his “mishandling” of the crisis. Critics say that he too has been slow in recognizing the gravity of the pandemic.
WHO director-general resignation pushed
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general who is being accused of leading the agency to allegedly favor Communist China, has now come head-to-head against the US and other countries, which are seeking his resignation through a petition that began in Taiwan and has now topped 750,000 signatures. Ghebreyesus allegedly turned a blind eye to Communist China’s cover-up of the disease, most notably when the communist state dismissed the claims of Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who, as early as December 30, 2019, began posting messages on a social-media chatting group used by local medics to warn them of “SARS at a Wuhan seafood market.”
On January 1, 2010, the Wuhan police arrested Dr. Li and condemned him and others of spreading baseless, “inauthentic” information, which allegedly brought a negative impact on society and should be “dealt with” by the law, according to a previous report by Xinhua or New China News Agency, the official state-run press agency of the People’s Republic of China. It took three weeks after Dr. Li’s alert signal for Wuhan to be locked down by the Chinese government. The doctor died of coronavirus in February. Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian microbiologist and internationally recognized malaria researcher, became WHO director-general in 2017. He is the first nonphysician and first African in the role, a career politician who rose to the top of Ethiopia’s government first as Health Minister and then Foreign Minister.
He now faces angry criticism for heaping praise on Communist China for its “commitment to transparency,” saying that the speed with which the regime detected the virus was “beyond words.” WHO has been called out by many people across the globe for being “China-centric,” a position that the US president has promised to “look into.”
UN records also show that Chinese contributions to both Ethiopia’s aid budget and WHO have substantially increased during the times that Ghebreyesus was at the helm.
Shortly after his WHO election, The Times reported, “Chinese diplomats had campaigned hard for the Ethiopian, using Beijing’s financial clout and opaque aid budget to build support for him among developing countries.”
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