Ten days ago, I wrote:
the world may thus soon become divided into two zones “Covid-safe” and “Covid-unsafe.” And those of us living in “Covid-unsafe” countries may find it extremely difficult to travel to many other countries… but especially to the “Covid-safe” ones.
On May 13, the tireless Covid-chronicler/statistician Tomas Pueyo– who was the originator of the concept of the “dance” that governments need to do to keep the longer-term spread of coronavirus infections under control– concluded something similar:
countries might split in two classes: dancing [that is, relatively Covid-safe] countries and infected countries.
With hard work, dancing countries will have eliminated most internal coronavirus cases. They will welcome travel between them, with few limitations. However, they will shun countries that go for herd immunity, for fear of causing new outbreaks…
[C]ountries following herd immunity… might have a hard time enabling their citizens to travel abroad, and struggle to keep their tourism industries afloat…
That whole post of Pueyo’s is well worth reading. It contains a wealth of information on different aspects of the fight to contain Covid-19.
Yesterday, Umair Haque had yet another of his very hard-hitting critiques of Pres. Trump’s policies on the coronavirus:
Trump — and his followers — are dropping the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on America… [T]he only reference we have for mass death at the scale America is suffering — and is about to see arise — is the explosion of a thermonuclear weapon. Go ahead and think about if anything else really produces the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, at least in the rich world.
…
I know you’re weary. I am too. Still, I feel I have to warn you. Nuclear in two ways. One, in the sense of the death toll. And two, in the sense of economic outcomes. Nuclear bombs vaporize everything in their path. So do events like this — a huge shock, and a depression simply left to wreck everything in its path. A nuclear bomb would make your neighborhood disappear. So, too, will, the effects of reopening the economy too soon. All those little neighborhood shops will close, and most won’t come back — ever. That’s because they’ll have to pay overhead and employees, and not receive any support, but people will stay home as the pandemic simply keeps on going — bang! A massive wave of bankruptcies — just as if a nuclear bomb had simply erased whole chunks of the economy.
This is so potent, and will help me to frame what I’m planning to write about the advent of this plague ushering in a whole new period in world affairs. Which of course, the original atom bombs dropped by the US military over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 also did….
