Payback for Agent Orange?

 


Vietnam has discovered a new Covid variant, a hybrid. 

“We have discovered a new hybrid variant from the Indian and the UK strains,” the health minister, Nguyen Thanh Long, was quoted as telling a national meeting on the pandemic on Saturday.

“The characteristic of this strain is that it spreads quickly in the air. The concentration of virus in the throat fluid increases rapidly and spreads very strongly to the surrounding environment.”

The new round of infections has made the public and government fearful and authorities quickly moved to place strict limits on movement and business activity. Cafes, restaurants, hair salons and massage parlours as well as tourism and religious spots have been ordered to close in various areas of the country.

Vietnam, a country of 97 million people, has vaccinated just over 1 million citizens. It is now ramping up its vaccine rollout and hopes to achieve herd immunity by the end of the year, according to the health minister.


Comments

  1. Northern PoVMay 30, 2021 at 7:04 AM

    For a little perspective, I just looked up 'cases by 100k' (i.e. per capita).

    https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-maps-and-cases/

    a sample:

    Sweden 10,388
    USA 10,130
    UK 6,705
    Canada 3,683
    India 2,041
    Thailand 225
    Vietnam 7

    The table at the link can also be sorted by death/100k.

    My take-away:

    While some poor countries can contain Covid-19 via public health etc., the rich essentially 'buy' their way out of a pandemic with a technological solution developed in record time.
    Bad lesson.
    Rather than causing a sense of urgency for fixing the myriad environmental crisis we've spawned, this will fuel the ' (black swan) technology will solve these problems' complacencies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibMay 30, 2021 at 8:48 AM

      Thanks for the link, NPoV. The maps are pretty informative, especially on deaths per 100K. The authoritarian states - US (Trump), Brazil, India, Hungary, Poland, various Eastern European and Balkan nations have the worst outcomes although Sweden and Italy are well up there. I guess the message is that rightwing authoritarian regimes aren't responsive to public health threats.

      Delete
  2. TrailblazerMay 30, 2021 at 5:00 PM

    Covid will be over when we reach infection and death rates we can live with !
    Undertaking will soon be a preferred occupation.

    TB

    ReplyDelete
  3. Northern PoVJune 3, 2021 at 8:45 AM

    And so it goes ....

    "WHO rules out new 'hybrid' Covid-19 variant in Vietnam"

    hurray.
    Pho, anyone?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded...
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more