The Australian market crash is symptomatic of the total lack of direction in global affairs caused by coronavirus. China is reopening factories, demand is high, and we supply China. Does that matter in this hysterical environment? Of course not.
Loss of global GDP is estimated to be $2.4 trillion, but hey, who needs trade when you can have uninformed drivel instead? This epidemic isn’t likely to be fun, but the reactions of world leaders and corporations will make it much worse.
The Australian market crash comes after a few infections and a few deaths. There’s no indication that the outbreak is hitting Australia particularly hard, at least not so far. The fear is being generated by the unknowables – A creaky, overloaded and underfunded (but functional) public health system, lack of vaccine development, and to put it mildly nothing but hysteria from global media. The virus is literally blocking all other news. It’s just a question of which deranged bastards think that’s a good idea. Maybe having no perspective on the virus helps people to be idiots?
As a matter of fact –
• About 50,000 people in China have had coronavirus and recovered. That’s nearly 17 times the number of actual deaths.
• Fatalities are in fact still struggling to reach 5,000 after months of global exposure. (Remember this virus started in December 2019, and had about a month to spread before detection.)
So where are the heroes?
Given the sheer disingenuousness of health “debates” which invariably lead to weaker public health sectors and increased prices, the political leadership of the world has been remarkably quiet.
Consider:
• Of course, a global pandemic would cause trade issues and market chaos. What else could it do?
• Decades of underfunding health and tolerating insane price structures pose a financial risk to people requiring hospitalization.
• Preparations for a pandemic are obviously non-existent, despite many years of warnings from health experts.
• You can’t fight a pandemic with more meaningless babble from the bottomless pit of ideological irrelevance in which most political organizations exist.
• The obligation of governments is to provide resources and support for emergencies. That’s not happening in any way.
Scenario
Can you imagine what it’d be like if this was a truly murderous pandemic? Something like Ebola, the Plague, or the Spanish Flu, which did kill millions, not a few thousand? What would our sainted “leaders” do about it? In the past, most of them moved somewhere else.
There’s no indication of a strong joint global system with international support, just random actions by different countries and parties. If a virtual pinprick like COVID 19 can do so much damage to the world operationally, a real pandemic would be catastrophic for humanity.
Bioweapon? No.
Some people say COVID19 might be a bioweapon. No, it’s not. A bioweapon would be far more effective, and kill a lot more people. One of the reasons people have gone very off bioweapons is that they can become totally uncontrollable, and particularly regarding viruses, which can mutate rapidly.
What’s needed
What’s required is:
• A very well-integrated global health management system.
• Better quarantine procedures
• Much more research into viruses and viral immunology and pathology
• Healthy health systems! (For god’s sake, how obvious must the obvious be before someone gets off their backsides?)
• A total absence of political interference in health management and the end of insane health prices.
Or, more simply, basic common sense. It has to happen sometime.
