Experts warn that up to 3 billion people lack access to soap and clean water -- vital safeguards against the coronavirus AFP/File
RFI/AFP: No soap, no water: billions lack basic protection against virus
As nations around the world fight the coronavirus pandemic with mass lockdowns and travel bans, UN experts warn that some three billion people lack even the most basic weapons to protect themselves: soap and running water.
The outbreak has infected some 200,000 people and killed 9,000, scorching through populations across the globe after emerging in China late last year.
While Europe has become the centre of the battle against the virus, closing borders and sequestering millions of people in their homes, concerns are rising for developing nations with fragile healthcare systems.
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WNU Editor: In the West we wonder if we have enough ventilators, testing kits, masks and gloves to face the Covid-19 pandemic. The rest of the world wonders if they have clean water and enough soap.
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https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/coronavirus-elephants-break-farm-self-21719583
Coronavirus: Elephants break into farm in self-isolation and get drunk on whisky
And at one farm in the Yunan province, elephants took full advantage of the situation. After drinking the lot the elephants were somewhat the worse for wear. Two males passed out, drunk, in one of the tea gardens nearby. Bet there were some sore heads the morning after the night before.
WNU Ed. As an event planner in the Met Police I have gone onto your site several times a day for updates on current affairs since 2011. Due to your site we could correctly forecast protests & potential disorder at various locations such as embassies & consulates in London prior to receiving notifications or Intel from other sources. I retired 2 years ago & I still find your site invaluable. Keep up the good work 🖖
In these early days of the coronavirus crisis, the American people have shown a significant capacity to endure hardships to slow the spread of the virus. They've stayed in their homes and watched as the economy crumbled around them. Many have confronted the loss of income and wealth with no guarantee these setbacks are only temporary.
What they may not abide, however, is the prospect that the rich and influential have used their positions of power to avoid the worst consequences of this financial collapse - particularly as their leaders were telling them to hold fast.
That's why the stories of senators selling stock portfolios in anticipation of a market drop are so toxic. It's a controversy that cuts across normally impervious partisan lines and has even conservatives and those "close to the president" sharply criticising the Republicans, like North Carolina Senator Burr, at the centre of the fury.
This story comes on the heels of grumbling over how some of the well-connected were getting virus tests while most Americans had to wait. It's a sign that this pandemic could lay bare the sharp divides in the US between the haves and the have-nots and make more than a few realise that - perhaps to their surprise - they are among the latter, not the former.
That's a recipe for political upheaval.
The pandemic that Donald Trump has been denying pretty much on the regular since January is no longer possible to deny, what with the thousands of dead Italians and the virus multiplying every day on this side of the Atlantic because exponential grown is, as the science nerds say, a bitch.
And so the Trumpists have found themselves in an impossible position. They were forced to acknowledge that COVID-19 is a really bad thing. But now they need someone to blame for it, because if they don’t start pointing fingers PDQ, then people might look around and start saying, “Hey, the president kept telling us everything was great and now it’s not great and either he was too dumb to understand what was going on or he was too dishonest to tell us the truth. But either way we’re going to have a chance to fire the SOB.”
So before people can start stitching together all of the evidence and stock trades and paper trails, Trump and his people need a villain. Fast.
In the ordinary course of events, you’d expect Trump to try out candidates for scapegoat at his Huge Rallies. But he can’t hold them anymore because of the pandemic that he let fester while he was blabbering on for week after week with happy talk about COVID-19 being nothing more than a beautiful, perfect flu-hoax.
So instead, he’s decided to use press conferences.
During his recent pressers, Trump has tried out a series of different objects to blame and a series of different obfuscation tactics.
On Wednesday, for instance, Trump blamed China. A week or so ago, Trump and his followers all started calling the coronavirus “the Chinese virus.” Members of the White House press corps took the bait and asked if maybe this wasn’t intentionally racist. Trump replied, “It’s not racist at all. It comes from China, that’s why.”
This is a basic Trump move: Try to turn a real problem into a culture war and then, when some reporter notices what you’re doing, turn it into a fight against The Media.
Fighting over racism is easier for Trump than fighting over his botched response to the pandemic—which is really saying something, by the way. But he figures that even so, while his base mostly doesn’t mind the racism, they might get a little freaked out by the prospect of mass graves visible from space.
Trump is not racist. He is pissed over the Chinese govt. lying.
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