Three things happened yesterday that made me think the sh*t with coronavirus just got very real.
First, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned after massive spikes in coronavirus infection in worst hit countries like South Korea, Italy, Iran and Japan: ‘We are in unchartered territory.’ And he revealed the death rate for it is has risen to 3.4 percent compared to less than one percent for regular seasonal flu.
Second, America’s Federal Reserve took the drastic emergency move to slash the interest rate by half a percentage point to limit damage to the economy from the virus.
To put this into perspective, the U.S. central bank hasn’t done anything like this since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 to trigger the global financial crisis. And nobody’s convinced that slashing interest rates now will make much difference to combating a disease.
‘It’s like placing a Band-aid on an arm to cure a headache,’ said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at The Economist. Indeed, after a brief rally, the cut prompted a further crash in the stock markets, which have already been suffering their worst run since 2008.
Third, the Queen of England – the very epitome of ‘keep calm, carry on’ common sense – wore long, heavy-duty white gloves to present members of the public with honors at Buckingham Palace, the first time she is ever believed to have done this for the investitures.
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A nurse checks a patient in an intensive care unit treating COVID-19 coronavirus patients at a hospital in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province
Oh, and if all this wasn’t disconcerting enough, the French health minister called for a ban on the nation’s favorite pastime, kissing.
None of this seems like an over-reaction to me.
The current stats about coronavirus are very alarming.
In 2003, the SARS virus infected just over 8,000 people in 29 countries, killing 774.
Coronavirus has already infected nearly 100,000 people in 80 countries – and killed over 3,000.
Should it become a global pandemic, as many experts now fear, then the consequences could be devastating. In 1918, the H1N1 ‘Spanish flu’ virus killed between 50-100 million people.
Tech titan Bill Gates, who spends much of his time and money combatting diseases with his charitable foundation, said: ‘In the past week, coronavirus has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.’
This is of particular concern in countries where there is already economic strife and societal upheaval.
In Iran, where sanctions have hit hard, coronavirus is running riot; 23 politicians now have the disease and a close adviser to the country’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni died from it.
In total, there have been nine coronavirus deaths on US soil with all of them occurring in Washington state. At least six of them are linked to the Life Care Center of Kirkland – the long-term care facility near Seattle with an acute outbreak (Pictured is a patient being taken from the nursing home on Tuesday)
Yet as many countries race to take dramatic steps to contain the virus, there remains an unnerving whiff of complacency about America’s response, led by the White House.
Two days before Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, was announced as one of the coronavirus taskforce members, he declared the disease was ‘contained’ in the U.S.
‘It’s pretty close to airtight,’ Kudlow said.
Erm, no it’s not.
In fact, if there’s one indisputable fact about coronavirus it’s that when it lands in a country, as it now has in the United States, it is the complete opposite of ‘airtight’.
Kudlow’s comforting words were, of course, intended mainly for an audience of one man – his boss, President Trump, who is desperately keen to keep a lid on a health crisis that could yet decimate the U.S. economy and pose an existential threat to his chances of winning the 2020 Election in November.
‘Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,’ Trump tweeted last week, the day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the spread of the virus was inevitable.
The CDC’s prediction sent the media into overdrive, which prompted Mick Mulvaney, acting White House chief of staff, to say it was overreacting about coronavirus because ‘they think this is going to be what brings down the president’.
But ironically, it will be UNDER-reaction to coronavirus by the Trump administration that could bring down the president.
There’s a very fine line between cool, calm confidence in such situations and complacency – and right now, I fear President Trump is falling into a trap of his own making by underestimating the scale of what is going to come very soon.
The Queen, who has carried out investitures since 1952, wore gloves for the first time as she handed a CBE to British actress Wendy Craig on Tuesday
He’s consistently playing down the danger, boasting about how well he’s dealing with it, and even quibbling with his top medical experts over how long it will take to get a coronavirus vaccine – even as all the scientific evidence suggests America’s about to be engulfed with infections.
For now, U.S. authorities are playing a ‘wait-and-see’ game with the virus and avoiding taking any of the draconian action taken by the Chinese which included complete lockdowns of whole cities like Wuhan.
But that draconian action seems to have worked: China, and we shouldn’t necessarily take their word for this given how misleading they’ve been in the past about such viruses, is now saying that rates of infection in the country are falling.
If so, what is America waiting for?
Japan has closed schools for a month, Switzerland has banned gatherings of more than 1,000 people, Italy has been cancelling major sporting events.
Yet in the U.S., nothing is really being done other than repeated entreaties to ‘wash your hands’ as the increasingly terrified public rush out to panic buy everything from medicines to toilet paper.
People are seen above wearing medical face masks on the streets of Rome
The consequences of inaction, and it’s hard not to suspect this is down to Trump not wanting to panic his beloved financial markets into utter meltdown, might end up being far more costly than the consequences of tough action.
If tens of thousands of Americans start dying from coronavirus, as seems more likely than not, and the economy continues to tank, then Trump will be blamed for not taking it seriously enough and that could prove to be a far greater threat to his chances of re-election than anything the Democrats, and their likely nominee Joe ‘Lazarus’ Biden, can throw at him over the next eight months.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson has conveyed a similarly relaxed view of the virus, even boasting yesterday that he shook as many hands as possible during a visit to a hospital containing coronavirus patients.
This struck me as a very stupid thing to say.
Why, when we know coronavirus is a highly contagious disease and passed very easily via handshakes, would any world leader want to actively encourage people shaking as many hands as possible at a location housing patients who have it?
Johnson has drawn up what he calls a ‘battle plan’ for how to deal with coronavirus if it does turn into a major crisis in the UK.
But his own chief medical officer, Professor Christopher Whitty, told me this morning on Good Morning Britain that it was now ‘highly likely’ that Britain would see an epidemic of coronavirus very soon, and it would have a ‘profound’ impact on the country.
So, again I ask: what are we waiting for?
If tough decisions need to be taken to contain the virus, then take them now.
As it happens, I’ve appeared in an apocalyptic horror movie – Brad Pitt’s World War Z – in which people are turned into crazed zombies from a mysterious virus that emanated from China.
(I’m seen presenting a news bulletin issuing a dire Greta Thunberg-style warning about the threat of global warming, in which I say: ‘The planet is getting hotter, CO2 emissions have dramatically increased in the past 50 years…’)
President Donald Trump designated Vice President Mike Pence to lead the coronavirus response
The virus, named Solanum, travels fast across the world through travel and commerce, and society is disrupted as panic spreads, and millions die.
One of the main reasons identified in the movie for this is the grotesque behavior of politicians who lie and cover-up to protect their own country’s economic interests at the expense of human life.
Coronavirus is not going to turn us all into zombies.
But it’s here, it’s real, it’s getting worse by the second, and this is not a time for complacency, party politics, or electioneering.
Nobody with half a brain will blame leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson for doing too much too soon to combat what is clearly a very serious global threat to human life.
But people rarely forgive their leaders for doing too little, too late.