Trmup’s Fake News
This article on the BBC is entitled Coronavirus: Trump’s Disinfectant And Sunlight Claims Fact-Checked.
This is the introductory paragraph.
President Donald Trump has questioned whether injecting people with disinfectants and exposing patients’ bodies to UV light could help treat the coronavirus.
The article then goes on to demolish Trump’s claims with the full force of scientifically-correct evidence.
Do they have whelk stalls in the United States? Trummkopf certainly doesn’t have the intelligence to run one!
The Anonymous Widower 
To list all of Trumpf’s fake news and misbegotten unfacts would take up most of the space on the internet. This suggestion (to inject people with disinfectant), though, marked a new low in presidential ignorance and irresponsibility.
What baffles me is how Americans can be so gullible as to elect him as their leader. The fact that so many of them still believe he is the country’s saviour and will vote for him again suggests that the country’s educational standards are very poor.
Admittedly, the alternatives to Trumpf are unimpressive, but it’s sad to see the former ‘bastion of the free world’ turning itself into a self-deluding gerontocratic irrelevance. The USA is being exposed as essentially a Third World country that’s merely been given a First World veneer.
In a sane world, Trumpf would be deemed unfit to govern, but it seems few are prepared to draw attention to the Emperor’s lack of clothes. Still, perhaps the tide is turning – see, for example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-mental-health-coronavirus-us-symptoms-cdc-white-house-press-briefing-a9446771.html
Can the States survive four more years of The Donald? Can we?
Comment by Stephen Spark | April 24, 2020 |
He’s certainly proven, that America needs a healthcare system Or are his supporters rather pleased that it seems the poor, black and Hispanics seem to be dying?
Comment by AnonW | April 24, 2020 |
He will be gone soon enough. I agree we need universal healthcare, although just to play the devil’s advocate I would also remind you that France, the UK, and the Netherlands a higher death rate per capita than the US from covid-19. It seems the main things that have distinguished the countries which have done well vs the ones which have done poorly is early shutdowns and enormous amounts of testing. New York city was late to shut down and has suffered mightily. California has done quite well. Their death rate is lower than Canada.
Comment by William McIntyre | April 24, 2020
He’s going to lose in the fall. But to claim the US is a third world country by his poor response is silly. You are also leaving the idiot NYC mayor off the hook. He was way late in shutting the city down. France has 22k deaths in a country of 65 million while the US has 50k deaths in a country of 330 million. Is France a third world country?
Comment by William McIntyre | April 24, 2020 |
I’ll be interested to see the death statistics properly analysed. Population density is different in the US, the UK, France and the Netherlands. I would suspect that the average US house is larger and on a bigger plot, so it is easier to self-isolate. Public transport has probably been a big source of infection in Europe and the US has much less.
Comment by AnonW | April 24, 2020
I have been concerned that people believe things Trump says. I have had people tell me that Trump is “turning their country around” and others that he is “sent by God to save America”. These are people I know online, some of them I know off the internet as well. I will not be surprised that people have drunk detail or similar.
Comment by nosnikrapzil | April 24, 2020 |
A former MP, once told me, that you had to be very careful what you said, as some think it’s gospel!
Comment by AnonW | April 24, 2020 |
On the mathematics, I would agree we didn’t shut down early enough. A few days would have made all the difference, but it was Easter and Passover and the Government wanted to get through them.
We didn’t do enough testing, but then the test kits we ordered from China didn’t work.
We certainly showed how to build temporary hospitals and the NHS reorganised itself to create a large number of extra beds in existing hospitals.
Logistics needed the army, but then it was more akin to Afghanistan than a normal day in the UK.
I think, that they’ll be a lot of lessons learned and acted upon before the 2nd, 3rd and 4th waves strike.
For instance some religious leaders like the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi shut places of worship, but others didn’t! Will their leadership be seen to be correct and next time, it’ll be shut down or else!
Comment by AnonW | April 24, 2020 |
There isn’t necessarily a correlation between density and who did well. South Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam have all done quite well and all three in particular Hong Kong are very dense. But in those countries people are used to wearing masks, which I think made a big positive difference for them. Even yesterday I saw on the TV people clapping for the NHS in close contact with each other and not wearing masks. Total stupidity. Being so reliant on the Chinese for PPE and testing is also quite dumb and needs to be changed going forward.
Comment by William McIntyre | April 24, 2020
Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, the same way all despotic leaders do. Not one of them has the spine to stand up to him and like all stupid people, he is too stupid to realise he is stupid.
Hopefully enough people will vote for Biden in the forthcoming election.
Comment by mauricegreed | April 24, 2020 |
Injecting disinfectant is clearly a new category in the Darwin Awards.
If the figures are to be believed, Vietnam has done very well in managing so far, using a muxture of Asian style masking, a very early shutdown including closing the borders.
Lesson to be learned for the UK is we needed to shut borders/mandatory quarantine for all people coming in (citizen or not) for a period supported by people tracing. Gov’t to pay for quarantine (similar scheme to Jury service payments plus hotelling)
As it stands there are still peopke coming to the UK who are not getting any inspection at borders or being asked to state movements
Comment by MilesT | April 25, 2020 |
Completely agree re checks at airports. It’s extraordinary that the UK has failed to protect itself with any system of checks at ports and airports, mandatory quarantining and daily health-screening of all arrivals (whether foreign or British citizens is irrelevant) in government facilities, and comprehensive contact tracing.
Like the UK, Mauritius is an island and as soon as the first cases emerged there (imported from the UK) the government acted swiftly to introduce mandatory quarantine (not at home but in empty hotels etc) for all visitors. Some weeks ago it stopped all passenger and freight flights; the airport is only reopened occasionally to allow emergency repatriation flights to arrive.
Unlike the UK, Mauritius sensibly retained the British colonial system of tracking all individuals showing signs of fever, cough or other infection, particularly if they’ve come from countries with, eg, malaria, yellow fever, chikungunya, dengue. After arrival, a health official (my brother-in-law is one such) visits them and checks the health of the traveller and those they are staying with. It works: the ‘curve’ was stamped on and squashed flat before it had a chance to run amok in very urbanised and overcrowded country.
Despite its isolated location in the Indian Ocean, which makes it hard to ensure food security during this sort of crisis, Mauritius was also much quicker and more effective in maintaining supplies to shops and supermarkets (where, NB, you have your temperature taken when you get to the door). When people were scrambling frantically to find basic necessities in London shops, there were full shelves in Mauritian supermarkets – again, because of strict and swift government control.
It didn’t get everything right, but Mauritius has a lot to teach our complacent and lackadaisical leaders in Britain (impossible, I fear, to teach those in the States anything – they are beyond redemption!).Unless they learn those lessons and introduce semi-permanent health screening at UK airports (necessitating major rebuilding, of course), we will face multiple epidemics of this kind for years to come, as each flight risks introducing fresh infections.
Comment by Stephen Spark | April 25, 2020 |
Vietnam and probably Cambodia are interesting countries. Certainly, Cambodian cooking is totally gluten-free, so it is likely, that the number of undiagnosed coeliacs in that country is very small. As I said in another post undiagnosed coeliacs who have a poor immune system could be ones to get seriously infected by the virus.
This is all rather personal to me, as I’m coeliac and I believe my youngest son was too! But he wouldn’t be tested, lived on Subways and he died at 37 of pancreatic cancer. Discussing this with pancreatic cancer experts at Liverpool University, they believe that being coeliac and his lifestyle could have contributed to him getting the cancer and his early death.
Your thoughts should be run past Jonathan Van Tam, who is of Vietnamese heritage. But I suspect he’s on the Internet to his relatives in Viet Nam.
Comment by AnonW | April 25, 2020 |