As per usual Trump's "facts" about the WHO are his own delusions. The WHO followed protocols and instituted in situ operations per those protocols. They also developed tests, which Trump refused to take advantage of. Dumb and Dumber (Trump and Johnson) are the critical points of failure in USA and UK. Both saw what was happening in China - Trump in January boasted about how tight he was with Xi during trade related discussions and final agreements - and then in Italy. Trump has one of the most sophisticated intelligence operations in the world at his disposal ... but either can't read or can't be bothered with the daily proffer even when they've literally reduced it to pretty pictures for him. Trump has no excuse for not knowing what was happening on the ground nor what the risks were, nor what he should do about. Both declined in their own way to act diligently and promptly. Both have little clue as to what is really happening. Johnson was hoisted on his own petard and had to avail himself of the NHS ... wonder what happened to the private clinic he should be able to afford ... I guess he didn't bank on being one of the herd when he advocated the herd immunity approach. I am sympathetic towards his wife/partner and the unborn child.
Adding insult to injury, Trump now routinely boasts about how he is going to provide ventilators and tests to Russia, when domestic states are still struggling for equipment and tests, and the federal operation has interfered with the states' acquisition of critical supplies. If it wasn't for the competence of states' governors the USA would be a total shit show. One bright spot is the superlative performance of the US Army Corp of engineers in building out new hospital facilities in conference halls and other venues. However, when you think that the US tax payer funds the federal government with trillions of dollars a year; then not content with that largess the feds run up a trillion dollar deficit ... it's the least we can expect. Executive leadership is vacant, and literally ... even with a prayer breakfast .. couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.
The Irish republic is tracking death locations and responding rapidly to the >50% death of the toll originating nursing homes with resources to attack that problem. In the USA, the death toll in nursing homes is unknown and not tracked. It is slowly being uncovered only when internal morgues are overflowing and somebody on staff has reached out to authorities for help.
Three obstetrics' units in NYC, by testing patients admitted for delivery, has determined that over 15% tested positive, and 14% were asymptomatic. One would think that women in their third trimester would have limited exposure due to their general lower level of mobility and their natural desire to stay healthy to protect themselves and the fetus. So, project that 15% into the NYC general population of say 8.5 million and you get 1.28 million cases almost double the national case count. C19 is an iceberg. What we see is what we test, which is the bit floating above the water. What we don't see and count are those we don't test, and those who die outside of hospital intensive care.
In my state, Connecticut, our case and death curves are still rising on a mixture of quadratic and cubic trends. We have been operating on a stay home protocol for around a month. Days to double are slowly expanding, but we're not seeing a flattening of any description yet. We are not tracking nursing home problems. We are not testing enough. We are running blind. We have problems popping up in other areas as the State has stopped special needs operations and redirected funding ... care for troubled juveniles, people on the spectrum, other vulnerables. Households and family units at the base of the pyramid are heavily burdened.
Food security is going to be an issue. There is no coordination here for produce grown and ready for harvest in places like Florida, now going waste and ploughed over because traditional customers (e.g. cruise lines) have no demand, and triple demand at food pantries in other States. The virus is crippling one of the country's largest pork slaughtering and processing operations in South Dakota ... a more out of the way place you couldn't imagine. If farming and food production operations are compromised by the virus there are going to be serious consequences over here. We've locked out the Mexicans ... so I don't know who exactly is going to pick and pack anyway. Lots of talk from POTUS about "war", but if this was a real war we'd be fucked; no clue nor coordination.
On the bright side .... Romanians to the rescue .... lucky that UK farmers are still able to enjoy migrant labour from the EU.
Running a country looks easy when everything is normal and operating in steady state .... what could possibly be easier ... it basically runs itself ... just STFU and stay out of the way. That's when any old rich prick with nothing better than half a clue thinks they could do a better job ... trouble is when they get elected and a tire needs to be changed or worse still a little black ice sits on the road and the truck skids into a ditch or is driven into one because they can't read a map, steer the wheel and change gears all at the same time.
And we have Dumb and Dumber!
The Chinese economy is now stalled. They are at the top of almost all supply chains, especially B2C supply chains. With no C - all retail is currently shut down - there is no demand. No demand means that every point of value creation along the chain has nothing to do without making an investment to buy inputs, pay labor, and create an inventory. China can't put its labor back to work, put wages in their hands, and recycle those wages through their economy until the C side of the equation starts up, unless they make a massive internal investment, but this is going to be months yet, and it doesn't work for anything perishable. To compound the problem there are logistic challenges and time lags throughout the chain. Are containers in the right place, how long to reposition. It takes over 30 days for a container to go between China and the US West coast. across the Pacific. There's reposition lag and transportation lag. Then there are lags due to customs and Trump's stupid tariffs. Then there are domestic distribution time lags. Then there is the consumer lag due to soft demand because people have been living on meager income for months and their disposable income is no longer readily disposable, it's used to replenish savings not to purchase. Then there is the lag as cash flows back up the supply chain - one man's payable is another's receivable. And to prime the pump, China doesn't magic up raw materials, they have to be sourced before China can start producing - some domestic and some overseas.
Somebody is going to have to bight the bullet and start spending money, i.e. making investments in operating capital, for all this to start working again. Who is going to do that ... fat cat billionaires or governments? China is the pivot in all this. They have to make investments to buy raw materials. They operate at scale, so initially they will operate inefficiently with higher costs. How long will it take to ramp up to full scale? It's not a light switch. It's going to be an iterative process that will take much longer than expected.
Rationing continued after WW2 for a number of years. Conversion of the industrial base from war time to peace time production took a while and investment. Demand needed to pick up - dead people don't buy anything. It is the same now with poor people or people that have been reduced to live on meager means. Then industry was ill configured. Today industry has all but stopped. Different condition but it's going to take time to get the global and domestic machinery working again.
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