The Covid-19 Transcripts, Watch video here
(I keep up with international news by watching networks such as France 24 here is transcript of one of their best weekly shows from last night)
Francois Picard: Hi everybody welcome to a confined edition of The World
This Week. [discussion re prime minister of UK sick
with Covid-19]
Leela Jacinto: It
was just in early March that Boris Johnson was shaking hands with people and joking about
this and in a matter of weeks he's tested positive. This really shows how infectious this disease
is and how authorities should have responded quicker than they have.
Picard: Yeah
hindsight is twenty twenty isn’t it
Christopher Dickey: Look it's not hindsight. Boris Johnson's policy initially was one of
trying to encourage something called herd immunity. The notion that he was pressing at the
beginning of this crisis was that as many people should get this. And of course some old folks were going to
die but we can handle this and it'll be better next time around with this virus
maybe in the fall.
Theoretically maybe that makes some sense but finally
studies done in Great Britain itself showed that the health system system would
be completely overwhelmed by such a policy, by so many people falling sick, so
many people dying, which is something that by the way, everybody else in the
world knew except for apparently Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.
(WORTH REPEATING: Something that everybody else in the world knew except for apparently Boris Johnson and Donald
Trump. Both Trump and Johnson were put into office by Vladimir Putin in 2016. Kay Ebeling )
So the net effect of course is that now there is a huge
crisis in Great Britain, it's growing by the day. If you look at the Johns Hopkins chart, it's
no longer dot dot dot it's dot leap dot leap dot in Great Britain, just as it
is in the United States now.
At the end of the day you have to look at Boris Johnson
and say he's a fool and he fooled a lot of people in his country and a lot of
people will probably lose their lives as a result of that.
The last question I would have about Boris Johnson is who
the hell was he talking to and greeting and hanging out with the last few days
when he was probably at maximum contagion?
We don’t know. We know the colleagues,
was he with Prince Charles? He should be
traced.
Picard: Before we
went on air we were saying, we all saw this was coming, no one more than you, Rachel Donadio,
who follows things out of Italy. A gain this is such an unprecedented situation, can you give policy makers a pass
because, underestimating, "we've never seen anything like this
before"?
Rachel Donadio: I
don't think you can. I mean, I don't
think there's a government on Earth that's handled this particularly well, the
Chinese dissembled about it and then went into this massive authoritarian
overdrive. The Italians began in
February isolating towns outside Milan, putting them on a kind of quarantine.
March 8th put a large part of Lombardy on lockdown and that should have come as
a massive warning to leaders around the world.
At first it seemed oh okay well that's just Lombardy but
we've been saying this for weeks, that every country is on the same curve as
Italy is on, which means if you don’t make people stay home, the infection rate
is so high that more and more people get this.
And now more and more are sick, and that's what we're seeing in Italy
now and also Spain. And now in New York it's getting really high. Before Italy went under lockdown, it was
spreading super fast. So I think we should not give policy makers a free pass,
I mean it's true it's unprecedented.
I'm studying the question of what constitutes criminal
negligence, because there's a lot of answering to do. Apart from authorities that did not respond
in time but there's also authorities that had the time. There was a time lag, and how they are
implementing their lockdowns, like India, they had so many weeks, but people
had four hours to prepare for an absolutely draconian lockdown. [Play clip of
Prime Minister of India]
Pickard: The Prime
Minister of India has taken it into overdrive.
Is he rebounding?
Jacinto: Like Rachel, we were seeing the signs. This needs to happen in India. The question is not whether they needed
measures, it was the lack of preparedness.
This kind of lockdown has not been done anywhere else in the world, not
even China has done it like that. China
isolated the provinces that were affected.
The entire nation of India is going into lockdown. There was a lack of planning, no supply
chains, no measures for public transportation. In India 90 percent are employed
in what's called the "informal sector."
Law enforcement is run there by Hindu party, the police
are shock troops, so the orders were implemented in this extremely harsh way,
people on streets being beaten. India
doesn't have to be like this, there was no reason, the prime minister the
previous weekend declared a one day curfew, people came out to clap hands and
it turned into pandemonium with no isolation at all. There was no emergency plan put into place.
Picard: Talk about
the situation here in France, where they're sort of doing it as they go
along. They're using rail to move
patients from east to west side of the country, how is French health care
moving with the punches?
Dickey: well I
think the health care in France were pretty badly stretched to begin with. There's a lot of talk about how great the
French health care system is but in fact it's been deteriorating over the
years, they've had a lot of strikes by health care workers. I know any number of doctors who've decided
to retire early. As a result a crisis like this really puts a strain on the
system.
That said, things have been well organized, the Army is
now being used to help people out of most affected areas to where they can get
better treatment. The problem is not
just the people who have Coronavirus serious cases where they can't breathe,
it's the people who have anything else wrong with them. What happens if you get appendicitis now,
where do you go? The French system has
been doing a pretty good job dealing with all of that, the death rate here has
been much lower than I expected two weeks ago, nothing like it's is in Spain.
And god help us not as high as it will be in the United
States in a few days. [Discussion that
death rates rely on testing. ]
Dickey: well the
truth is you could say no numbers make sense because there's been almost no
randomized testing. You get bad symptoms, then you get tested, that’s the case
in France or Pennsylvania or New York City.
You have to have the disease and serious symptoms before anybody will
test you, so that obviously skews the numbers.
In Italy they are beginning to do it the way it should be.
Here in France it's only now that they're beginning to
count people who are in assisted living facilities who get coronavirus and die,
potentially it's a pretty significant number.
Donadio: the way the information is coming is has been
different. The death count has been low
in Germany partly because they haven’t tested people post mortem. As unfortunately the deaths go up across the
world, we're going to see the statistics come in line.
Dickey: We have to
look at countries which we know have been lying about their numbers. Japan was desperate to hold Olympics in July so their testing has been minimal. Now that
Olympics have been postponed, suddenly they're testing lots of people. Now government saying prepare yourself for
news of major outbreaks here. Well of
course, because they're testing now.
Picard: Here are
pictures of people going to cafes in bars in Japan
Dickey: The most
egregious case is Russia where in St. Petersburg they were talking about a hundred
thousand cases of suspected SARS, well coronavirus is a SARS virus but they didn't
want to call it that because Putin is holding vote in April for him to become President
for Life, they didn't want anything to interfere with that. Now Mayor of Moscow saying we haven’t counted
all the cases. And even now Putin is going
to the hospitals and putting on a Hazmat suit and pretending like he's leading the
charge against a disease that he did his best to ignore up to a week ago.
Picard: the Germans
seem to be testing a lot more than other Europeans, including France.
Jacinto: Is this a
question on European unity? In the European
Union health has always been a national issue.
There should have been more cooperation with the response but we have different
systems.
Donadio: There aren’t enough tests. The companies have not been making tests
quickly, one of the companies that makes the swabs is in Lombardy- and there's not
enough people to administer the tests.
In France we're being told to stay home unless you can't breathe, in which
case call emergency services. But in New
York you're just told, if these are your symptoms, stay home. The tests would have been more useful when people
were walking around not knowing they had it.
Picard: Christopher, we keep hearing the tests are coming
they're just not here yet, your comments?
Dickey: Already we've seen China exporting tests that are
eighty percent ineffective, 80 percent wrong.
They were used in Czech Republic and Spain. Lots of different manufactures and companies producing
them, some will work some won't.
Problem in United States was originally there was an
effort to control everything through the CDC and a reluctance to let individual
labs and hospitals organize the tests.
Then it turned out the CDC tests were faulty, so it's been a disaster in
terms of testing.
Tracing is also important, in Germany it's not that they
dumped out certain things, it's that they've done much better contact tracing
than most other places. And certainly in
South Korea as a program to stop the disease, contact tracing has been central
to their operation. We hear in United
States it's way too late to carry out effective contact tracing. [Atlantic article: U.S. lost three crucial
weeks]
Dickey: you could see
this coming, it was like a tsunami coming across the water. Yet people didn't prepare, forget locking down,
the hardware masks ventilators, all the things that were needed, and no country
more egregiously un prepared than the United States.
Donadio: The
pictures of medics at Mount Sinai in New York wearing plastic bags as
protective gear, that just was stunning to me, I mean that's a very well
equipped Manhattan hospital and if it doesn't have enough gear, I'm in fear of what
will happen in the rural United States and the rest of the world. [Discussion of
what friends in New York City are going through. Discussion of half-truths Donald Trump says about
equipment being available when it's not.]
Dickey: I'm not
sure that the French have tried to hide anything, this is not Russia or Japan and
I think that Macron may have been a little bit late addressing the crisis, but when
he did I think he was extremely plain, no sense he was hiding anything. I remember him saying we'll beat this thing
but the day after tomorrow is not going to be like the day before we started
and that's exactly right, it's not. We
are entering a whole new world and I think the French are aware of that and the
whole world had better be aware of that.
What's so painful to watch is a politician like Trump or
many in Congress who want you to believe that this is going to be just a little
flash in the pan and we'll go back to a ranging stock market and be super. Maybe
in a couple years but it won't be the same as before this started.
Jacinto: In India there
are questions about whether this response was even necessary. Are people going to die of the virus or are
they going to die from hunger. There's a
public outcry against social distancing. What about public anger, public
outbursts, if government is not trusted in its own country- it's proving that democracies
that are open and transparent you have to put pressure on public opinion.
Picard: The role
of government, funding of health systems- the number of hospital beds, that's been
glaring through all of this.
Jacinto: look at
number of beds in Africa, in South Africa they're worried about the crime rate
rising. The health capacity across the world,
not just in France in several countries, not enough budget has been allocated to
public health and we are absolutely seeing the effects of that now. Africa is not going to be ready to handle a
crisis of this kind. [discussion about other anecdotes in Nigeria where people think
it's hot so you can't get coronavirus, which is "just not right." ]
[discussion about how people in France are living in
isolation with video clips]
Picard: We've seen
the best and the worst of human nature so far.
[discussion: in Europe nationalistic groups growing, in U.S. it's each
state for itself. ] But some writers claim divisive politics are irrelevant
now.
Dickey: Where are
we talking about, I'm not sure I can make that case. Divisive politics mean a hell of a lot, they
affect if bills get passed to rescue corporations or people. The United States employment rate was based
on very bad jobs with very poor health care, those are the first jobs to be
lost. Six hundred dollars for a family that's
out of work, that's not enough.
Picard: In 2008 there
was anger over bailouts and that anger changed into something else.
Dickey: The checks are an effort to say yeah we're helping
out but they're inadqueate. We need change
to the basic government in the United States, starting with health care. It doesn't have to be Bernie Sanders'
universal health care, but it has to be something that's a hell of a lot better
than it is now, and if people don’t understand that before this crisis, they certainly
will after this crisis.
[Discussion about France response. ]
Jacinto: Police without masks, people working in shops
and putting lives at risk. In the end
will this be overall good or bad, worried about food stocks. Russia is investigating its food stocks, to
see what exports they can stop to keep their national stock. Rural countries their harvests will be
affected, if a nationalism goes in, countries will be trying to protect their
food supplies.
Donadio: the day I
was most distraught was when European commissioner warned of borders popping up inside Europe,
the delays of trucks could affect food supply in Europe, here in Western Europe, not sub-Saharan Africa.
General
Agreement: This could be the end of the European union as we know it. *
Links in this post:
Video of France 24: https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2020/03/something-everybody-else-in-world-knew.html
Covid-19 Transcripts Origin https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-covid-19-transcripts-origin.html
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NOTE: The clips I transcribe for this project contain information that I don't think is available in print anywhere else. Please show your appreciation by clicking some cash into my PayPal account through button at top of left hand column.)
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Posted by Kay Ebeling
Producer, City of Angels Blog
the city of angels is everywhere
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