A Journal of the Plague Year

Trump’s press conference yesterday felt more upbeat than it has been for a while. He was talking again about soon getting back to work. Most significantly, he was back to talking hopefully about hydrachloraquine. He called it not only a “game changer,” but “a miracle”—if it works, he carefully qualified. Mention of the drug had been eerily absent everywhere official for a while.

Trump surely knows that, if he pushes hydrachloraquine, and it turns out to be a dud, the press will crucify him. They have already done so for even suggesting it. He must have seen very promising and very solid data to take this risk.

You might argue that he is just trying to briefly boost morale at a dark time. But that cuts two ways; talking up a cure could also prompt people to take social distancing less seriously.

The media, less intelligent than Trump, have immediately gone after him again for promoting this harebrained miracle cure, as he must have expected. Now they have thoroughly identified the drug with Trump. If it does not work, he looks really bad. And if it soon proves to work, he is going to look very good.

He must be pretty confident.

Trump also made a point of saying that they had a good secure supply of the drug. This might also have been why the authorities were so quiet about it—they were worried about the supply. Now perhaps they have stockpiled enough to go public.

In bizarrely apocalyptic, and possibly related, news, Venezuela has fired on and rammed a German cruise ship in international waters.

In normal times, this would be insane: an act of war, on a cruise ship?

It cannot be that they feared this ship, like others recently, was infected with coronavirus. They were trying to force the ship to port—not drive it away. And it would be easy to simply refuse it moorage.

I think they must have feared the craft was either spying, or stuffed with US marines looking for an inconspicuous point at which to wade ashore.

And for all we know, they were right. What was a German cruise ship fitted out for Antarctic cruises doing idling along parallel to the Venezuelan coast, just beyond territorial waters?

When the Venezuelan warship rammed the civilian cruise ship, the warship sank. The cruise ship had a reinforced hull for slicing through the Antarctic ice.

That might also have been useful for making unconventional landings in shallow waters.

I suspect the US is gearing up to invade to secure the vital ingredient for hydrachloraquine, for which Venezuela is a source. I suspect Venezuela suspects what I suspect.

Data collected from smart thermometers in the US shows there are actually significantly fewer people reporting a high temperature now than you would see in a regular flu season. And that number is dropping fast.


It looks like the social distancing is working effectively.

At the same time, the thermometer data shows social distancing is reducing the number of people catching the normal flu. It is also reducing the number of deaths by accident, since fewer people are out moving around. The terrifying overcrowding of hospitals we have feared may not happen. The hospital ship Comfort, originally slated to handle trauma cases, freeing the regular hospitals for coronavirus, has been shifted over to coronavirus, because there were not enough trauma cases.

Modified social distancing, based on this experience, may become a part of the culture going forward. No more handshakes. More facemasks during flu seasons. More telecommuting.

It is also possible that the coronavirus is burning itself out. Viruses commonly do so; Ebola did.

It also looks possible that the virus is sensitive to weather, as flu viruses are, and will naturally abate over the next few months at least in the far more populated northern hemisphere. Notably, Australia, which gets a lot of traffic from China, has never yet experienced a breakaway local spread: most cases are still imported. The Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, Taiwan, all close to China, although they have had their troubles, have not been hit with the intensity of Europe or the US. If you look at the Johns Hopkins world map, equatorial Africa also seems to have seen an oddly low number of cases. While some South American countries have seen larger outbreaks—these are the Andean nations, where high elevations produce cooler and drier weather.

Trump suggested this might be because they had good stores of chloraquine, being malarial areas. But it might still be the weather. For what it is worth, more northerly, significantly colder, countries also seem to have been somewhat less affected: Russia, Canada, Iceland, Finland, Scandinavia.

If the virus is abating for summer, it will no doubt come roaring back next fall. But that will give us adequate time to prepare more ventilators, more hydrachloraquine, more face masks, more effective protocols, and more research.

I feel the tide has turned.

In one flat note, Justin Trudeau spent some of his press conference yesterday boasting about how much of the government’s emergency funding to cope with the virus was going to go to more women’s shelters, to protect women and their children in case things are not safe in their home due to domestic violence.

But what about men facing the same situation, from an abusive wife and mother? They, and their children, are simply forced to stay in place and suffer.

This has nothing to do with the coronavirus. It is a handout to a client group at the expense of the general public, when we are all in dire straits.

So is the Canadian government’s special funding to aboriginal reserves to deal with the crisis. The whole thing about the Indian reserves is that, rightly or wrongly, they are the original example of enforced social distancing. Because of their segregation from other populations, often reinforced by great distances, they are probably the least likely of Canadians to be exposed to the coronavirus.

But in the midst of general crisis, vital funds must be diverted to another client group.

Canadians may be pulling together, but our governments are not.