Scotland

Starting at home, there is evidence that the lockdown is starting to pay off as the new case and death counts are starting to go down. That said the numbers are still awful. Today’s figures for Scotland are 9038 confirmed cases and 1062 deaths. We are now up to 2174 cases in Glasgow.

There’s been a long string of notable events in Scotland. Starting with the most damaging for the government: the resignation of Dr Catherine Calderwood. Standing next to Nicola Sturgeon for several key events, such as the original lockdown announcement, she’s become part of the government’s public response to the crisis. Unfortunately she was photographed by The Scottish Sun visiting her second home with her family in violation of the lockdown, causing a minor backlash. She initially downplayed her trips but that quickly unravelled and left her unable to stay in her position.

In a statement issued on Sunday night, more than seven hours after insisting she would carry on, Calderwood said she had again discussed the controversy with Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon and concluded her position was untenable. ¹

The other big scandal has been the issues surrounding PPE. This one has been very confusing. The story first broke on BBC Radio, as I understand it.

“We are facing an additional problem and that is that the care home sector and the care sector had traditionally ordered PPE from various sources. The four largest companies in the UK last week said they were not sending to Scotland and their priority was going to be England NHS and then English social care providers so within two or three days we’ve had a massive dry-up of procurement into Scotland and that’s had an impact, a really serious impact on our care homes and home care.” ²

Taken at face value this seems like a shocking turn of events, but comments were quick to defend this as an “English Stockpile for English Use”. I’ve not seen proper evidence for this, only comments arguing that these 4 companies build up a stockpile after the last event intended for use by England, and that they’ve been asked by the government to reserve that stockpile for England. I’m not clear on how that works or if such a request would be legally binding. I would assume that these stockpiles are the private property of the 4 non-governmental companies, so the assertion that these goods already belong to NHS England (or the English more broadly) seems completely hollow.

While I understand that an important resource like PPE would be something you’d want to tightly control in a crisis, it’s a slap in the face to the unionist arguments that we’re all a single country working together for the greater good. It seems like this should be a huge story but it’s been buried among various other bits of high-profile news. With Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP pushing for a new referendum on Scottish Independence, this seems like a lot of ammunition for that fight.

The National

In terms of what’s actually going on at ground-level, an emergency hospital has been built in the SEC. It’s strange seeing landmarks like this turned into emergency hospitals, and it’s giving off a very apocalyptic vibe. Hopefully it’ll not need much use.

Here’s some more photos sent to me by people getting their 1 hour of exercise.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Tomasz Daraszewicz.

Provided by Mary Dubois.

Provided by Mary Dubois.

Provided by Mary Dubois.

UK

In the larger UK picture, Boris Johnson has contracted Coronavirus, been hospitalised and finally discharged. This has been a pretty big news story but in the broader scheme of things not much has changed as a result. A lot of people have been quite annoyed that the Conservatives have been making such a big deal about praising the NHS, but their policies have been starving the organisation of resources and personnel for a long time. They cheered after successfully voting to block a pay rise for NHS nurses in 2017, as shown in the video below.

Despite Theresa May infamously saying on this subject that there was “no magic money tree”, the Conservative majority government have somehow written off £13.4 billion in NHS debt. It’s not clear how this was done or what the long-term implications are for the NHS, but it seems like a good thing taken at face value. It’s mad that it would take something like Coronavirus to push the Conservatives into action, but here we are.

5G Conspiracies

On the subject of madness an utterly bizarre conspiracy theory started floating around that Coronavirus is a full-blown hoax, and that what’s actually happening is people are getting radiation sickness from 5G towers. Skepticism is a healthy thing to have, but I don’t understand the level of delusion you’d need to have to argue that Coronavirus is a hoax. As I understand it 5G is using a part of the radio spectrum freed up by the shutdown of terrestrial television services, so we’re not looking at some new type of wireless technology here. Anyway this seemed like just another bunch of fringe lunatics, much like flat-earthers; something to roll your eyes at and ignore.

Source

At least it was, up until they started to try and burn down critical infrastructure in the middle of a crisis. As of the 14th April, there had been more than 40 attacks nationwide, including to a tower that serves the emergency NHS Nightingale hospital.

The USA

Across the pond in the US, there’s been a whole swathe of insanity going on. Every day there’s a new article about how badly the emergency is being managed. It certainly is being mismanaged: the USA has 820,600 active cases and 45,967 deaths. Although we can’t trust the numbers coming out of several countries, using the official numbers that would mean that just over 25% of all Coronavirus deaths worldwide were in the USA.

I think it would be impossible to go into any of these in any kind of detail, so I’ll cover some notable stories.

In several states, churches were refusing orders to not congregate for easter services. Apparently most churches made it work using drive-in congregations (which is a neat idea) or by doing it all online. One particular pastor has been arrested after driving a bus at someone protesting this outside of his church.

The US has promised to provide stimulus cheques of $1200 to a huge chunk of the US population, with extra money for those who have kids. Most people would get this money deposited right into their bank apparently, but those who were expecting a paper cheque will find it delayed; apparently because President Donald Trump wanted them to print his signature on them.

There’s been issues with the federal stockpile of PPE, which was historically built up for emergencies just like this one. However Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has (for unknown reasons) become involved in this process, and has stated “…the notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use.” Look, this one is too hard to follow and cite all the relevant sources. We’re not going to know all the facts here until much later. But what it looks like is that the federal government are selling (or possibly giving) these masks to various companies to sell to the highest bidder under the guise of letting the open market provide a distribution mechanism. This is not how this is normally done, as distribution would normally be handled by government agencies such as FEMA or the National Guard. The result is a nationwide shortage of PPE in the USA.

In several states there have been protests against lockdown conditions, most notably in Michigan, where the protesters blockaded a hospital. The protesters appear to be driven by various astroturfed online web presences, and everyone is still looking for clues as to who’s behind it. An initial lead that looked like a failure to redact WHOIS data pointed to a guy in Florida, but it seems there’s more to that story. While it’s not clear just now who’s pushing for this or what their motives are, what is clear is that these protests are likely to lead to a second wave of infections and a significant number of deaths.

Donald Trump is on form as ever, endorsing the protests as liberation movements. There’s a lot of scared and angry people out there, and the last thing they need is to be encouraged into viewing this as a civil war. I’ve already seen a report of a woman who shot at cell tower workers over the 5G thing, although that’s clearly a case of mental illness.

Source

There’s so much more going on in the world but I don’t have the energy to write any more. I think I’ll have to try and focus on Scotland in the next few updates for my own sanity. Suffice to say it feels much like we’re spiralling out of control at a global level, and I don’t know where this whole thing is headed.