The A-Z of coronavirus
From abject poverty to zany animal behaviour
A is for abject poverty. One of the under-reported global achievements of the past two decades has been a decrease in the number of people classified as extremely poor. Now, for the first time since 1998, global poverty rates are forecast to rise. By the end of the year 8% of the world’s population, half a billion people, may be pushed into destitution, says the World Bank.
B is for bleach. A mentally challenged official in southern Spain ordered workers to spray the beach of a quaint fishing village with diluted bleach to protect residents from Covid-19. Environmentalists were hopping mad. “The beach is a living ecosystem. And when you spray it down with bleach, you’re killing everything you come across,” they pointed out.
C is for Catherine the Great, the first person in Russia to be vaccinated. The Most Powerful Patient in Russia was vaccinated in 1768 against smallpox at a time when the death rate from the disease was 40%. A London doctor was invited to give the injection. The empress ordered a team of post horses to be kept ready so that he could bolt to avoid lynching if he managed to kill her (it’s not clear if he insisted on this clause in his employment contract).
D is for domestic violence. The UN Population Fund predicts domestic assaults will soar by 20% during a three-month worldwide lockdown.
E is for Egypt. The country last week flew a planeload of medical supplies to the US. Labels on the crates read, in English and Arabic, “From the Egyptian people to the American people”. The delivery included 200,000 masks, 48,000 shoe covers and 20,000 surgical caps.
F is for facial recognition and face masks. Users of advanced smartphones that use facial recognition found it annoying to have to take off their protective face masks every time they wanted to unlock their screens. But on Wednesday, Tech Crunch reported that Apple has modified its latest operating system, iOS 13.5, enabling an iPhone to automatically revert to traditional passcode-entry mode if it detects its owner is wearing a mask.
G is for the Great Leap Forward. Chairman Mao launched a mass extermination campaign against the “Four Pests”, which he declared to be rats, flies, mosquitos and sparrows. Mao included sparrows because they eat grain, and so 1-billion sparrows were slaughtered. One method of killing was to use drums, metal objects and musical instruments to create a noise that would disturb the birds into flight for so long that they would drop dead from exhaustion. In Beijing an estimated 800,000 birds were killed in three days. The Great Leap Forward led to the great famine of 1959-1961 and the death of tens of millions of people. Locusts had devoured crops as there were no sparrows left to eat them.
H is for human rights. Security forces enforcing the lockdown in parts of Nigeria have killed more people than the coronavirus itself, a local rights group says. The National Human Rights Commission claims law enforcers have killed 18 people since lockdown began. Covid-19 has claimed 12 lives.
I is for inequality. There are more vice-presidents in South Sudan (five) than ventilators (four). J is for Japan. The Land of the Rising Sun has a reputation for state-of-the-art gadgetry and innovative robotics but most Japanese workers don’t have the high-speed internet and suitable computers to work from home. British market researcher YouGov found only 18% of those surveyed were able to avoid going into the office for work. In India, nearly 70% of those surveyed were staying at home.
K is for king. In this case Henry VIII, a big scaredycat who knew all about social distancing. When a plague of the dreaded “sweating sickness” broke out in the summer of 1528, he bolted from his castle and moved from house to house in terror. His girlfriend at the time, Anne Boleyn, was infected after being packed off to her ancestral home because one of her ladies had the disease. Love is blind, but it’s not stupid.
L is for loafing. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have many things in common and one of these is an aversion to hard work. In the era before the coronavirus the president of the US spent his working days watching hours and hours of cable news and tweeting angrily. During the era of the coronavirus Trump spends his working days watching hours and hours of cable news and tweeting angrily. As his ratings fall, aides are spinning the line that the president is working his butt off. How hard? Sometimes it’s hard to get him to eat a quick bite at lunch time. One critic commented: “As though not always getting to eat lunch isn’t a thing that most working adults struggle with, even the ones who aren’t leader of the free world.” As for BoJo, not only did he spend two weeks convalescing at Chequers after his bout of coronavirus, he also disappeared for 12 days at the start of the crisis to another country estate used exclusively by British PMs. A leading newspaper columnist delicately attributed this disappearance to BoJo’s “baroque personal life”. Because keeping the missus honest is way more important than saving the grey little people from pandemics.
M is for mogul, also moegoe. Hollywood billionaire David Geffen recently posted an Instagram photo of the sun setting behind his 454ft yacht in the Caribbean, captioned: “Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.” Faced with a tsunami of abuse he quickly made his account private. Madonna — you know, the global personality famous for her “formidable intellect” — called the coronavirus “the great equaliser”. Sitting in a milky bathtub filled with rose petals and more shiny silver knobs than you’d find in a cockpit, she confided that the pandemic doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor: “What’s terrible about it is that it’s made us all equal in many ways, and what’s wonderful about it is that it’s made us all equal in many ways.” Not for sensitive viewers.
N is for nicotine. Smokers were dancing a jig when Jean-Pierre Changeux, a neurobiologist at the Pasteur Institute in France, published a hypothesis on science platform qeios.com proposing the experimental use of nicotine patches on people infected with Covid-19. This was after noting that there are surprisingly few tobacco smokers among those who have contracted the disease. Further research will be done but either way the caveat remains: smoking is bad for you.
O is for odour. In this case a disgusting stink. Cops were called to Brooklyn to investigate a nauseous smell after a funeral home overwhelmed by the coronavirus resorted to storing dozens of bodies on ice in rented trucks. The Guardian reports that hospitals have used refrigerated tractor trailers to cart away multiple bodies at a time, sometimes loading them in public view on the sidewalk.
P is for praise, or shall we say self-praise. The New York Times analysed Trump’s daily coronavirus press conferences from March 9, when the outbreak began spreading uncontrollably, through to midApril. Reporters found by far the most recurring utterances from Trump were self-congratulations (600 times). He did credit others (more than 360 times) for their work, but he also blamed others (more than 110 times) for inadequacies in the state and federal response. Trump’s attempts to display empathy or appeal to national unity (about 160 instances) amounted to only a quarter of the number of times he complimented himself or a top member of his team. The paper cited a White House briefing on March 19. The president offered high praise for the commissioner of the Food & Drug Administration: “He’s worked, like, probably as hard or harder than anybody,” Trump said. Then he corrected himself: “Other than maybe Mike Pence — or me.”
Q is for quarantine. These began during the Black Death in the 14th century. Ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing. This practice was derived from the Italian words quaranta giorni, or 40 days.
R is for recession. The coronavirus outbreak has set off the first recession in the Sub-Saharan Africa region in 25 years, with growth forecast at minus 5.1% in 2020 from a modest positive 2.4% in 2019, according to the World Bank.
S is for Sarov. Russia has expressed alarm at the spread of the coronavirus to the city, one of its nuclear cities. Sarov was so secret it did not appear on maps until the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. The city is closed to foreigners and Russians require special clearance.
T is for toilet paper. Two of the world’s biggest pulp makers say onerous new border regulations are delaying shipments of the raw material — the only ingredient in toilet paper. Do hoarders hold the royal flush after all?
U is for unintended consequences. The oldest woman in the Swiss canton of St Gallen died last week at the age of 109 — not, according to news reports, from the coronavirus, but from loneliness. She survived the Spanish flu of 1918 and was not infected with the coronavirus. Her family believe corona isolation affected her deeply and she faded without daily visits.
V is for Vietnam. A tragic milestone was reached when the Covid-19 death toll in the US exceeded the number of US casualties in the Vietnam war. Now fatalities are higher than in the Vietnam war, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined.
W is for World Health Organisation, the body trying its best to temper global hysteria with science. Its website (who.int) has an excellent “mythbusters” page that shoots down all the so-called remedies for and causes of Covid-19 that are virulently spread by gullible graduates of the University of Google.
X is for xenophobia. CNN reports that Africans in the southern Chinese city Guangzhou have been evicted from their homes by landlords and turned away from hotels. Some were forcibly quarantined for 14 days in their homes for no reason. Meanwhile, in other countries including SA, citizens of Chinese origin have been unfairly vilified and abused for their perceived association with the place where the coronavirus was first identified.
Y is for Yale. On Tuesday, researchers at the US university’s New Haven hospital began clinical trials to test the effectiveness of asthma drug ibudilast in treating Covid-19 symptoms. It is hoped that the drug might help to reduce inflammation and retard the progression of lung damage in the severe phase of the disease. Trials on mice have shown “promising” results.
Z is for zany. The Sumida Aquarium in Tokyo organised a virtual “face-showing festival”. Staff noticed that its spotted garden eels were exhibiting curious behaviour — burrowing their slender bodies into the sand every time a human passed by their tank. They concluded that this was probably due to the fact that the eels are shy because they haven’t seen many humans since the aquarium closed in early March (not that the eels found life without humans so fabulous that they couldn’t stand the sight of us any more). During the “face-showing festival” the eels were able to look at human faces around the world on specially positioned tablets. Trance parties for big cats, anyone?