This is a good read. Canada will be crucified with our weak leadership and a non confidence vote is around the corner
www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/03/08/...irus-quake-reshapes/
The worlds geopolitical order will be unrecognisable once Covid-19 has done its worst. Long-standing regimes will be badly compromised. Political systems that have never fully recovered from the Lehman crisis will suffer a second body blow.
Those Western democratic governments that have been most complacent or incompetent will be torn to shreds by unforgiving electorates. Social media will see to that.
Covid-19 is turning into a strategic contest between the social control model of Chinas Communist Party and the unruly, free-spirited pluralism of the West. How that comparison plays out will shape the global order in the 21st Century.
In this country, Brexit scarcely matters right now. Decimal points of GDP are irrelevant. Boris Johnson will be judged on whether or not his administration allows avoidable decimation of the elderly -- and the not so elderly -- and whether the National Health Service buckles in catastrophic institutional failure.
Korea has six times as many intensive care (ICU) beds per capita, and Germany four times as many. What we know so far from Lombardy is that 13 percent of infected patients require ICU treatment, typically for two to three weeks.
The outbreak is already overwhelming the system in Italys best equipped region. ICU patients are being sent to Tuscany because beds have run out.
The Italian society of anesthesia and critical care says it may be necessary to reserve "very scarce resources" to patients with a "higher chance of survival and more years of life to come." The unthinkable is happening.
"Italy should be a warning to everybody, everywhere," says Professor Massimo Galli, head of infectious diseases at the Luigi Sacco hospital in Milan.
He is scathing about those still playing down the threat. "It was never anything like flu. People uttering such things are sowing confusion among those who wish to be confused," he said.
If the British government can buy vital weeks to "flatten the peak" and stretch the epidemic into the less contagious summer (we hope), it might have a chance of preventing a national disgrace -- starting with a shortage of respirators, one variable explaining why reported mortality rates in Wuhan are 5.8 percent, 2 percent in Beijing, and 1 percent in Shanghai, but rising everywhere as slow deaths come in.