Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain*
COVID-19 ROUND-UPGeneral
- There isn't a perfect correlation - among the top 10 hardest-hit countries - as between the tests and the deaths per million. Though there is for France and the UK, in both of which the level of testing is low and deaths high.
The UK: So obsessed with pandemic influenza had the government been that they hadn't seen the coronavirus coming. And, for want of a specific plan, when it did arrive, they used the influenza plan anyway. It was the only one they had. The rest, as they say, is history.
Ireland: Still rising up the table of deaths per million.
The USA: Randolph County in Georgia is the county with the highest death rate, including New York. Limited access to health care, an elderly population and high levels of poverty could all be a factor. And it is not alone - the cases in the South are surging. Yet at the same time Republican governors are reopening businesses, including in Georgia, where tattoo parlours and spas were allowed to open on Friday, prompting national headlines.
Sweden
o As the death toll rises, a significant number of people believe Sweden may have made a fatal error of judgment.
o The BBC asks here whether they've got things wrong.
Life in Spain in the Time of Something Like Cholera
- As of May 2, we will join the rest of the world and be allowed out of prison to take a bit of exercise.
- The lifting of other rules will depend on where you live. “It will be gradual and asymmetrical,” the PM says. “We will not advance at the same speed.”
- Meanwhile, my impression is that police patrols have markedly decreased in the last week or so.
- María's Chronicle, Day 42.
- A nice tale from Valencia.
- More sales tax reductions.
- Another of those Spanish politicians . . . Mallorca's mayor fined €3,000 after attending an alcohol-fuelled party during the lockdown.
- I read somewhere that the feast day of St James/Iago - 25 July - is called the Dia del Matamoros (The Day of the Moors-slayer) on the Spanish calendar. I can't say I've ever heard this, and I doubt it'd be acceptable in today's - yesterday's? - politically correct climate. Eamon/María?
- Madrid wants free money not loans and fears the consequences of the latter.
- We can but hope that having someone insane as the 'leader of the free world' doesn't end in a near-term global disaster. And wonder what on earth it signifies about the US that led its people to putting him in this position. Doubtless historians will tell us one day. Meanwhile, we can but mock a man who 'has relinquished any last semblance of mental balance.' So here goes:-
- Another ditty from the engaging Randy Rainbow. 'A Spoonful of Clorox'
- Another impersonation from J-L Couvin. 'I said Diet Fresca, not disinfectant.'
- Just a few of the funnies going round:-
Way of the world
- The Covidian Revolution: It was going to happen anyway, but Covid 19 and the need to live virtually is going to make it happen more quickly. More here.
Finally . . .
- On this day in 1937, the German Condor legion - in Operation Rügen - bombed, strafed and machine-gunned defenceless Guernica - an appalling atrocity that was never admitted to during Franco's lifetime. See Wiki on it here and click here for the devastating eye-witness report of the American Special Correspondent George Steer. And here for a reading of the report accompanied by newsreel footage.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.
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