In America today we would normally have a holiday called Memorial Day. Instead we have an abnormal holiday called Memorial Day.
The holiday is intended to honor the memories of U.S. soldiers who died in action. But this year it seems meant for honoring anyone who is defiant, suggesting all the American soldiers who died in action weren’t fighting only against an enemy, but against themselves.
In a wildfire if you have the capability you dump the water on the largest blazes. When we get a vaccine will we direct the first doses to the worst outbreaks?
It’s daunting trying to predict where the worst outbreaks are now much less where they will be. Using Statista today the U.S., all of Europe and the U.K. are at the top of the list for deaths per capita, yet there is not a single African country, or Southeast Asian country in the top 50.
How can that be?
Sunday afternoon the Tanzanian president urged foreigners to come right now to Tanzania “to visit the wildife.”
In marked contrast neighboring Kenya closed all its airports and just last week all border posts with Tanzania after nearly 80% of all Tanzanian truckers trying to enter the country tested positive for Covid-19. “There is some level of threat from the Tanzanian side,” Kenya’s chief health officer told the press Monday. “We keep out those who [are] positive,” he added.
The carnage of African safari companies grows like a dry season wildfire. Distant Serengeti grasslands are lit with flames of desperation. The dead grasses fueling this destruction are the charities proffered to safari customers as a benefit of their bookings.
The charity these schemes achieved for years has stopped flat out: Anti-poaching units, schools, health dispensaries, food assistance and educational training are disappearing with a level of human suffering that the executives of the companies who concocted them ensured they would never experience themselves.
I’m betting that a vaccine will be ready by the first of the year and that Kenya, South Africa and a number of other sub-Saharan countries will require all travelers to prove they are vaccinated in order to gain entry.
But what will you find once you get in?
Lions hunt because they’re hungry, and I’ve often listened to excited clients posit why a pair of fit hunters just missed a take-down: They were “too desperate.” I smile wanly to myself. Wild animals’ every moment is one of desperation.
Never, though, has any lion displayed the level of desperation found today among African safari companies trying to survive this virus. We knew many wouldn’t make it. We didn’t know it would be suicide.
I can’t convince myself there will be a second wave. I can’t convince myself that a vaccine will be available the first of next year. I guess in fact I can’t convince myself of much. Except one thing: African tourism is imploding so severely that it will gut the global market for safaris for decades to come.
Half of the 2019 African tourism will not exist in a year. By the end of 2021 there will be an unprecedented transformation rolling back decades of trends. (More on this later this week.)
Strict government actions in Africa to protect the population against Covid-19 make America’s actions look like a slap-on-the-wrist. Who’s right?
Today America errs on the side of economics over optimal minimizing of the infection. It’s absolutely the reverse in Africa. Is this just a difference of perception? Or morality? Is it a realistic debate over long-term well-being? Or something much more insidious, such as the personal well-being of our leaders?
China and America are toeing up at the post-virus starting line at the continent of Africa, and it’s pitiful how out of shape Americans are. Mike Pompeo and the State Department rely on a tried and true Trump technique of dominance: lie until it’s believed. But Africans aren’t as dumb as Americans.
Imagine about a year from now when much of the world, even a few parts of Africa, start to really manage the virus. Imagine an airplane actually flying from London to Johannesburg. Imagine, too, that Americans are banned from these flights.
I just finished an hour reading the sarcasm, fear and disbelief – mostly from Africa – about Trump suggesting “injecting” disinfectant into the body to kill the virus.
These emotions rope off America from the rest of the world. Today’s African commentary was particularly worrisome that the medical advisors sitting beside him didn’t jump up and scream, “NO!!!”
America isn’t just the laughing stock, but the King Kong monster of the world.
Open up? We privileged have more latitude implementing our morality than our poor bloke cousins. Alas, the current partisan pandemic. The growing impression is that Covid-19 is a rich man’s sickness, and ‘god forbid, let them die.’
No better magnification glass on this painful dilemma than what’s happening in Africa.
Ready for a new threat? It’s just as ethereal and deadly as Covid-19. It strips away our naive precautions just as efficiently and wrecks havoc far beyond its relatively short existence when it’s finally put under control. In a word, “worse” than the virus. I rely specifically on my African experience to tell you about this.
I experienced it mostly in troubled times and situations, a singular threat to my protecting my group. But it also walloped me when I least expected it, when everything around me seemed just so perfect and peaceful.
Rage.
Sometimes it’s better to let your brain suppress your gut. Better than Rolaids. It’s what I have to do when contemplating the virus in Africa.
There’s an enormous disconnect between what my gut tells me about the dangers of Covid-19 and what my brain does. The numbers on the continent are – and I suppose this is the point – ridiculously low. But numbers in Africa are like snow flakes in a cotton field. They rarely appear and when they do, they’re very hard to find.
The first insurance claim made by an EWT traveler that we know of was March 3. This morning that claimant said they received acknowledgment of their claim but as of today the claim had not been reviewed.
It doesn’t look very promising. The situation is similar with the airlines. Here is a brief summary of what EWT clients have explained to me regarding their various insurances.
You’d think it was a Gucci purse. Large pocketbook size, beautifully encased in a thick wet brown leather case stylishly pierced symmetrically, its oversize steel buttons were actually easy to open, hard to close. Wish now I’d saved it, but when the antenna broke I ditched it.
My Grundig Shortwave Radio. I’ve been thinking nostalgically about MGSR recently as I read with increasing terror the “professional” advice that we should consume less media in this time of such unrelenting stress and anxiety. The fact is that we should all be consuming more.