viral news

Instapundit has been doing a series of "coronavirus update" posts that are basically a collection of links to the latest news about COVID-19. I'm siphoning off that list to relay the following article titles that struck me as interesting:

27 killed by alcohol poisoning in Iran trying to protect themselves from coronavirus

Volunteers needed: Human guinea pigs to be paid $7000 to be infected with coronavirus

Ireland cancels all St. Patrick's Day parades due to coronavirus... just as Ireland has had its first-ever venomous snakebite. Saint Patrick expelled the snakes from Ireland, but without the old man to protect the Irish, the snakes now see a way back!

South Korea sees coronavirus 'stable phase' but 'too early to be optimistic'

Iran and Italy have been in a race with Korea and its current infection numbers. Italy has outpaced Korea (9172 infected in Italy versus 7478 in South Korea) and is now under a country-wide quarantine. Iran is gaining on Korea, with 7161 confirmed cases of infection. Whether either of these countries is handling the crisis as competently as South Korea has handled it is doubtful. And as much as I've been teasing extroverts about this new era of enforced antisocial behavior, I recognize that many Westerners don't take kindly to restricted freedom of movement. True, you could argue that East Asians don't like being penned up, either, but Westerners are, even now, generally more individualistic and less conformist than folks in the East. You can expect Westerners—starting in Europe but eventually including the US—to go increasingly stir-crazy as isolation and quarantine procedures grind on over time.

I'm seeing a lot of worry, right now, for major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, which all have homelessness problems that entail plenty of improperly disposed-of urine and feces. This is problematic because urine and feces are vehicles of transmission for COVID-19. Mayors who have been slack about these social problems had better wake up and clean up their act—literally—for the sake of their law-abiding citizens.

ADDENDUM: over at ROK Drop, a dissenting Korean voice:

Those who say both #Taiwan & #ROK did a good job in containing #COVID2019, can you tell me your rationale?

Shortest distance from China
T: 80 miles
K: 500 miles

No. of confirmed cases (3/9)
T: 45
K: 7313

Deaths (3/9)
T: 1
K: 50

# of masks sold to PRC
T: 0
K: 300M+

Do tell.

— Sung-Yoon Lee (@SungYoonLee1) March 9, 2020

My comment: I completely agree with the implication that South Korea has played politics by kissing China's ass. Sending millions of masks to China while also accepting the (re)entry of 20,000 Chinese university students was a stupid move by the Moon government, which could have helped to control the situation by restricting the influx of Chinese into Korea. As for the rest of Mr. Lee's tweet... well, we're each able to interpret statistics in our own way.