Plague Update #11 - Stripes and Clusters

Terrible news on the disease front!  A malayan tiger has apparently contracted COVID-19.  This raises a lot of questions, first and foremost, who the hell is getting within coughing distance of a tiger?  Granted this malayan tiger is resident at the New York Zoo (if it lived in the wild it would probably have been poached by now) where literally everything has COVID-19 at the moment.  Birds flying overhead are dropping out of the sky.  Several other tigers and lions are being tested.

Slightly closer to home (in terms of geography if not social development) Tasmania has announced that there has been a COVID-19 cluster at one of the collection of mouldy shipping crates and survivalist tents that comprise their hospital system.  Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if Tasmania's hospitals had outbreaks of bubonic plague.  Actually it would probably be better, we know how to treat that.  I asked my correspondent if she was worried about the COVID-19 cluster when she visited the hospital, she responded that she was more concerned about the asbestos.

The government graciously announced today that charities that had lost 15% of their income due to the COVID-19 outbreak would be eligible for some of the money currently being sprayed about.  At this the nation's public universities pricked up their ears.  Technically they are charities and with Chinese students which pretty much comprise their sole reason for being no longer coming they are feeling the pinch.  The government stamped hard on that idea however, they delicately pointed out that the money would be directed to charities that do something useful.  They didn't put it quite like that but that was the definite implication.  I have to admit I would have thought our universities would be ideal candidates for distance education.  They could email the study schedule and test questions out to their students, the students could cut and paste the responses from wikipedia and email them back.  Then the university could just send them the degree as a printable attachment.  Or get the students to write their own.  It will be the first piece of original work some of them have done.

Western Australia has a hard border (or at least as hard as is constitutionally permissible) in place.  The WA premier praised his government's achievement by comparing it to Brexit and claiming to have done in a few days what Britain took four years to achieve.  This has got to be the most irrelevant comparison in history if only because Europe honestly doesn't care whether WA leaves the rest of Australia (most of Australia doesn't care either).  I'm pretty sure that Brexit was a little more involved than simply parking a police car on the road into the country.

Speaking of Britain, their prime minister has now been hospitalised with COVID-19.  Frankly Boris Johnson always looks as though he's coming down with something so its a tribute to Britain's health system that they diagnosed him at all.  Prince Charles, however, is out of danger.  Even as I type this I can imagine the queen rolling her eyes and muttering "what does it take?"  The queen herself addressed her nation (and by extension, mine) from a heavily secured, disclosed location.  Keeping as far as was decently possible from the one cameraman who had to be present her majesty talked about better times coming and praised people for their behaviour. Basically what she said was a version of "Keep Calm and Carry On".  Still that's probably better coming from her than from Boris Johnson.  You don't want to hear "Carry On" from somebody who looks like he should be in a Carry On film (and not one of the good early ones but one of the crappy later efforts when they were really milking it for the last drops).