Coronavirus: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Let's dive right into our top story

tonight

, which concerns the topic that has dominated the news all

week

global hot spots the spread of the corona virus fears of a global pandemic grow a huge spike in cases in Italy hundreds of cases in South Korea new cases reported in Europe the CDC warned Americans to be prepared here at home it's not a question of if, but when, the corona virus on Tuesday, the CDC said it's spreading here not It's a question of if, but when, which is just not a comforting thing to hear about the spread of something deadly.

It's only comforting if you're talking about whether Saoirse Ronan will win an Oscar or whether Henry Kissinger will ever die. Don't worry, it's not. a question of if but when and the CDC wasn't wrong, there are Now several dozen confirmed cases here in the United States and the first death occurred yesterday, while the stock market has suffered its biggest drop in a

week

since 2008 and many Americans have questions about how to stay safe. Joy Johnson sent us an email asking if I can get

coronavirus

. from a package delivered from China, that's a big question, let's talk about these masks, will we receive them or not?

Some people wonder if you can protect yourself from the virus with bleach, we are on steroids, can you get corona? virus from eating Chinese food, of course you can't get the corona virus from eating Chinese food, in fact if you're eating at a Panda Express you can't even get Chinese food from eating Chinese food, although I will say it's unlikely to get the virus crown if you gargle with bleach regularly because you know what they say being dead is already the best medicine look, it might be helpful to explain the basics here right away. What we are talking about is a disease called Covid 19.

Caused by a new strain of corona virus, symptoms include fever, cough and shortness of breath, and preliminary estimates indicate that it has a mortality rate of around two percent. percent, with the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions being the most at risk, and I know some people are not. He seems to think 2 percent is as bad as Chuck Todd told us in the strangest way possible, so I surprised my teenager

last

night when I told him that only 2 percent of those who get this

coronavirus

die and he said, "Well , I thought it was". I thought it was a lot worse and I understand that if you just digest social media, just digest the headlines, this feels deadlier than it is right, so first, in the name of your teenage dad, get out of my room and stop telling me the news, but second.

The percentage of people is a lot when you talk about those people who die, think about it this way, the two percent of the people who disappeared were literally the premise of leftovers, you know the show whose pilots didn't consist of Justin Theroux turning out well , That's how it went. tough, but to be honest it could have been worse and then the program ended, the fact is that a 2% mortality rate, if true, would be about 20 times higher than the seasonal flu and although the good news is that about 80% of those who contract this virus have done so. mild symptoms, the bad news is that it means they are more likely to spread it without even realizing that is one of the things that makes it so dangerous and why, although its mortality rate is much lower than that of SARS or MERS, this virus has already killed.

In fact, one expert has predicted that between 40% and 70% of the world's population will be infected over the next year, which is incredibly disturbing because there is only one infectious disease that two-thirds of the world should be contracting right now and that's Adam Driver, fever, destroy my knees, redwood, rip off my toes, big unwashed buffalo, so if the stock market is tanking and people are considering gargling with bleach, we thought

tonight

might be a good time to talk about the corona virus, how we got to this point. what is currently being done and how this virus has exposed government vulnerabilities as it has spread around the world and let's start with how this all started.

The first documented cases emerged late

last

year in Wuhan, China, and initially the Chinese government was not only slow to respond, officials attempted to silence and punish medical professionals who tried to raise the alarm, which almost certainly helped. for the disease to spread, and when the Chinese leadership finally decided to act, it acted aggressively and locked down nearly 50 million people a month after Wuhan. Its borders are closed, its roads are empty and construction sites are abandoned. Residents had been allowed to leave their residential complexes once every seven days, but this week loudspeakers placed on street corners notified households of a change.

From now on, no one can leave. that tells you that you can't leave your house feels pretty dystopian to be honest i don't much prefer our dystopia we are a talking box listens to all our conversations and then tells jeff bezos when i'll need underwear next it's a very convenient way of giving up everything, people locked down in China find themselves in a very unpleasant situation, but they have been doing everything they can to try to have fun like this man who improvised a cool mask or finally found a socially acceptable reason to indulge in a very fetish Specific other citizens made makeshift protective suits out of inflatable Christmas trees and dinosaur costumes, while others stayed locked inside or limited themselves to creating their own entertainment like playing pool with chopsticks and cherry tomatoes.

Look, I have to say that this is the greatest culinary genius I have ever met. I've seen since Claire from the Bon Apetit kitchen made compost from scratch. I don't know why you do this to yourself. Claire, they sell them in stores, but despite the government's efforts to contain them, more than 2,700 people have died in China, including Dr. Read when Lee Ann, one of the first whistleblowers silenced by officials and who has since become a symbol of citizens' anger at her government's response, that's how it all started and the coronavirus has since spread to more than 60 countries that have managed it to varying degrees. of success Vietnam, for example, acted quickly and, among other things, produced this incredible public information video on how to limit its spread through proper hygiene.

Yes Yes Yes. Vietnam made a song about washing your hands to prevent coronavirus infection and it's a slap in the face, it's a real club. banger right there in fact people love that song so much it even became a tick-tock dance challenge the songs are amazing it makes all the other songs about washing look like garbage and I'm I'm talking to you here Ernie, look, I've been on top for a long time, but you got complacent, didn't you? And while other artists were out there innovating, you kept singing the same old Ducky song, you lost your hunger.

Sol, you fell asleep at the wheel and the music continued without Look, not all countries have responded so well. Japan is famous for its botched handling of the Diamond Princess cruise ship by Quarantining II more than 3,500 passengers and crew on the ship, which had disastrous results. More than 620 cases have been confirmed among passengers and crew. on the cruise raising concerns about how the virus could spread so quickly among people who should have been isolated oh I'll tell you how it spread so quickly they were on a cruise ship under the best of circumstances a cruise ship is a floating petri dish you might as well have them placed in a Chucky Cheese ball pit, the spread was so bad that seven passengers have since died, and the WHO's list of coronavirus cases by country actually had a separate line just for the diamond.

Princess, which is terrifying, although again, in cruise ship terms, it's still not the worst if your options are the Diamond Princess or the Carnival Cruise, where the bathrooms were so full they were falling off the walls. I'm booking the SS coronavirus ten times out of ten ten times out of ten and in some countries the response was handled so poorly that you could see the spread of the virus live on television in Iran, a government spokesperson was trying to assure people that the virus was under control while the Deputy Minister of Health, who was next to him, began to mop away the fever, the sweat like an Alabama preacher, who was later confirmed that this guy had the corona virus, although not before returning to appear on TV to explain his symptoms while coughing all over the studio and if that wasn't bad enough it turns out the Iranian people now trust their government so little that they think he was setting this whole thing up they say they lied they have Corona but they wanted this is propaganda they don't have it no they don't say he is lying and in three days he is I'm going to go out and say that I owe you look, I'm recovered, it's not serious, don't worry, the level of distrust towards Iranian politicians is so deep that they wouldn't believe anything that comes out of his mouth, right?

The Iranians won't believe. anything that comes out of your politicians' mouths, even if that's the real coronavirus, and that's a big problem because it will be difficult for any government to give effective advice if people don't believe in it, you know, trusting institutions is critical when it comes to containing a possible pandemic and unfortunately that brings us to the United States response to this virus and specifically this type because the messages from the White House have been all over the place this week, in fact, on Tuesday, the same day that the CDC said the spread of the corona virus in the United States was not a question of whether one of Trump's top advisers was on TV saying this, we've contained this, we've contained this.

I won't say airtight, so close to airtight. and it's because airtight versus near-airtight is a pretty crucial distinction, it's the difference between having a functioning submarine and a cold metal tube to die in and the dissonance there speaks to a real problem because in a global health emergency what You want to hear from the many trained experts who were fortunate enough to work in our nation's public health agencies, you don't want to hear from politicians, and yet on Wednesday the president made a surprise announcement. President Trump, along with his top health advisers, sought to calm a nervous nation by naming a new key person to lead the administration's response.

I'm going to put our Vice Mic Benson in charge that he has some talent for this because he was under the impression that the only thing Pence has any talent for was avoiding women off leash. sucking up to people who represent the antithesis of everything he claims to believe in and failing miserably to give himself a haircut known as Judi Dench, putting aside his pencils, to put it mildly, an extremely mixed record as governor of Indiana in handling of public health issues, even the announcement that he would lead the task force was a debacle because Alex the Czar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, was already supposed to chair that task force and Trump didn't seem interested in clarifying their roles or, indeed, in being there at all.

I'm still chair of the task force so I'm not in the program at all, when this was mentioned to me I said I was delighted to be able to have the vice president helping out in this way. Delighted, yes, he just left, this was a press. conference meant to calm the nation and with the most basic question of who would run things seemingly up in the air, he just did it. I know we used to only see businessman Trump, but it's nice to occasionally glimpse the absent father in For him too it's more than just a lack of leadership, it's also worrying that Trump's main focus when talking about this virus seems to be to downplay importance to any potentially bad news.

He started tweeting this week that the corona virus is very much under control, but there was no way around it. be sure of that, since, frankly, you should have known that many of the test kits the CDC initially developed to detect the virus apparently did not work as expected, meaning that as recently as Wednesday, the CDC and only six state labs were testing for the virus, fortunately that has since been fixed and we are presumably going to find more cases now, but Trump seemed too reluctant to admit that will happen. You can see that dynamic in real time as the officials at the press conference say one thing and try to massage it.

Otherwise, we can expect to see more cases in the United States. We expect more cases when you have 15 people and the 15 in a couple of days will be reduced to almost zero. It's a pretty good job we've done. fact yes but it won't be close to zero, your experts just said cases will increase and you said they will decrease? You can't just ignore thereal numbers and invent the ones you like best. This is the problem with a president whose entire life has been a series of low bets, lies, a man who lied about, among other things, his net worth, his trainee qualifications, the number of failures in Trump Tower, the size of victory in the electoral college, attendance at their rallies, whether it rained or not. his inauguration and even whether or not he was invited to this very boring, low-rated show that he doesn't like about something that literally means nothing and lying about the spread of a deadly disease and that's not the only time Trump has sold false hope, if he seems to be talking about this virus lately, you may have seen him repeatedly assure everyone that there was a chance that the end of the outbreak is just around the corner.

There's a theory that in April, when it's hot historically, that's been able to kill the virus, you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat as the heat comes in, you know, in April it supposedly dies with warmer weather and that's a beautiful day to look forward to, it's the first one not to hit the calendar. beautiful dates, I don't know, I don't know how he did it, but I'm pretty sure Trump just sexually harassed the month of April the second again, the truth is much more complicated there because yes, some viruses recede. warmer months and Yes, the worst flu pandemic in history in 1918 lasted through the summer, but it's worth knowing that when fall came, the virus came back much more serious and ended up killing nearly 200,000 Americans in October alone.

This is a bad time to have a president who can't speak clearly because there is already enough bad information floating around and the president's favorite channel has been a particular offender here. Fox hosts and guests have repeatedly amplified false claims of the idea that the virus was created in a Chinese bioweapons lab – baseless Internet. Rumor that it came from Chinese people eating bat soup, which one commenter used as an excuse to say what he really feels. Bat soup may be delicious to some people, but unfortunately bats are the largest reservoir of viruses in the world. What are we going to do with China? what are we going to do with a totalitarian dictatorship in which it is okay to sell live virus-infected bats in open-air markets and then make business and tourist trips between that country and the civilized world, which escalated rapidly.

It really gets away from the vaguely dog-whistling. We will do with China to the end: it is not part of the civilized world at lightning speed. Truly that man is the Usain Bolt of racism. A comparison I'm sure he absolutely hates. It gets worse because some people are even clearly trying to profit. out of the current panic like televangelist Jim Baker, who has a cure he would love to sell. Would you recommend a doctor? People should have money in their home. You never want to be without money. You are saying that Silver's solution will be effective, well let's say it has not been tested on this strain of corona virus, but it has been tested on another strange corona virus and he has been able to eliminate it in 12 hours, yes, it totally overpowers it, it kills it and disable it, okay? that's ridiculous silver doesn't kill coronavirus silver kills werewolves which means you have to first get a microscopic wealth to bite your coronavirus and where am I going to find one of those in this economy?

Well, that's right on our online store for just $49.99. send you John Oliver's premium working solution. He contains millions of microscopic worlds ready to spread his bestial curse to his coronavirus and then he can use the silver solution which is based on exactly the same amount of science. The truth is that the truth is while clinical while clinical. Trials are underway, there is no treatment for the corona virus at the moment and a vaccine could take between a year and 18 months to develop and at this point you may be wondering how scared you should be and the answer is probably to look around a bit.

I don't want to be alarmist here, but I also don't want to minimize what we could face. It's really about trying to strike a sensible balance. Basically, if you're drinking bleach to protect yourself right now, you should probably calm down. if you say lick subway poles because you're sure nothing can hurt you, maybe don't do it and you want to stay somewhere between those extremes, don't be complacent and don't be an idiot and look at it as a practical matter until the experts advise that this threat is over, first we should all follow some basic advice, don't be racist, it's just good general advice for now, so don't hold masks, what I understand you may want to do, is that you are potentially taking those masks off . from the people who really need them, the healthcare providers and those who are sick.

Please check the CDC website for future updates because they may have additional guidance as this develops and finally, and this is more important than it sounds, wash your hands regularly for at least 20 seconds and know the last lesson is boring and easy to forget, but luckily we now know there is a way to ensure it never leaves you in your head.