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COVID-19 resurges in reopened countries; Wuhan sees first cluster in a month:
The World Health Organization on Monday called for continued vigilance as several areas that have eased lockdown restriction began to see a resurgence in COVID-19 cases—and the United States begins unbuttoning as well.
The Chinese city of Wuhan—where the pandemic began last December—saw its first cluster of cases in at least a month. The city began reopening in early April.
The cluster was just six cases: an 89-year-old symptomatic man and five asymptomatic cases. All of the infected lived in the same residential community.
[...] NPR's Emily Feng reported from Beijing that "The rise of such hard-to-detect asymptomatic cases has alarmed public health authorities in China, who have ramped up contact tracing and testing efforts."
China state media announced Tuesday that it has ordered all residents of Wuhan—roughly 11 million persons—to be tested within the next 10 days.
Likewise, the mayor of Seoul shut down bars and restaurants over the weekend—just days after South Korea had eased restrictions and allowed businesses to reopen—due to a spike of 86 new COVID-19 cases. Authorities identified a 29-year-old who visited five nightclubs and a bar while infected with the virus, sparking an outbreak of at least 54 cases, according to NPR. The uptick also led South Korean officials to delay the reopening of schools.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @05:25PM (4 children)
Counter narratives won't turn this pig into a swan. In other words, only the unions had an interest in continuing that state of affairs. No wonder it lost.
Consider your "excited" link (guardian story about the "lessons" of private healthcare):
So it wasn't very privatized at the time of that story (2012). and as I noted in another post [soylentnews.org], there still wasn't much in the way of privatization as of 2017. On your healthcare to GDP link, 7.4% (in 2000) to roughly 11% (in 2018) (about 60% of which came in a single year change from 2010 to 2011) is not soaring healthcare costs.
What makes you think it would be better otherwise? As I see it, little change actually happened from your alleged privatization. Something else is going on. I see that Sweden has had a decline [statista.com] in hospital beds since 2000, consistently since 2000. The surge in healthcare costs didn't even cause a noticeable change in that decline.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 19 2020, @08:28AM
(Score: 2) by Pav on Tuesday May 19 2020, @10:06PM (2 children)
So unless a hospital is privatised from the roof to the slab that's the only privatisation that counts? That rhetoric actually worked here for a decade or so until electorates started becoming aware that falling efficiency was not just due to funding cuts but to "stealth privatisation" ie. pathology, front end clinical services, equipment maintenance, IT etc... IBM has actually been banned from submitting tenders for any more government contracts in my state because of failing to deliver even the barest fig leaf to justify their billions of drain on the public system, with the electorate forcing action. Still, despite that the US system has half the financial efficiency and almost universally worse outcomes except for number of MRI machines (which gets hyped in your media apparently, and repeated by US free marketeers, which would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 19 2020, @10:13PM (1 child)
You haven't established that significant privatization has occurred in the first place. Meanwhile we still have that it's irrelevant to Sweden's response to COVID-19.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Tuesday May 19 2020, @10:42PM
That's why people now often talk about "single payer" instead of public healthcare... it's no longer actually publicly provided healthcare. Hint for the particularly slow : it's because much of the infrastructre has been privatised.