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Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates was heard on CNN Global Town Hall on Thursday (March 26) as saying six to ten weeks of lockdowns across the country is now necessary to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. 

“It is super painful to drive this very high degree of social isolation I call shutdown. The middle course really isn’t there because it’s hard to say, oh, go back to the theater for a week maybe or maybe not you’ll be infected or infecting people,” Gates said.

“Until we get the certainty we’ve hit these low numbers, you know, I doubt even if you told people that they should be buying new houses and cars and hanging out in restaurants, I doubt they’re going to want to do that. People want to protect older people,” he said. 

“This is kind of the nightmare scenario,” he said as to what is currently unfolding across the US. As of Saturday morning, there are 105,000 confirmed virus cases and 1,711 deaths. The epicenter of the breakout is New York, with more than 46,000 cases. 

Gates said the response in the US was slow and chaotic. He said if the government would have “behaved a little bit like the countries that have done the best on this one” – then maybe the spread could have been suppressed. 

He warned that the “peak” in cases and deaths is not close, indicating that further lockdowns will be needed to flatten the curve and slowdown infections to avoid hospital systems from being overwhelmed. 

“This is kind of the nightmare scenario,” says Bill Gates, who warned about the dangers of a pandemic in 2015. “[I] talked about how we needed to invest in new platforms so that we could quickly make diagnostics, make drugs and make vaccines to stop an epidemic.” #CNNTownHall pic.twitter.com/xPW182yCSR

— CNN (@CNN) March 27, 2020

“Basically, the whole country needs to do what was done in the part of China where they had these infections,” he added.

And to Gate’s point about where the US is in the virus cycle. We noted last week that the US is in the acceleration period. 

Gates has been warning about a pandemic for years. Back in 2015, he told the audience at a TED Talk that his greatest fear wasn’t World War III, but rather a fast-spreading virus that would consume the world. 

Gates was a part of The Event 201 scenario in October (months before Covid-19) that modeled an outbreak of coronavirus across the world, killing 65 million people by month 18. 

His foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been pouring millions of dollars into developing and distributing at-home testing kits for COVID-19.

So what do we expect after the nationwide lockdown? Well, Harvard researchers believe “intermittent lockdowns” and “widespread surveillance” of Americans could become the norm through 2022. 

Canada has over 6,243 confirmed coronvirus cases, including 64 deaths as of Sunday, which compared to the United States – at over 135,000 cases and rapidly growing – appears to be doing a much better job at fighting the spread. 

Though nationwide transport systems, including flights and trains, are still active, Canada announced Sunday that starting Monday any passengers showing symptoms related to Covid-19 will be banned from domestic flights and trains. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the new nation-wide rule from his residence in a press briefing, which reads “people showing any signs whatsoever of Covid-19 will be denied boarding on all domestic flights and intercity passenger trains,” according to Politico.

Trudea said that measures to contain the disease are “beginning to work” but still said individuals “need to continue to do what is necessary to prevent the spread of Covid-19.”

The new measures will likely involve more invasive temperature scans and symptom monitoring checks by authorities at transport hubs. But the language of the new order puts the onus on the train and airline companies to monitor and enforce the mandate among their passengers.

Thus far Canadians who are returning from travel abroad are under legal mandate to self-isolate for 14 days upon return.

Trudea’s own wife previously tested positive for coronavirus after a trip to London, and has since been in self-isolation for two weeks, but recently announced her doctor said she was in the clear.

Neither Trudea nor their children have shown symptoms, but over the weekend he indicated he may continue to work in a state of isolation to “set an example” for Canadians. 

Currently Quebec is maintaining police checkpoints around the province’s major cities in order to monitor unnecessary travel, and to tell outside travelers returning to Quebec to self-quarantine upon return to their homes. Quebec has further banned gatherings of 5 people or more in order to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Authored by The Zman,

Has the world gone mad? It certainly seems that way to some of us. Even the most cynical never imagined the government shutting down the country for fear of a virus, but it has suddenly become the new normal. The cynical, if they thought of it at all, would have thought the opposite. Instead of a great lock down, the response would have been for the beautiful people to insulate themselves from harm, while abandoning the rest of us to the plague. Instead, we have all gone mad together.

Not everyone has got the fever, that is this panic fever, not the one caused by the Chinese coronavirus.

Our world is now firmly divided into two camps.

• There are those fully invested in the great panic over the virus and

• there are those who look at the other camp, gobsmacked by what appears to be a general madness.

Those in panic look at the rest of us the same way preppers look at normal people. They just assume the gods will strike us down for doubting the virus.

Of course, the people in the skeptic camp could be the ones suffering from some form of madness that prevents them from seeing the threat. The trouble is, the great plague is not exactly lighting up the scoreboard. America has tested over 600,000 people suspected of having the virus. Over 500,000 tested negative. Of the positives, 12,000 needed hospital care. In a country of over 320 million people with 200,000 empty hospital beds at any one time, that’s not much of a crisis.

Yet, despite the numbers, formerly sober-minded people continue to carry on as if there are bodies in the streets. Steve Sailer, a man not known for excitability, is calling this virus a great adversary of the human race. Greg Cochran has completely lost his marbles over this thing. Geneticist and HBD enthusiast Razib Khan is in hiding, convinced the end times are upon us. In fact, the whole HBD community is a click away from fleeing to Antarctica to wait out the end of civilization.

Of course, part of the panic, a symptom of that particular virus, is a set of abracadabra phrases that have become so common they seem like something from a secret society, understood only by the initiates. The duller sorts chant about “exponential growth” while others talk about “the hospitals being overwhelmed.” That’s why we have to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread.” These incantations are to chase away doubt and reinforce the belief that people are dying in the streets.

The dying in the streets bit is not much of an exaggeration. A popular bit of folklore now among the panicked is some version of the anonymous ER doctor or nurse relaying how they are overwhelmed and letting people die in the hallways. This urban legend turned up in China, Washington, Italy, New York and now New Orleans. Formerly sensible people now pass these whoppers around on-line, never bothering to think that maybe they are being fed a just-so story by people seeking attention.

One emerging aspect to the madness is the moral dimension. The Human Biodiversity (HBD) crowd seems to have been hardest hit. They spend a lot of time contemplating nature and their fellow man’s refusal to respect it. Part of what is driving them now is a sense that nature is going to finally exact some revenge. In other words, this panic is part of a strange revenge fantasy, where they are finally vindicated by biological reality. This sudden sense of moral purpose has made them immune to reason.

Another aspect to this general panic, unrelated to the virus itself, is a different type of revenge fantasy. Many people are cheering the collapse of the economy and civil life on the mistaken belief that what emerges from the rubble will have them at the top of the social hierarchy. This is a phenomenon shared across the political spectrum. It seems to be most popular with young people unhappy with the status quo and far too caught up in purge fantasies to be reached with facts and reason.

Probably the most salient aspect to this panic is the role of women. As has been noted too many times to count, the West is now a gynocracy. It is not a matriarchy, as women have stopped bearing children and stopped caring about children. Look around and you see childless women in positions of authority all over the West. In fact, these are women who reached their status by rejecting every aspect of womanhood. The West is now a world run by middle-aged childless women.

Anyone who has been around women in a crisis has observed a strange phenomenon among childless adult females. Some switch gets flipped in a crisis where their protective instincts get misdirected at the adults in the room. This part of their nature was never allowed to mature in the raising of children, so it comes bursting forth in an incoherent desire to help when their help is not needed. They become like mother ducks loudly herding the brood to safety.

For a society run by such women, every crisis is met with demands that everyone shelter in place. Notice how over the last few decades that public officials no longer call for volunteers or tell people to pitch in and work together. Such independent action violates the frightened female’s sense of duty to her brood. Instead, mild weather events now close the schools and force people to work from home. This virus scare is every middle-aged women’s Hunger Games moment.

Mass panics are a known phenomenon.

The general panic that took place in France between July 22 and August 6 1789 is known as The Great Fear. It was a period of rural unrest, driven by both a grain shortage and rumors of an aristocrats’ “famine plot” to starve the peasants. The exact reason for this panic is in dispute. Ergotism is a favorite reason for those with a certain sense of humor, but most historians consider it one of the primary causes of the French Revolution.

At some point, the bloom comes off this lock-down rose once people start to feel the real cost of listening to madmen. People will remember that the same folks who swore Boris and Natasha had used their mind control devise to install Trump in the White House are the many of the same people peddling this panic. Necessity will force a lot of people to stop going along with what they have suspected from the start is nothing more than a mass panic. Soon, this all comes to an end.

Like the Great Fear, the Great Madness will leave a mark, or at least it should leave a mark on our society. You never can be sure about these things, as the West seems to be unusually immune to learning from these events. Two centuries ago The Great Fear meant the end of the feudal order and eventually a revolution. It was not the sole cause of the revolution, maybe not the main cause. It was certainly an example of how the old order was no longer able to maintain order.

It is too soon to know what this panic means for us. Perhaps it further undermines the legitimacy of the system and the people that profit from it. Perhaps it sets off social changes that slowly transform our society in ways we have yet to imagine. Maybe the fever breaks and this event, like the Russian hoax, gets forgotten.

Given what most likely awaits on the other side of the lock-down, it is hard to imagine this great madness being forgotten. There’s always a price to be paid for following madmen.

Last Friday, around the time of the quad-witching collapse which sent the S&P to levels not seen since Trump’s inauguration, amid the flurry of headlines bombarding shell-shocked traders, was one that was particularly ominous if bizarrely incomplete. Shortly after the close, Bloomberg blasted the following headline:

• CFTC PROVIDING RELIEF TO LARGE U.S. BANK ACTIVE IN OIL, GAS

There was little additional information to go with the report, aside from the CFTC saying it would temporarily exempt a U.S. bank from a requirement to register as a “Major Swap Participant” even though its growing energy swaps exposure would technically require it to do so by the end of the next quarter, and since the bank was not named, traders’ attention quickly shifted to whatever the next crisis du jour, or rather du minute was.

However, late last week, Reuters reported citing two sources, that the bank in question was Virginia-based Capital One, best known for questionable retail lending and cheesy credit card commercials starting Samuel L Jackson.

So what exactly happened? According to a spokesman for the CFTC, the commodities regulator issued a waiver to protect the bank and its energy clients from “undue disruption,” given the unprecedented market conditions over the past month amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“We have actively encouraged all market participants to identify regulatory relief or other assistance that may be needed to help support robust, orderly and liquid markets in the face of this pandemic,” the spokesman said, implicitly admitting that the CFTC intervention amounted to what was an effective bailout of the bank.

At the core of the issue were plunging oil prices, which ended up having a margin call effect on the bank’s swaps exposure; and since Capital One’s waiver lasts until Sept. 30, if energy prices remain low or the bank’s exposure remains above the threshold, it will register as a swap participant or make business adjustments, the CFTC said on Friday.

And here is why anyone who currently has a deposit account at CapitalOne may consider quietly moving the money elsewhere: according to Reuters, the CFTC designation entails a number of complex and costly reporting and compliance obligations, which the CFTC spokesman said could hurt the institution’s ability to keep lending.

In short, CapitalOne made a terrible trade, betting via derivatives that oil would not plunge to where it is now – at 17 year lows – and only CFTC intervention prevented a margin call of unknown magnitude from being sent to Capital One’s corner office. Which is surprising considering that the bank is a relatively small player in the energy lending and financing business, with energy loans accounting for just 1.4% of its total loan book, according to its filings.

As part of that business, Capital One enters into commodity swaps with its commercial oil and gas clients to help them mitigate the risk of energy price swings and the related borrowing risks. Typically, those trades do not bring Capital One’s swaps exposure anywhere close to the CFTC’s registration threshold, according to the CFTC’s Friday notice.

But the 50% plunge in crude oil prices caused by the coronavirus and a flood of supply by top producers has seen its exposure on those swaps balloon, putting it on course to hit the threshold by the end of this month, the CFTC said.

As Reuters details, the threshold kicks in if a bank has $1 billion in daily average aggregate commodity swap exposure that is not secured by collateral, such as cash margin. Which, it appears, was the case with CapitalOne.

Following the 2007-2009 financial crisis during which several major institutions were toppled by their derivatives exposure, Congress created a slew of swap trading laws to reduce systemic risk and increase the visibility of the market. However, the ad hoc decision to grant a waiver in this case has sparked worries that regulators are going too easy on banks in a bid to prop up lending, exposing them to more risk down the road if energy prices do not rebound.

In effect, the CFTC allowed CapitalOne to incur even greater ongoing losses, while buying it a quarter’s worth of time, in hopes that oil rebounds. But what happens if instead of rebounding, oil keeps grinding lower and, as we warned earlier today, actually goes negative as oil storage space runs out? The cumulative exposure facing CapitalOne would be many billions, and could potentially render the bank insolvent.

That said, COF is not the only one: across the board, regulators have scrambled to grant regulatory relief, worried banks will pull back from lending and exacerbate corporate liquidity stress.

“The priority of the CFTC is not to prop up an ailing sector. It’s to ensure that the market is protected from risks,” said Tyson Slocum, a director at government watchdog group Public Citizen and a member of the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee.

But then, in an surprising and sobering admission that the CFTC did in fact participate in a quiet bailout of CapitalOne – because had the bank announced it was facing a $1+ billion margin call one can imagine what its depositors would do – Slocum added he was worried the agency would give exemptions to other banks caught flatfooted by the market turmoil.

“I’ve got concerns with over-leveraged banks in the oil and gas sector. I don’t want this to spread across the financial sector.”

Dear Tyson: by letting CapitalOne get away with it, you have once again propagated moral hazard and guaranteed that this will spread across the financial sector, as bank after bank comes begging for a similar stealthy bailout, all the while doing nothing but praying that oil miraculously rebounds in the next three months. But what if it doesn’t, and who will tell CapitalOne’s depositors that they are now sitting on a ticking time bomb? This guy?

One month ago we reported that “China Faces Financial Armageddon With 85% Of Businesses Set To Run Out Of Cash In 3 Months“, in which we explained that while China’s giant state-owned SOEs will likely have enough of a liquidity lifeblood to last them for 2-3 quarters, it is the country’s small businesses that are facing a head on collision with an iceberg, because according to the Nikkei, over 85% of small businesses – which employ 80% of China’s population – expect to run out of cash within three months, and a third expect the cash to be all gone within a month.

To be sure, the stakes could not be higher: These smaller employers account for 99.8% of registered companies in China and employ 79.4% of workers. They contribute more than 60% of gross domestic product and, for the government, more than 50% of tax revenue. In short: they are the beating heart of China’s economy.

In short, should this default tsunami start, not only will China’s economy collapse, but China’s $40 trillion financial system will disintegrate, as it is suddenly flooded with trillions in bad loans.

* * *

Well, it is now one month later, and as we feared, and as the SCMP reports, “a global consumer default wave is just getting started in China” as overdue credit-card debt in China has soared by about 50% in February, while researchers at the Peterson Institute warn (as we did in February) that what is happening now in China is “a preview of what we should expect throughout the world.”

Take the case of Zhang Chunzi – like millions of people around the world, she borrowed money she thought she would be able to repay before the coronavirus changed everything. Now laid off from her job at an apparel exporter in Hangzhou, the prosperous capital of east China’s Zhejiang province, the 23-year-old is missing payments on 12,000 yuan (US$1,700) of debt on her credit card and an online lending platform operated by Ant Financial.

“I’m late on all the bills and there’s no way I can pay my debt in full,” Zhang said.

Zhang’s story is playing out in similar ways across China (and soon, across the world), where the virus outbreak has been taking lives and ravaging the economy for more than three months. As Covid-19 works its way through the rest of Asia, Europe and the Americas – forcing countries into lockdown, driving up unemployment and pummeling small-business owners – analysts say it is only a matter of time before stretched households globally start to default on their loans.

To be sure, the early indicators from China are not pretty. Overdue credit-card debt in February rose by about 50% from a year earlier, according to executives at two banks who asked not to be named. Qudian, a Beijing-based online lender, said its delinquency ratio jumped to a staggering 20% in February, from 13% at the end of last year.

For some the shock from the economic slowdown is so big, they have had no choice but to hit pause. China Merchants Bank, one of the country’s biggest providers of consumer credit, said this month that it “pressed the pause button” on its credit-card business after a significant increase in past-due loans as an estimated 8 million people in China lost their jobs in February.

“These issues in China are a preview of what we should expect throughout the world,” said Peterson Institute for International Economics research fellow Martin Chorzempa.

And while the extent of the squeeze on consumers and their lenders will depend on the effectiveness of government efforts to contain the virus and shore up economies, “the scope for pain is immense” the SCMP warns ominously.

Needless to say, what is coming across the globe is unprecedented: household debt-to-GDP ratios in countries including France, Switzerland, New Zealand and Nigeria have never been higher, according to a January report from the Institute of International Finance.  In Australia, which has the highest household debt levels among G20 nations, the country’s largest lender said on Thursday that its financial assistance lines were receiving eight times the normal call volume.

A similar surge in queries has flooded lenders in the United States, where credit-card balances rose to an unprecedented US$930 billion last year and almost 3.3 million people filed for jobless benefits during the week ended March 21 – quadruple the previous record.

However, not even the US has seen as big a jump in consumer borrowing in recent years than China, where household debt including mortgages soared to a record 55 trillion yuan (almost $8 trillion) last year. That figure has nearly doubled since 2015, thanks to a housing boom and the rise of online lenders like Ant Financial. While the firm’s risk models rely on reams of payments data, they have yet to be tested by a major economic downturn. Many consumers who take out these short-term, high-interest loans – typically funded by banks through Ant’s Alipay smartphone app – have minimal income and virtually no credit history.

“Since 2015, banks have kept lowering their criteria to compete,” said Zhang Shuaishuai, an analyst at China International Capital. “The virus outbreak accelerated their exposure to risks. It will only get worse if unemployment climbs further.”

Meanwhile, consumer default rates at some banks have already increased to as high as 4%, from about 1% before the outbreak, according to Zhao Jian, head of Atlantis Financial Research, who cited a survey of lenders. An executive at a major Chinese bank said his firm was taking steps to tighten credit card loans or even drop some clients after seeing a rapid increase in overdue payments.

With corporate delinquencies rising as well, banks could face a 5.2 trillion yuan surge in total non-performing loans and an unprecedented 39 per cent slump in profits this year, according to a worst-case scenario outlined by UBS. As reported last week, China’s industrial profits just crashed the most on record, plunging -38.3% Y/Y, and far worse from the -6.3%Y/Y decline in December.

Some hope that massive government stimulus will help ease the blow. Most countries have announced plans for economic support measures in recent months, including a US$2 trillion package in the US that will provide direct payments to lower- and middle-income Americans. Some of the biggest US lenders have pledged to offer grace periods for mortgage borrowers affected by the crisis.

In China, authorities have flooded the financial system with liquidity and encouraged banks to step up their lending to small businesses that employ about 80 per cent of the nation’s workforce. While most banks have yet to offer debt relief to consumers outside those living in cities like Wuhan that were hit especially hard by the virus, UBS predicts China’s government will do more if needed to help people find jobs and pay their bills. Bloomberg Economics estimates that about 85 per cent of the economy was back online in the week ending March 20, excluding the original virus epicentre in Hubei province, although we believe those numbers are strongly gamed to represent to the world that the economy has rebounded when the reality is a mirror image.

That said, as UBS analyst May Yan correctly notes, “a large scale increase in unemployment, and resulting high delinquencies on retail loans won’t be tolerated by authorities as social stability is their bottom line,” although it is unclear what it can do to preserve stability if tens of millions lost their jobs.

Of course, stimulus is unlikely to tide over everyone, particularly in places like China where household finances are stretched like never before. The country’s consumer debt-to-income ratio surged to 92% at the end of 2018, from 30% a decade ago, surpassing that of Germany and closing in on levels in the US and Japan, according to IIF.

The risk is that a prolonged economic slump and weak real estate market will force more people to renege on their loans.
That moment has already arrived for Yin Weijun, a 27-year-old who recently lost his job as a hotel chef in Wenzhou, in Zhejiang.

“I’m like a refugee from debt,” he said. “I had never missed a payment in my life, but the virus left me with no choice. Even if they give me an extra one or two months, I still can’t pay.”

 

Authored by Prasanthi Ramakrishnan, Siddhartha Sanghi, David Schwartzman and Hayley Wabiszewski

The United States death toll from the novel coronavirus has steadily increased in the last few days, with over 2, 200 COVID- 19 deaths, and more than half of the deaths in the last three days alone. The death toll is expected to only get worse in the coming weeks as cases increase and the capacity of the health care system is stretched. However, one silver lining might be that the death toll could be lower than anticipated due to individuals changing their behavior during the coronavirus pandemic. We use CDC data (detailed below) to analyze weekly US deaths over the last five years (as accessed on March 28 , 2020 ). Figure 1 shows weekly deaths for all ages. For the year 2020, we have data through week 10, or through the week of March 7, 2020.

There is a clear strong downward sloping trend in the number of deaths at all ages for the current year as compared to the previous 5 years. Moreover, the current year appears to be a break in trend from the previous 5 years. Comparing the difference of the previous 5 -year average with 2020 deaths through March 7 and we find that for week 10, there were close to 9000 fewer deaths – this is nearly a 20 percent decrease in the number of the deaths! The decrease is most evident after week 7 (week ending February 15 , 2020 ).

Weekly deaths in the US down by 7,000 – 10,000 for the week ending March 7 2020! Silver lining with people changing their behaviors during COVID-19? Raw weekly death numbers taken from @CDCgov: pic.twitter.com/Y7tzG5TSTU

— Siddhartha Sanghi (@SidSanghi) March 29, 2020

Since coronavirus concerns have increased as US spread has become more evident, the decline in deaths in recent weeks suggests that the fall in deaths might be an ‘un-intended’ consequence of the COVID- 19 due to people adjusting their behavior to avoid getting and spreading COVID- 19. Comparing the deviation with the COVID- 19 confirmed cases in the US, we see a high negative correlation of 0.9271. One suggestive mechanism is that as people stay at home more, crime and accidental deaths may decrease. As the CDC continues to update the data, the data for the week ending March 14 and March 21, 2020 will be useful in understanding this behavioral aspect – however, after that, the behavioral effect may be harder to disentangle, as deaths due to coronavirus will become more prominent in the aggregate data.  

It correlates well at the national number of COVID-19 cases: pic.twitter.com/8nlOOFreU8

— Siddhartha Sanghi (@SidSanghi) March 29, 2020

The mechanism we propose should primarily affect the younger population, as the younger population tends to be more mobile, and the older population is more likely to die of other natural causes. This is exactly what we observe when breaking up these trends by age group. We see that the deviation from the trend is the starkest for children ( < 18 years) - there is a decline of 297 deaths, which is a 76 percent decrease! At the point through which data is available, most schools had not yet shut down and even so, we observe this large decrease. We observe a similar but smaller decline of 27 percent in the age group of 18 to 65. This is suggestive of the possibility that as coronavirus mitigation measures become more widespread, non-coronavirus deaths may decrease further.

Particularly stark for Ages 0-18 where the data suggests 300 fewer deaths compared to previous years! pic.twitter.com/B0H4uWPI0F

— Siddhartha Sanghi (@SidSanghi) March 29, 2020

Data Sources

We take total weekly deaths in the US by three age groups from CDC FluView data 1 . The data provides weekly total national deaths and the deaths caused by Pneumonia and Influenza. We take the national data from 2015 week 1 to 2020 week 10 , i.e. the week ending March 7 2020 , since week 11 numbers were not complete at the time of our access. National deaths can be sliced into three age groups: 0 – 18 , 18 – 65 and 65 +. The dataset also has state-level deaths, but state data was not available for week 8 – 10 , so we were unable to use that for our analysis 2 . We plan to include state-level deaths and data for later weeks as this becomes available. We also use total number of COVID- 19 cases reported by Johns Hopkins for our analysis.

Ongoing Work

We will be updating the figures as more data becomes available. In ongoing work, we are exploring ways to de-compose reductions in mortality attributed to lower accident and crime rates as well as other ‘un-intended consequences’.  

Since the very beginning of the Chinese coronavirus epidemic, the World Health Organization has been shilling for Beijing.

From WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus showering the CCP with praise for their early handling of the disease (by hunting down doctors who told the truth, and outright lying about its transmissibility), the WHO has proven themselves to be loyal lapdogs to the communist regime – spreading uncorrected Chinese propaganda (which Twitter is just fine with). Read more about WHO and China here.

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020

To that end, a journalist with Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK was rudely hung-up on after asking WHO official Bruce Aylward – who led a mission to Wuhan – if the organization might give Taiwan a membership.

First, Aylward said he couldn’t hear the question – asking the reporter to move on. Then, he disconnected the line after she said she wanted to hear more about Taiwan.

When they were reconnected, Aylward dodged another direct question about Taiwan – taking China’s stance with his answer while complimenting Beijing and withing Hong Kong good luck.

In response, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu highlighted Aylward’s shilling in a now-viral tweet.

Wow, can’t even utter “Taiwan” in the WHO? You should set politics aside in dealing with a pandemic. FYI @WHO, 450+ news reports from 40+ countries so far positively covered #Taiwan’s handling of #COVID19. These reports do not mistake us as part of China & #TaiwanCanHelp. JW https://t.co/KbupbUb7NG

— 外交部 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ROC (Taiwan) 🇹🇼 (@MOFA_Taiwan) March 29, 2020

After millions of views, the WHO issued a statement clarifying that WHO membership is up to WHO states, not the staff – and that Taiwan has kept COVID-19 numbers relatively low, and should be learned from.

“WHO is taking lessons learned from all areas, including Taiwanese health authorities, to share best practices globally,” said WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic in an email to Bloomberg.

The WHO has a point of contact with Taiwan to receive information, and the country is involved in epidemiology training. Two Taiwanese public health experts took part in a research forum the WHO organized in February.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeatedly backed China, even as Beijing was criticized by other countries and organizations for being slow to respond initially to the outbreak there, and for resisting cooperation with international disease-trackers. After weeks of wrangling, Aylward’s WHO response team gained access to Hubei province, where the virus first erupted. –Bloomberg

In February, Aylward said “China was the first line of defense to prevent the international spread of this virus, because they feared and felt the responsibility to protect the world from this virus,” adding “Other countries should think about whether they apply something, not necessarily through lockdowns, but the same rigorous approach.”

Could these people be any more transparent?

WHO flat-out lying. Again. https://t.co/SIYYvtkoTW

— PEG (@pegobry) March 26, 2020