Saturday, March 14, 2020

Distractions

On 5 January 2020, the World Health Organisation issued a detailed statement about a pneumonia of unknown cause that was occurring in Wuhan, and of which the WHO local office had been informed a few days earlier (31 December 2019). This was a critical stage in what would become Covid-19. But the world news at the time was consumed with the US - Iran tensions, with the drone strike against Qassim Soleimani on 3 January, and the Iranian retaliation, during which they shot down the Ukrainian airliner, on 8 January. Not by coincidence, the USA and Iran are two countries that find themselves scrambling to get on top of situations that others had noticed a while ago.

And now the Iranian militias in Iraq are it again. From that perspective it might be an advantage if Trump uses the stock market as opposed to an Iran feud as an indicator of his success. 

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