Latin America Hits 7 Million Cases

Latin America finds itself mired in a desperate situation insofar as Covid-19 is concerned. 

The virulent pathogen is stalking and hurting many countries – and yesterday, it breached the 7-million mark. Its caseload and fatality numbers represent 28.5% and 32.2% of the world total respectively. 

You may be interested to know that among the 12 worst-hit countries in Latin America, they combine to account for 98% and 99% of the region’s total confirmed cases and deaths. And 8 of those countries are among thirty nations from around the world yielding 100,000 cases or more. 

In Malaysia, the residents of Slim, a small, rural, Malay-majority constituency in Perak ensured that BN (actually UMNO) retained 13,060 votes to win the by-election today. It's a 10,945-vote majority.

Mahathir Mohamad’s party, Pejuang which made their debut lost, having secured only 2,115 votes.

Latin America Tops 5 Million Cases

Latin America broke through five million confirmed cases of Covid-19, a Reuters tally showed, underscoring the region's position as the area of the world hardest hit by the pandemic. After all, five of the countries are in the world's Top 12!

It is also noteworthy to mention that the 12 worst-affected Latin American countries account for 98% of the continent's total. 

Elsewhere, India climbed to 1.7 million cases on Saturday, and within a day, added another 100,000 to reach more than 1.8 million.

 

The US tallied 4.8 million cases on Sunday. The Philippines too made further inroads with 100,000 cases on the same day and Iraq accumulated 130,000 yesterday.

 

In fact, the Americas account for 54% of the world total.

 

Today, I received an email which confirms that my scream has just been blasted from speakers placed in Djúpivogur, East Iceland. That's super cool!

[If you don't know what I'm talking about, kindly refer to my blog post “S-C-R-E-A-M” published July 27, 2020. I watched a recording of it at https://lookslikeyouneediceland.com/?share=71f9270d-339e-466a-82de-d66975e5d398].

 

But in my particular case, my scream was heard when it went all the way to Iceland!

Already 12 Million Cases!

The spread of coronavirus in some countries is super fast. It took just three days for it to make another jump from 11.5 million cases on Sunday to 12 million yesterday. 

Already, Latin America has seen 3 million infections on Tuesday. In fact, worldwide, four of the countries are well-entrenched in the Top 12 for Most Number of Coronavirus Cases: Brazil at No. 2, Peru at No. 5, Chile at No. 6 and Mexico at No. 9. And when combined, they contributed a weighty 84.3% of the Latin America total. Or 21.3% of the world total!

And Russia and Bangladesh reached new peaks with 700,000 and 170,000 cases respectively on Wednesday:

There was an EPL game yesterday and record-chasing Liverpool moved another step closer to the 100-point Premier League landmark with a comfortable 3-1 win against Brighton. 

The champions stole a march on their opponents with two goals inside the opening eight minutes as Mohamed Salah and Jordan Henderson capped clinical counter attacks with simple strikes (6, 8). 

The Seagulls pulled a goal back in the forty-fifth minute – but Salah (76) scored again after the break heading in a corner from Andy Robertson at the near post to put the game beyond Brighton.

Y-a-y-y-y, Liverpool have now won 30 of their 34 Premier League games this season (drawn two, lost two); this is the fastest any side has ever reached 30 wins in a season in the history of the English Football League. 

The next match is against Burnley on Saturday.

Christopher Columbus and His Legacy of Genocide

The killing of George Floyd has inspired a campaign against memorials of historical figures. 

In the US, statues of Christopher Columbus have become a popular target of protesters – and which, I'm certain, drives you to ask what has an Italian explorer who made four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1400s that opened up what European colonizers dubbed “the New World” got to do with BLM?

Popular literature may have romanticized Columbus (left) as the famous adventurer who sailed under the Spanish flag and who discovered America – in truth, he never even set foot in mainland America (the US today)!

Nonetheless, he represents the original white European oppressor, a hated symbol of the colonizing forces that would follow to victimize and brutalize the indigenous and African populations. 

Make no mistake, Columbus was responsible for enslaving and systematically exterminating the native Taino population on Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

“Columbus's programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime to about three million by 1496. Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time of his departure – but his policies, however, remained, with the outcome that by 1514 the Spanish census of the island showed barely 22,000 Indians remaining alive. In 1542, only two hundred were recorded. Thereafter, they were considered extinct, as were Indians throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate population which totalled more than fifteen million at the point of first contact with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known”. [Excerpts from Ward Churchill’s “Indians are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America”, Common Courage Press, 1994]. 

And just to give you a glimpse of the inhuman acts perpetrated by the Spanish conquistadors – they included hanging Tainos en masse, roasting them on spits or burning them at the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed and so forth, all of it to instil in the natives a "proper attitude of respect" toward their Spanish "superiors". 

That is Columbus' murderous legacy of genocide.

That is why protesters take aim at Columbus statues.

On June 09, 2020, an eight-foot-tall statue of Columbus was vandalized and thrown into a lake in Richmond, Virginia.

The following day, police in Boston, Massachusetts received a report that a marble statue of the fifteenth century colonizer and genocidal maniac on the North End Waterfront had lost its head.

On the same day too, demonstrators spray painted statues of Columbus and Ponce de León, a Spanish conquistador, in Bayfront Park in Miami, Florida.

As reported by KXXV News Channel 25 on Thursday, red paint had been applied onto the hands and face of the 7-foot-tall Columbus statue in Bell Park near the Museum District in Houston, Texas. A piece of cardboard that read, “Rip the head from your oppressor” hung from its neck.

Also, on that day, in St. Paul, Minnesota, demonstrators toppled a ten-foot-tall bronze Columbus statue that stood in front of the State Capitol. 

And NBC Chicago divulged on Saturday that a Columbus statue in the Museum Campus park in Chicago, Illinois was vandalized – the letters "BLM" (Black Lives Matter) and “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) were spray painted onto its base.

Latin America: One Million Cases and 50,000 Deaths

Latin America's coronavirus death toll topped 50,000 on Saturday. If that’s not bad enough, yesterday, its confirmed cases reached 1,011,726, which is 16.2% of the global tally. 

When we take a look at the Top 7 worst-affected countries, they combine to show a 94.1% share of Latin America's total and 15.2% of the world's total.

There’s no doubt about it – it is the new epicenter (as my May 24, 2020 post had trumpeted). Four countries continue to yield high daily infection numbers: Brazil, Peru, Chile and Mexico. 

I must single out Brazil in particular because the country is supposed to have already started using chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine widely to treat Covid-19 – therefore, we should expect them to be able to rein in the disease, shouldn't we?

After all, these drugs had been proudly endorsed by two presidents, Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, no less!

Yet, the country collected over half a million cases yesterday – 514,849 to be precise and it alone contributed 50.9% of Latin America’s total.

Russia recorded 9,268 cases which raised the national tally to 405,843 and still comfortably holding onto its No. 3 position.

Meanwhile, Iran's infections had breached the 150,000 mark and it's sitting in position No. 12.

A day earlier, Oman and Kazakhstan reported more than 10,000 cases and Nigeria followed suit on Sunday.

Latin America: A New Epicenter

Many countries are loosening their lockdown measures as governments become guardedly optimistic. 

If we believe the "official" numbers, coronavirus cases appear to be generally easing, if not contracting. 

And if we examine just the Top 7 countries with the highest tally of new cases on May 23 – we can calculate that together, they constituted 65.1% of the global total:

The positive outlook as described in the first two paras does not include Latin America. 

In fact, the World Health Organization had declared it “a new epicenter” of the coronavirus pandemic on Friday. It is noteworthy to mention that four of the seven countries are from Latin America itself.

Surges in infections across much of Central and South America continue to drive the global toll higher even as hard-hit nations in Europe, along with the United States, sought to move into a cautious “recovery” phase with new cases supposedly on a downward trend.

A graphic produced by Johns Hopkins researchers shows the number of new infections around the world 

Be informed that Latin America contributes 13.0% of total cases worldwide – and this is slightly less than half of the US share of 30.9%. Moreover, the Top 7 countries – identified below – already add up to 94.1% of Latin America's total number of cases:

Methinks, the Covid-19 situation in Latin America will only get worse.

4.7 Million Cases and Counting

Global coronavirus infections have passed 4.7 million cases yesterday. 

In Latin America, it has already reached more than half a million cases – my calculations put the total at 517,178 – with the seven worst affected countries contributing 93.8% of that tally.

Mexico, which ranks No. 3 also registered 5,000 deaths.

Two days earlier, the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples' Association (APIB) has reportedly sounded the alarm about Covid-19 mauling thirty-eight indigenous communities, raising fears for populations that have a long history of being decimated by outside diseases.

The world’s second most populous country has the eleventh highest number of infections at 95,698, overtaking the country with the most number of people, and which is now ranked #13 with 82,947 coronavirus cases. 

The following day, the No. 3 country in terms of population size surpassed 1.5 million cases and 90,000 fatalities. 

Indeed, the US is miles ahead of everybody else – a feat that Donald Trump can take pride in. 

Even the next 6 most infected countries combined cannot match the US total! I don't know about you but methinks, he is doing an absolutely amazing job as President of the United States of America!

And Saudi Arabia topped 50,000 cases on Saturday, according to the country’s health ministry.

Despite the numbers, It's not all doom and gloom. Just hang in there; better times are coming, I'm sure!

The Day Venom Dispatches Spider-Man

Warning: Strictly for Venom fans only. 

One of Marvel's most enigmatic and complex characters, his origins can be traced to a race of symbiotes from the planet Klyntar. These beings merge with hosts, and the combined entity tends to have a personality based on both the symbiote and the host itself, though sometimes one side or the other tends to dominate. 

A hulking and twisted distortion of Spider-Man, Venom is the result of an alien symbiote merged with a human – a newspaper reporter named Eddie Brock – holding a bitter grudge against Peter Parker. This combination has proven nearly lethal to the wall-crawler on multiple occasions. 

Despite his hatred of Spider-Man, Venom has a twisted sense of morality, avoiding harming anyone he deems to be innocent and even performing heroic deeds. However, it is never clear how long Venom's darker impulses can be held in check. 

No matter how hard anyone tries to keep the symbiote down, Venom always manages to come back, like a plague. 

I am not a fan of Spider-Man, so this clip where Venom goes toe-to-toe with him and kills Peter Parker gets my thumbs-up! [Manic laughter in the background].

Of course, the above is fiction – but with the comic world, you never know!

Covid-19 infections are still piling up. 

Yesterday, India reported more than 70,000 confirmed cases and Chile surpassed 30,000 cases: 

And a cluster of countries all reached 10,000 cases – Denmark on Thursday, Serbia on Saturday, and both South Africa and Dominican Republic on Sunday: