RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boris-and-bibi-ride-coronavirus-pandemic-popularity-11588629245?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

The Covid-19 pandemic is, among other things, a test of leadership around the world. For some—Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, for instance—the pandemic has been a major political setback. Others, such as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, have seen their popularity soar. Then there are those like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who have exploited the pandemic to expand their sweeping powers.

Prime Ministers Boris Johnson of Britain and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are the two world leaders who have been most successful at strengthening their positions amid the pandemic. This isn’t because they have both succeeded in stopping the spread of the disease. While Israel has, so far, contained the disease with fewer than 300 fatalities at press time, Britain trails only Italy among European countries in number of lives lost to Covid-19. Many more deaths are likely to come. Messrs. Johnson and Netanyahu are succeeding because the pandemic drives home their core messages.

National leaders acquire and hold power in part by offering a “theory of the case”—a vision of what their country needs and why a particular leader and particular program are the solution. In 2016 Donald Trump’s theory of the case was that a broken and corrupt establishment was driving the country into the ground. In 2020 former Vice President Joe Biden’s theory of the case is that America needs a president who will bring “normal” back.

President Trump was preparing to run on “the strongest economy in world history.” The pandemic crushed that argument, and although his base continues to support him, Mr. Trump is struggling to reinvent his re-election campaign. President Vladimir Putin’s core message for 2020 was that a stable and respected Russia was becoming more secure economically. A referendum scheduled for this month would have sealed his grip on power. But thanks to the pandemic and the resulting oil price implosion, the referendum has been postponed, and Mr. Putin must find a new message.

For Bibi and Boris, the pandemic reinforced the arguments they have been making to the public. In Mr. Netanyahu’s case, his response to the pandemic enabled him to split the opposition, postpone his trial on corruption charges, and continue his reign as Israel’s longest-serving and most effective prime minister since David Ben-Gurion. His core message is that in a dangerous world Israel needs a decisive prime minister and government with a real majority, and that the opposition, whose fissures are becoming deeper, is incapable of providing it. Mr. Netanyahu must survive a ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court about whether a person under indictment can serve as prime minister, but the strength of his new Knesset majority shifts the odds in his favor.

Let me fuse two tales of resurrection — the PM’s medical ordeal and his party’s return from death’s door — into a single narrative in which the hero, an outcast Tory rebel, ends up as a Prime Minister who dominates British politics more completely than anyone since Margaret Thatcher. Better still, the voting public come to realise just how much they like him.

The story begins a month before the 2019 European elections when Tory constituency associations began passing motions of no confidence in Prime Minister Theresa May. That rebellion, which spread rapidly, signified that the Tories were a party with a clear Leave majority—something like 70 per cent of activists and 55 to 60 per cent of Tory MPs (if the latter had taken a truth serum).

Those no-confidence votes were important, but national political correspondents treated them as marginal. That was partly because they’re overwhelmingly Europhiliac. Also, they shared a deeply rooted collective sentiment that Tory activists shouldn’t be important, which slid imperceptibly into thinking they couldn’t possibly be important. As a result they were consistently mistaken in predicting that May would eventually get her non-Brexit bills through the Commons and, more generally, that Brexit would be lost in the quicksands of a Remainer House of Commons.

Those calculations, like much else, were shattered by the European elections, in which the triumph of the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage could only have been achieved with the support of both Tory voters and Tory activists. (When a Tory canvasser asked my sister to vote Tory in local elections, she agreed to do so but added she would vote for the Brexit Party in the Euro-elections. He replied: “So will I.”) But the 8 per cent national vote, amplified by more association votes of no confidence and the looming prospect of one by the National Conservative Convention of 800 senior Tories, led in quick succession to May’s resignation, a Tory leadership election, and Johnson’s clear victory on a promise to achieve a real Brexit.

https://quillette.com/2020/05/03/an-icu-doctor-reports-from-the-frontline/

I had been out of clinical medicine for a couple of years but felt a calling to return to the intensive care unit (ICU) to help my local area in London cope with the additional burden presented by this pandemic. Like everyone, I had read that the National Health Service (NHS) needed a dramatic increase in capacity to save lives—beds, ventilators, and staff. I was a little scared. Would there be enough Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)? Would my new colleagues accept me? Would I survive, or become another face on the news of a frontline staff member who had succumbed to the virus? I felt a little deflated when I contacted four local London hospitals to offer my help, my time, possibly my good health, only to have my emails either not replied to or batted around various HR departments. Hospital administrators struggled to process a volunteer who was an ex-intensive care doctor with 11 years’ experience. Classic NHS, I thought. The national institution that all we Brits know: at times loved, at times hated, full of wonderful people, but not always well-run. This was part of the reason I had left my UK clinical work to become a doctor in the global pharmaceutical industry.

I cycled up to the hospital on an unseasonally warm day before the Easter weekend. My first day back. What immediately struck me was that the corridors of the old Victorian hospital were empty. Where was everybody? Where was the pandemic? There seemed to be no patients, no staff, no one about at all. Had this all been media hype? I expected the hospital to be a hive of bustle. The front line. This was where the rubber met the road of tackling COVID-19, I thought.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-sweeps-across-brazil-a-land-ill-equipped-to-fight-it-11588603847?mod=hp_lead_pos5

In the tiny, stifling home she shared with seven relatives in the Amazon, Maria Portelo de Lima began coughing, started feeling weaker and, over a week, got sicker and sicker.

Her family tried to get the 61-year-old to a hospital in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million in the heart of the rainforest. They were told no ambulances were available or hospital beds free because of a flood of coronavirus patients.

Ms. de Lima died April 26. With so many other Covid-19 victims in the city, it took 30 hours for an ambulance to pick up her body. She was buried in a mass grave, her identity marked by a wooden cross that cost $22.

Covid-19, which has focused its fury most heavily on wealthier countries, now is hammering Brazil. Brazil has just passed China, the origin of the pandemic, both in confirmed cases, 101,147, and in deaths, 7,025, becoming the hardest-hit country in the developing world.

Unlike in China, which corralled the virus through stern restrictions, things in Latin America’s largest country are expected to get much worse. Infections are rising by more than 5,000 a day and deaths by nearly 500.

There is so little testing in Brazil that its real number of Covid-19 infections might be far higher than the official figure. One university study has estimated the total to date at higher than the U.S.’s world-leading 1.19 million.