Coronavirus: as the pandemic spreads in the US, so do racist attacks, and not just against Asians

Asians and Asian-Americans continue to be targets, but recent coronavirus webinars have included abuse and slurs of black participants

The Zoom videoconferencing platform was used, and hacked, in both webinarsCharley Lanyon11 Apr, 2020

The Zoom videoconferencing platform has become ubiquitous as the coronavirus spreads. But it has security flaws, and hackers disrupted two recent US coronavirus-related webinars using the platform with racist slurs. Photo: Reuters

As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads across the United States, reports of racist attacks and abuse have spiked. While many accounts involve the targeting of Asians and Asian-Americans, the phenomenon is not limited to them.

In the past two weeks alone, two separate medical webinars on the coronavirus featuring minority health care workers were disrupted by hackers spewing profanity and racial slurs.

On Wednesday, a coronavirus webinar hosted by the Washington-based Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC) was intended to shine a light on racial discrepancies in the response to the outbreak. Instead, participants themselves became the targets of racial vitriol.

“Hate speech of all sorts – however, mostly racist comments – bombarded our chat,” said ABC’s president, Dr Michelle Albert, who moderated the discussion. “Nonetheless, we continued.”

As the frequency and tenor of the racist comments increased, so did the reaction of the audience, which responded by flooding the chat with declarations of support and gratitude and love for the doctors on-screen, swamping the hate speech.

Chinese diaspora fights coronavirus discrimination in the USPeter Chin-Hong, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Centre who was the first panellist to speak, was among the earliest to notice the racist comments.

“I felt frightened first, then angry,” he said.

One thing Chin-Hong didn’t feel: shocked. The same behaviour had disrupted another medical teleconference just the week before.

Michelle Guy, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of San Francisco, also attended both events Last week, she was attending a UCSF “town hall” for the cardiology division discussing Covid-19 and the Bay Area’s response when she saw that the meeting had been overrun with racist hackers.

“Last week and yesterday were the only two times I personally experienced hate speech on a teleconference platform,” Dr Guy said on Thursday, adding that she had heard from a colleague at another institution that a group of black students were harassed during a teleconference.

“Hearing about it third-person I didn't appreciate how it impacts you. Once it happened to me, I better understood.”

Dr Peter Chin-Hong. Photo: Handout

At the town hall, it began with a few sexually explicit texts. Soon the platform had more than 90 commenters filling the channel with pornographic language.

And these hackers didn’t limit themselves to text.

“The audio, screen and chat were all taken over. You could hear several male voices saying the N-word multiple times. A garbled song came on also repeating the N-word,” Dr Guy said, adding that she also heard a homophobic slur.

“It felt like an ambush and assault. It was overwhelming. I was too emotionally affected to concentrate on learning new information.”

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On Wednesday at the ABC webinar, when she saw on the text thread the “N-word repeated over and over” she was wounded but “not surprised”.

“It's demoralising, upsetting, and reprehensible,” she said.



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Perhaps predictably, both teleconferences employed the videoconferencing app Zoom. As the coronavirus has driven people to use Zoom when working from home, many have found that the platform is especially vulnerable to hackers.

Increasingly, anonymous persons have joined tele-meetings without invitation, often interrupting with offensive language or posting pornographic images, behaviour now called Zoombombing. The FBI has issued a warning to people and businesses about privacy issues when using the app.

In Hong Kong, students from 40 secondary schools have called on their teachers to stop using Zoom and switch to a safer platform to conduct lessons because of fears that their data could be compromised.

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As coronavirus cases have surged in the United States, so have reports of hate crimes and racist rhetoric online, mainly targeting the Asian-American community.

According to an intelligence report compiled by the FBI’s Houston office and distributed to local law enforcement across the country last month: “hate crime incidents against Asian-Americans likely will surge across the United States, due to the spread of coronavirus disease … endangering Asian-American communities … based on the assumption that a portion of the US public will associate Covid-19 with China and Asian-American populations.”

At two recent coronavirus-related webinars, hackers broke into the Zoom videoconferencing platform and hurled racist slurs at participants. Photo: DPA

On Thursday, the Network Contagion Research Institute, a New Jersey-based group that tracks hate speech, released findings that the pandemic has led to a significant rise of anti-Asian hate speech online. And stories of verbal and physical attacks on Asian-Americans are increasingly common.

In March, a family of three were stabbed outside a store in Midland, Texas. Last month, a 51-year-old woman was verbally abused and physically assaulted while riding the bus in New York by a fellow passenger riding with her three daughters.

In the midst of this, the coronavirus itself seems to be especially devastating to people of colour, especially African-Americans – the result of entrenched inequalities in health care, and standard of living among minority communities which contribute to their higher mortality rates.

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In Chicago, African-Americans account for more than half of those who have tested positive and 72 per cent of virus-related fatalities, even though they make up a little less than a third of the population there, a trend seen in cities and towns across the country.

Black residents of Louisiana make up about a third of the state’s population but 70 per cent of its Covid-19 fatalities.

Numbers like these are a call to arms for doctors of colour, and all medical workers who serve at-risk communities.

“We are just trying to learn as much information as we can and share it with as many other health care providers as we can to save people's lives,” Dr Guy said. “To have to be subjected to racism and hate speech while we are doing our work, makes me want to cry and scream all at once. These are orchestrated attacks on people of colour.”

On Wednesday, after more than 90 minutes, refusing to end the presentation despite the stream of abuse, Dr Albert drew her seminar to a close with a quote from Maya Angelou: “If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.”



Charley Lanyon

Charley will write about anything but has a passion for food. After years living and eating in Asia, he has recently relocated to Los Angeles where he is delighted to report that the dim sum isn’t terrible.

How the greedy ruling elite failed us, by putting profit before pandemic preparedness
The global ruling elite, who ignored expert warnings of a pandemic, are even now proposing stimulus measures to prop up markets, rather than truly help people

Expect any attempts to align supply chains to health care or welfare imperatives to meet fierce resistance from vested financial interests, further holding back economic recovery


Andy Xie Published: 6 Apr, 202

Illustration: Craig Stephens

As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds, hundreds of thousands may well die, possibly even millions, if the hot weather cannot slow the disease in the southern hemisphere. Governments and people may pin their hopes on effective medicine and/or a vaccine coming come soon, but neither is likely. This catastrophe may well last well into next year and change the world as we know it.

While the virus is a natural phenomenon, the ensuing tragedy should have been preventable. Infectious disease experts have been predicting a pandemic like this as a certainty. Yet, the global ruling elites ignored it.

Instead, they gather at Davos every year to talk about power, money and technology – mostly about its potential for making money. They have not focused on the No 1 responsibility of any ruling class – the safety of the people. 

If health care systems had been prepared for a pandemic like this, there would be 100 times fewer casualties.

Instead of protecting people, they spent trillions of dollars bailing themselves out after creating the 2008 global financial crisis through their greed. Then, they built huge financial bubbles to make themselves richer than ever. If there is justice, these elites should go to jail for their criminal negligence.

The current chorus from these same influential people is about how to keep stimulating the economy with trillions of dollars. Their real purpose is to prop up financial markets, not to help people. When the stimulus cost is tallied, it is likely to surpass US$10 trillion, twice as much as proposed now.

While financial assistance for the unemployed is necessary, help for big businesses is hard to justify. The US government has budgeted US$500 billion to help businesses. For years, many of these businesses have used their profits and borrowed more to buy back stocks. Helping them is a grave injustice. Such policies only make the world less stable.

The trillions of dollars in aid will not return the world to where it was; this is not like restarting a disrupted film. The global economy could fall by over 20 per cent in the second quarter, the biggest drop ever during peacetime. Any recovery during the second half of the year, or beyond, is likely to be anaemic for four reasons.

First, life cannot go back to normal so soon. Social distancing may slow down Covid-19, but will not eliminate it. If people return to their old ways, the virus is likely to come back. Social distancing, even loosened, has a significant impact on the services industry.

The tourism sector, for example, will remain shuttered for the foreseeable future. It employs one in 10 people in the non-agricultural sector. This factor alone will keep the global economy below the 2019 level for at least two years.

Second, this crisis has exposed the fragility and unaccounted extra costs of maintaining a
global supply chain. Electronics and car industries have been severely interrupted. Just-in-time inventory management and the concentration of parts production has left the global economy extremely vulnerable to a black swan event such as Covid-19.

The cost is more than just to the gross domestic product. When the production of health care equipment and medicines is interrupted, lives are lost, unnecessarily.

Coronavirus could cause global food shortages by April as export curbs worsen supply chain problems

Political forces are likely to ensure global companies rearrange their supply chains to reflect national interests, not just profit maximisation. This process of deglobalisation will slow the economy and generate considerable inflationary pressure.

Third, the Covid-19 crisis has  burst financial bubbles built up since 2008. The US stock market, for example, is normalising, which could wipe out US$15 trillion in wealth. As the slowing global economy increases credit risks, the overleveraged shadow banking system may catch fire.

American companies have been borrowing for years to buy back stocks. Some of their bonds are likely to default. This kind of debt crisis will be a significant drag on the global economy.


Lastly, the crisis is forcing governments to reallocate resources to health care systems and other forms of welfare protection. The US spends nearly one-fifth of its GDP on health care but is failing to cope with a pandemic like this because resource allocation has been driven by profit, not the safety of the masses. As vested financial interests resist the reallocation of resources, the economy is likely to be dragged down.

Hong Kong’s property market is a small but extremely egregious example of screwing people over for the benefit of the rich. With people asked to stay at home, the city’s small and subdivided flats with their congested conditions – making it so much easier for a virus to spread – are literally killing people.

People become depressed when confined in small spaces for too long. Hong Kong’s property market is at best a screw-the-poor and rob-the-middle-class plot to benefit the rich and powerful, often in the guise of an everybody-can-get-rich casino. This crisis has exposed it as a bloodsucking conspiracy against the people. Is a revolution avoidable?

In this grim tragedy, the good news is about the scientific race for new equipment, medicine and a vaccine to fight the virus. Human ingenuity tends to become turbocharged under extreme pressure. The discoveries during the second world war have powered the tech economy ever since. The discoveries made during this Covid-19 war may unleash a wave of bioscience advances to benefit mankind for ages to come.


Andy Xie is an independent economist

Dr Andy Xie is a Shanghai-based independent economist specialising in China and Asia, and writes, speaks and consults on global economics and financial markets. He joined Morgan Stanley in 1997 and was managing director and head of the firm’s Asia-Pacific economics team until 2006. Prior to that he spent two years with Macquarie Bank in Singapore, where he was an associate director in corporate finance. He also spent five years as an economist with the World Bank. He was voted one of the 50 most influential persons in finance by Bloomberg magazine in 2013.

The US topped a 2019 pandemic preparedness index. So why wasn’t it ready for Covid-19?

Deciding whether (MONOPOLY) capitalism or socialism (STATE CAPITALISM) is more suited for pandemic management is a false binary. The real issue is whether officials under each system are able to test, trace and contain the virus, and work out how to reopen economies

Andrew Sheng Published:11 Apr, 2020

Refrigeration trucks are lined up near the office of New York’s chief medical examiner to serve as an expanded morgue on April 3, as the city prepared for a growing number of coronavirus deaths. Photo: EPA-EFE

Who could have imagined that the Cold War could morph into a “cool war” and now a Covid-19 war? The Cold War was fought between the United States and the former Soviet Union, ending with the latter’s dissolution. The cool war between the US and China is still going on over trade.

As for the Covid-19 war, it is not about fighting each other, but protecting each country’s citizens against a coronavirus that does not distinguish between borders and political beliefs.

History will judge how, in this public health battle, authoritarian China has reported more than 3,300 deaths, whereas more than 14,000 have died in the democratic US.
There are four hard choices in this crisis: moral, informational, political and economic. A tough moral decision has to be made between lives and livelihoods.

Coronavirus: Is the gig economy dead, and should the self-employed worry?
Most governments have rightly chosen to protect lives by shutting down economies. But with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimating a loss of 2 per cent of gross domestic product for every month of lockdown, economic costs are mounting.

This explains why the US president is all for reopening the economy as soon as possible. With estimates of deaths in the US falling to 60,000 by August, the issue is whether the US can afford to spend trillions to prevent more deaths.

Developing countries certainly can’t afford lockdowns. As it is, many of their citizens lack running water and soap, and can’t wash their hands frequently to stop the spread of coronavirus. The pandemic might push millions more into poverty.

In the post-Covid-19 future, the world economy will be reset
6 Apr 2020


he second choice is informational: do you believe scientists or politicians? On the one hand, Trump wants a timeline for restarting the economy but, on the other hand, infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci says the timeline is determined by the virus.
So far, the political leaders who heed scientific advisers have done best. The prime ministers of Singapore , Malaysia and New Zealand are to be commended for taking decisive action and enforcing lockdowns.

The third choice is political. Deciding whether capitalism or socialism is better suited for pandemic management is a false binary. The real issue is whether officials under either system are able to test, trace and contain the virus.

Food security of world’s poorest communities threatened by Covid-19 pandemic, warns UN food body

Back in October, the US was ranked as the country most prepared for pandemics in the Global Health Security Index published by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security and The Economist Intelligence Unit. Britain was at No 2 and China, No 51.

In late November, before news of coronavirus cases in Wuhan broke, the US National Centre for Medical Intelligence warned of a disease outbreak in China that could pose a serious threat to US forces in Asia.

On January 29, Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, alerted the White House that a “full-blown coronavirus outbreak on US soil” could cost trillions of dollars and the health of millions. So why didn’t the vaunted US system kick in to prevent the spread of Covid-19?

To be fair, all bureaucracies are slow to react to new and uncertain challenges. Mauro Ferrari, the European Union’s top scientist, said he had proposed a special programme in March to combat the virus because “the very best scientists in the world should be provided with resources and opportunities to fight the pandemic, with new drugs, new vaccines, new diagnostic tools, new behavioural dynamic approaches based on science, to replace the oft-improvised intuitions of political leaders”.

However, his proposal “was passed on to different layers of European Commission administration, where I believe it disintegrated upon impact”. Ultimately, he resigned as president of the European Research Council, after failing to persuade the EU bureaucracy to take action.

Unfortunately, a “whole of government” approach is only possible if we are to able to knock sense into obstinate bureaucrats. The parts must work together to save the whole.

In Covid-19 spread, China and the West have reversed roles
19 Mar 2020

Last but not least, there is the matter of how to reopen the economy,
once the pandemic is brought under a semblance of control. The reality is that there is no one formula, model or theory that can guide us, given that different countries have such different values, resources and institutions.


One thing is certain. The market cannot respond without the backing of the state. Indeed, there is no best practice when it comes to deciding how to reopen an economy. Each country will have to experiment, based on the best data on both public health and the economy.



Free-market ideology has not prepared us for this, because we have good information on the largest corporations, but little up-to-date data on the balance sheets of the households and small businesses that are feeling the brunt of the lockdowns.

Meanwhile, rich countries are dropping “helicopter money”, as if helicopters can put out raging forest fires by randomly spraying water. The successful economies are those that are able to target money to help those who need it most.

To put it another way, economies need to test, trace and target, just as health systems do to tackle the virus. In practical terms, this means applying tools that best fit the conditions on the ground.

In fighting the war against Covid-19, success is relative, but failure is contagious. If we fail as individuals and as a community to make hard choices, more lives and livelihoods will be lost. This is the pandemic box we have opened up.

Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

Andrew Sheng is a former central banker and financial regulator, currently distinguished fellow at the Asia Global Institute, University of Hong Kong. He writes widely on Asian perspectives on global issues, with columns in Project Syndicate, Asia News Network and Caijing/Caixin magazines. His latest book is “Shadow Banking in China”, co-authored with Ng Chow Soon, published by Wiley.

The data on global coronavirus-related trade and job losses is grim, but the worst is yet to come
The ILO estimates 6.7 per cent of working hours, or 195 million full-time jobs, will be lost worldwide in the second quarter of the year. This is why so many governments, including in Hong Kong, have taken radical steps to support workersOpinion
Outside In by David Dodwell Published: 11 Apr, 2020

A man sits alone in the deserted nightlife district of Lan Kwai Fong 

in Hong Kong on April 2. Photo: Dickson Lee

Memories of the pain and harm done by the US-China trade war and six months of street violence across Hong Kong may not have faded, but they have, in the past three months, been overwhelmed by the coronavirus, and the unremitting angst that this invisible enemy has caused in communities worldwide.

So it is not good news that the worst is yet to come, and might not be done with us until well into 2021.

We are only now beginning to sense the scale of the economic harm being inflicted in the fight against the spread of the virus. That is mainly because this harm is still not clearly perceptible and has yet to be fully captured by data. The disastrous domino effect of domestic lockdowns and international self-isolation is now beginning to be seen, but not yet felt.

Two important reports this week have provided us with some sketchy numbers about the future facing us. The first, from the World Trade Organisation, foresees global merchandise trade collapsing this year by between 13 and 32 per cent – in raw numbers, that means a fall of between US$2.4 trillion and US$6 trillion, from US$18.89 trillion in 2019.

Worst impacted will be North America, with exports expected to decline by 17 to 41 per cent, and imports by 14 to 34 per cent. If such forecasts are anywhere near accurate, you can see why Donald Trump is so concerned about deflecting blame ahead of the United States presidential election in November.

The WTO says the crash in services trade, never captured as accurately as merchandise trade, will be even more severe. “These numbers are ugly,” says Roberto Azevedo, WTO director general.

For manufactures, the worst harm will fall on electronics, the automotive and other industries “characterised by complex value chain linkages”. Economies most in harm’s way will be those deeply embedded in long and complex value chains.

These include Mexico, Malaysia and Vietnam, with more than 50 per cent foreign value added in their exports, Singapore (over 40 per cent), South Korea (over 30 per cent) and
China (25 per cent).

The second report, from the International Labour Organisation, provides a sobering glimpse into why so many governments – including our own in Hong Kong – have taken such radical steps to support workers, pre-empt redundancies and avert the thousands of bankruptcies that will almost certainly be upon us soon.

The ILO estimates 6.7 per cent of working hours, or 195 million full-time jobs, will be lost worldwide in the second quarter of this year. Sobering US unemployment data released on Thursday – which show that 17 million Americans have in the past month applied for unemployment benefit for the first time – obviously lends strength to these estimates.

learly, some areas of work have not been affected: teachers, health workers, government employees, police and army officers, and people in power and utility companies will not suffer significantly.

But, for other areas of work, the prognosis is grim: accommodation and food services, real estate, business services, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail trades have been slammed worldwide, with no early recovery expected. These sectors account for about 38 per cent of all jobs worldwide – about 1.25 billion.

Look at Hong Kong, and you see good reasons for local alarm. Our economy is built on exactly those sectors facing the grimmest challenges (the ILO says transport is another such sector). Clearly, moves by Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s administration to
throw meaningful lifelines to large parts of the workforce have come not a moment too soon.


The ILO data also provides a glimpse into the coming collapse in consumption. Working hours are expected to fall by 7.2 per cent in Asia in the coming quarter, and this means that the average household in Hong Kong, with a median income of HK$27,000 a month, would have HK$1,944 less to spend.

Since there are 2.51 million households in Hong Kong, this means spending power in the community might fall by about HK$4.8 billion per month, or HK$14.6 billion per quarter.

Apply the same arithmetic to the US, where there are 129 million households earning a median household income of US$4,900 a month, 

(THAT IS DISPROPORTIONATELY HIGH TRY $2500-$3000)

 and you find families losing US $329 per month in spending power – amounting to US$42.5 billion for the US as a whole, and US$127.5 billion for the quarter – not a small chunk out of the Congress-approved US$2 trillion rescue payout agreed two weeks ago.

Extend such arithmetic to the entire world, and one quickly sees why so many leading businesses are in a sweat about a protracted recession.

While the hope is that the world economy might quickly recover from this implosion, evidence suggests that recovery will be slow and that, as we emerge, much will have changed forever.

A restructuring of supply chains, with some being shortened, domesticated and made more resilient, seems inevitable. There might be some decoupling between the US and China – though it will be fascinating to see who then couples with the US, and who with China.

Will record global debt trump all other crises in 2020?
30 Dec 2019


Out of the coming recession, government indebtedness is set to rise to record levels across the world, with no clear prospect of how debts will be managed back to sustainable levels. Lockdowns have also brought digital delivery of everything to the heart of many economies, with the imminent arrival of 5G platforms set to put this trend on steroids.

But some parts of our future look less clear. Will international tourism – which accounts for one in 10 jobs worldwide – rebound in answer to airlines’ prayers? Will inequalities that have been exposed by the pandemic be tackled, or continue to be airbrushed?

While lockdowns have brought down carbon emissions (by 60 per cent in Europe), can this be sustained, or will global warming accelerate as recovery begins?

Perhaps most important of all, can we summon the statesmanship to work together across the world to bring the pandemic under control, and manage an economic recovery? So far, the odds are poor. In the US, Trump seems set on blaming all around him.

And the European Union looks perilously divided. It is a cliché to say opportunities arise out of every crisis, but at this particular bleak moment, those opportunities seem tough to find. For the good of all of us, we need to find them fast.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

David Dodwell is the executive director of the Hong Kong-APEC Trade Policy Study Group, a trade policy think tank.

US military researchers call for use of privateers against China

Magazine published by US Naval Institute features articles titled ‘Unleash the Privateers!’ and ‘US Privateering Is Legal’

But any such move would provoke a retaliation from China, military watchers say


Liu Zhen in Beijing and Kristin Huang Published: 10 Apr, 2020

The authors of the reports attack said an attack on China’s global trade would undermine its economy and threaten its stability. 

The  United States should encourage the use of privateers to fight Chinese aggression at sea, according to a pair of articles in magazine produced by the US Naval Institute.

The reports – titled “Unleash the Privateers!” and “US Privateering Is Legal”, and published in the April issue of Proceedings – suggest the US government issue letters of marque – a commission authorising privately owned ships (privateers) to capture enemy merchant ships.

The authors – Mark Cancian, a retired US Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Brandon Schwartz, a former CSIS media relations manager – said that China’s larger merchant fleet represented an asymmetric vulnerability with the US, and an attack on China’s global trade would undermine its entire economy and threaten its stability.

Such a campaign would be a legal and low-cost way to contain China’s power rise on the sea, they said, adding that it could prevent, rather than provoke, a war.

The reports said privateering was legal under the US Constitution. Photo: DPA

Collin Koh, a research fellow from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, said the idea was “politically unsound”.

“That would be regarded as an outright provocation which would invite retaliation from China,” he said.

“And going by the UN Charter, it might even be construed as a use of force, and would invite international condemnation too.”

Privateering with a letter of marque dates back to a period from the mid-16th to the 18th century known as the Age of Sail, but was outlawed with the introduction of various treaties in the 19th and 20th centuries.

However, the authors of the Proceedings reports said that the US government never formally signed any agreements, and argued that the US Constitution gave Congress the power to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal”.

Although no such letters had been issued since 1907, that was due to “strategic and policy considerations rather than legal ones”, they said.
The authors did not say if China’s trillions of dollars worth of trade with the US should be exempted from attacks by pirates, but that probably was because it would no longer exist in a hypothetical scenario of the two nations already having decoupled.

Privateering with a letter of marque dates back to a period from the mid-16th to the 18th century known as the Age of Sail. Photo: EPA-EFE

Hong Kong-based military commentator Song Zhongping said that such decoupling, as advocated by American conservatives and far-rights, was a dangerous sign that it would place two nuclear powers in confrontation and even conflict.

“When the Americans decide to act tough against a so-called adversary or enemy, they will spare no effort and limit no means,” he said.
“Privateering on Chinese merchant ships may also be possible.”

Republican congressman Ron Paul raised the issue of using letters of marque against Osama bin Laden and Somalian pirates in 2007 and 2009, but did not succeed.

Julia Xue, chair professor of International Law at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said the researchers argument was not valid.

“It has been customary international law, and the US is also bonded by it,” she said. “It was an incorrect interpretation of international law.”

Koh said the current policy elites were unlikely to seriously consider such a recommendation, but such articles represented the think tankers who advocated a much harder policy stance against China.

“If anything, it does reflect the growing schism between China and the US, as both countries see their ties sliding downhill under the cloud of strategic lack of trust,” Koh said.

Human pressure on wildlife increases risk of diseases like Covid-19, study finds

Hunting, wildlife trade and threats to habitat key factors in viral spillover

Research adds to growing evidence about the role of humans in the emergence of new infections


Simone McCarthy Published: 10 Apr, 2020

The spillover of viruses from animals to humans is a direct result of our actions involving wildlife and their habitat, according to the lead author of a new study. Photo: AFP

The exploitation of wildlife increases the risk of animal viruses infecting people, potentially sparking outbreaks like the Covid-19 pandemic, caused by the
new coronavirus.

That was the key finding of a study published on Wednesday by a group of researchers at the University of California, Davis which looked for trends among the animal species known to host viruses that have infected humans.

While genetics and chance are among the factors that determine whether a virus can spill over from animals to people, the study highlights the human role driving the risk of the phenomenon behind the current pandemic, which so far has sickened more than 1.5 million people.

Animals threatened with extinction by human degradation of their habitat, or through hunting and the wildlife trade, hosted twice as many viruses known to infect people, compared with species threatened for other reasons, the researchers found.

“Spillover of viruses from animals is a direct result of our actions involving wildlife and their habitat,” said lead author Christine Kreuder Johnson, director of the EpiCentre for Disease Dynamics at the One Health Institute, a UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine programme.

“The consequence is they’re sharing their viruses with us. These actions simultaneously threaten species’ survival and increase the risk of spillover. In an unfortunate convergence of many factors, this brings about the kind of mess we’re in now.”

The research examined around 140 zoonotic viruses that infect humans and had been found in specific animal species before 2014. It looked for trends among those species, using data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ Red List of Threatened Species.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence about the role of humans in the increasingly frequent emergence of infectious diseases in recent decades.

Scientists and public health organisations have long been calling for more attention to be paid to the role of increased encroachment on animal habitats in the emergence of infectious disease outbreaks.

Deforestation, urbanisation and the expansion of agriculture have all brought more contact with these species as the human population has more than doubled since 1960, they have warned.

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that, historically, domesticated animals were the largest mammalian contributors of infectious viruses, because of their regular close contact with people.

Domesticated animals, including livestock, shared eight times more zoonotic viruses with people than wild mammals, such as H1N1 flu, hantaviruses and rabies.

The researchers pointed out that sprawling human populations had created more opportunities for people to live in proximity with wild animals. Rodents, bats and primate species living near homes or farms – in some cases expanding their populations near settlements – presented a high risk for ongoing transmission of viruses to people.

Rodents, bats and primates – representing more than 70 per cent of all terrestrial mammal species – were together implicated as hosts for three-quarters of zoonotic viruses, they found. Bats are thought to be the originators of a number of viruses which cause diseases in humans, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), Nipah virus infection – and Covid-19.

That the greater levels of human and animal interaction would lead to more spillovers of disease from animals to humans was no surprise, according to veterinary epidemiologist Dirk Pfeiffer, a professor of One Health at Hong Kong’s City University, who was not involved in the research.

“If you have these human animal contacts more often, because of population density and people doing things where that contact occurs more frequently, eventually it will go wrong,” he said.

What next for China’s wildlife ban?
8 Apr 2020


Improving coordination between doctors, veterinary surgeons and ecologists, under the One Health model, upping biosecurity on farms, and surveillance of disease in animals and humans were all important steps to cut down on risk and prevent the next pandemic, said study co-author Peta Hitchens, a senior research fellow and veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne.

“There will be more viruses that jump from animals to humans in the future, and our ability to react to that will get better, including controlling infections before they can get out of control and producing vaccines in a more efficient manner. We’ll get there – we can only learn from this experience,” she said.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Wildlife proximity raises virus risk, study finds

Simone McCarthy  joined the Post in 2018. She previously wrote about China tech, business and society for SupChina and has a bachelor's in literature from Yale University and a master's from Columbia Journalism School.

Bat virus? Bioweapon? What the science says about Covid-19 origins

Speculation about the emergence of the new coronavirus is spreading almost as quickly as the pandemic
Scientists believe some pathways are more probable than others


Simone McCarthy and Stephen Chen in Beijing Published:11 Apr, 2020

Experts say the conditions in wet markets increase the chances of a virus 

jumping from animals to humans. Photo: Simon Song

As the Covid-19 pandemic has infected its way through human populations around the globe, it has been followed by a web of speculation about where the
new coronavirus actually came from.

Some possibilities are scientific hypotheses based on genetic data while others borrow from dark conspiracy theories with little or no basis in fact.

Laboratory researchers have established solid genetic links between the new coronavirus, known as Sars-CoV-2, and one found in a horseshoe bat in southeastern China.

Further genetic detective work – and what is known about the evolution of past coronaviruses that have infected people – indicates the pathogen may have passed through another animal species first. There, scientists believe, it mutated or combined with another virus before finding its way into a human body, latching onto cells and spreading.

But science has not stopped other theories from percolating. One theory – debunked last month by a genetic analysis by a group of the world’s top epidemiologists – is that the virus was bioengineered in a laboratory in Wuhan, the pandemic’s first epicentre.

The latest theory, laid out in a recent article by The Washington Post, has another spin on this: the virus source could have been a researcher infected by a bat, or the sloppy disposal of hazardous materials at a Wuhan Centre for Disease Control facility near the wet market linked to many early cases in the outbreak.

Scientists are quick to acknowledge that when so little is known about the evolution of the new virus there are endless possibilities for its origins. But, they say, groundless speculation is no help, and point to the role played by probability in the emergence of new diseases. What we do know about the coronavirus family points to other, more likely, paths of transmission to humans.

“These accident theories – and the lab-made theories before them – reflect a lack of understanding of the genetic make-up of Sars-CoV-2 and its relationship to the bat virus,” said Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University in New York.

“If someone had that virus in the lab, and say it escaped, it would not have been able to infect humans – the human Sars-CoV-2 has additional changes that allows it to infect humans,” he said, adding that the bat virus would have had to circulate, and evolve, for a number of years before mutating enough to be able to infect people.

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The bat virus in question was discovered by a group of researchers that included scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading institute which collaborates regularly with its counterparts around the world. Recent analysis by the Wuhan researchers found a 96 per cent similarity between the bat virus and the overall genome of Sars-CoV-2.

But the new coronavirus has adaptations to its spike protein – the part of the virus that binds to human cells – never before seen in closely related bat coronaviruses.

That was the conclusion of another group of scientists who carried out a comprehensive genetic analysis of how Sars-CoV-2 compared with known viral sequences and submitted their findings last month to the journal Nature Medicine.

Their paper addressed the possibility of “an inadvertent laboratory release” of the virus, but gave several reasons why this was not the best explanation for how the deadly pathogen evolved its unique adaptations and entered the human population.

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One reason they gave was that it would have meant researchers had access to a bat virus that was more similar to the novel coronavirus than the known relative from 2013. The scientific community was not aware of any such virus, the paper said.

Meanwhile, scientists stress that conditions in nature – and the many ways humans come into contact with wildlife – already provide a wide range of likely scenarios and pathways for how the virus first jumped to humans.

“In a world where Sars-like viruses are common in bats and other animals, and bats are allowed to roost wherever they like, why do we need to invent a laboratory and some sloppy human scientists to make the virus go from a bat to a human?” asked Benjamin Neuman, professor of biological sciences at Texas A&M University-Texarkana.

The wildlife trade – and the associated wet markets where live animals and their meat are sold – has been pointed to as a likely platform for the emergence of Sars-CoV-2. This was the case in the Sars outbreak, caused by a coronavirus in 2003, where a bat virus is thought to have infected a civet cat, which in turn infected humans at a wet market.

“Live wild animal markets, such as the huge ‘wet’ markets in China, are ideal places for zoonotic virus emergence to occur,” Andrew Cunningham, deputy director of science at the Zoological Society of London said, pointing to the high number of animals from different species being kept closely together in “overcrowded and unhygienic conditions”.

While the wildlife trade creates interaction between humans and animals, it also provides an opportunity for viruses to move through populations of animals, mutating as it transmits through that population, or for a virus to recombine in species unnaturally brought into contact with one another.

A virus jumping from an animal and then being able to infect humans and spread is a rare event. The proximity of a number of animals who can pass viruses between each other and come in regular contact with people can increase the chances of a virus emerging which is able to spread to humans, experts say.

“Ultimately it’s a numbers game. The more infected hosts you have, the greater the chance that some sort of change in the virus could occur,” said Gavin Smith, a professor in the emerging infectious diseases programme at Duke-NUS Medical School Singapore.

He said that spillovers might happen multiple times before eventually meeting the right conditions for a virus to be able to spread among people.

“The idea that you could just get a one-off transmission and then replication in an individual who then starts spreading it is highly unlikely, but not impossible,” Smith said.

While the outbreak of Covid-19 was centred around a wet market in Wuhan, several early patients did not have known links to that market, according to research published in The Lancet by doctors from Wuhan and Beijing. This could indicate that the virus was circulating between humans earlier or that people were also infected in another location.

It is also possible that humans could have been infected directly from bats, as opposed to through an intermediary animal, experts say.

But there are other kinds of people living near or working with wildlife on a regular basis who could have been infected besides bat researchers, according to Racaniello.

“[A virus related to Sars-CoV-2] might have infected someone outside the city; perhaps there were several short chains of infections before the virus reached Wuhan. One scenario that I like is that a farmer harvesting bat guano for fertiliser might have become infected,” he said.

But among the many question marks and unknowns, researchers say it is too early to come to any conclusions about how the new coronavirus emerged.
Wide retrospective testing of blood samples collected over years could provide more clues about whether similar or related viruses had been jumping over in humans unnoticed, according to Roy Hall, a professor of virology at the University of Queensland in Australia. More animal testing could also help find a closer match to Sars-CoV-2.

“It’s unhelpful to speculate if you don’t have all the evidence,” Hall said. “Anything is possible, but you have to look at the probability.”


Additional reporting by Stephen Chen

White House accuses US broadcaster Voice of America of promoting ‘Beijing’s propaganda’

The attack on a government-funded news outlet came as some lawmakers have intensified their criticism of how the Chinese government handled the outbreak

Owen Churchill in Washington, DC and Robert Delaney Published:11 Apr, 2020

The White House has lashed out at broadcaster Voice of America (VOA), accusing the broadcaster of amplifying “Beijing’s propaganda” by quoting China’s official coronavirus statistics in its reporting and publishing footage of celebrations marking the end of Wuhan’s lockdown

The extraordinary attack on a government-funded news outlet came as the Trump administration and some lawmakers have intensified their criticism of how the Chinese government handled the outbreak.

“VOA too often speaks for America’s adversaries – not its citizens,” said the White House in a Thursday missive, adding that the outlet, which is funded through congressional appropriations, was “promoting propaganda” with taxpayers’ money.

“This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful ‘model’ copied by much of the world – and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end,” the release said.

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The story that the White House appeared to be referencing was an Associated Press article that the VOA had syndicated on Tuesday, not a staff-written story.

“Even worse, while much of the US media takes its lead from China, VOA went one step further,” the White House’s Thursday missive continued. “It created graphics with Communist government statistics to compare China’s Coronavirus death toll to America’s.”

The White House did not reference the fact that many other prominent news outlets, including the The Washington Post, Reuters and Associated Press, also published stories covering the moment when US deaths surpassed China’s official figures at the end of March.

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In a statement released Friday defending its objectivity, VOA director Amanda Bennett noted that data from the graphic cited by the White House was taken from statistics gathered by Johns Hopkins University, which she said was “used throughout the world”

“We are thoroughly covering China’s disinformation and misinformation in English and Mandarin and at the same time reporting factually – as we always do in all 47 of our broadcast languages – on other events in China,” Bennett said, before listing more than a dozen reports they published recently that were sceptical of China’s claims throughout its Covid-19 epidemic.

In an internal memo seen by the South China Morning Post, Bennett said suggestions the VOA was publishing propaganda was a discredit to “the hundreds of VOA men and women around the world who work hard – sometimes risking or even losing their lives – to give fact-based, fair, unbiased news and information to the world.”

In 2013, a reporter for VOA’s Somali service was killed in a bomb blast in Mogadishu, Somalia.

“Those of you – and it is most of you – who work in highly polarised climates know what it is like to have a person, an organisation or a group pull out one quote, one story, or one photo that they don’t like (or that doesn’t support their cause) from a huge body of work and use it to claim ‘bias,’” Bennett continued. “So all of this should feel familiar to you.”

The VOA was one of five US outlets targeted recently by Beijing with new media restrictions requiring the organisations to submit detailed information about their operations to authorities.

“Please remember that the wonderful thing about being government-funded independent media – rather than state-controlled media – is that we are protected by law in order to continue doing just the kind of incredibly important fact-based work that you do every day,” Bennett said in the memo.

The White House’s criticism of VOA was more about deflecting criticism of its own handling of the coronavirus outbreak and less about concerns over objectivity in the media, said Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China.

“It has nothing to do with press freedoms, information or objectivity, anything other than political hackery,” said Guajardo, now a senior director at McLarty Associates.
Trump threatens to cut US funding of World Health Organisation amid coronavirus pandemic

Noting that VOA’s founding principles of providing objective news coverage to an international audience, including those living in authoritarian countries, Guajardo said that objectivity and truth “doesn’t necessarily mean a US version of everything, or opposing a foreign version.”

“In this case, I did not see an accusation of the Voice of America for distorting truth, or not being objective,” he continued. “It’s just an accusation because they are reporting something that’s favorable to a country the White House sees as an adversary.”

VOA was not the first organisation accused by the Trump administration this week of doing Beijing’s bidding.

Having lashed out repeatedly at the World Health Organisation (WHO) over recent days, Trump said on Friday his administration would be considering moves against the UN agency next week over its alleged deference to Beijing in how it handled the emergence of the coronavirus.

“We’re paying [the WHO] 10 times more than China, and they are very, very China-centric,” Trump said at a White House coronavirus task force press briefing, misstating the discrepancy between the two countries’ contributions.

The White House’s proposed budget for 2021 cuts the US contribution to the organisation significantly, from US$122 million to under US$58 million. China’s net payable contribution to the agency for 2020 was US$57 million, according to WHO documentation.

“China always seems the best to get the better of the argument and I don’t like that,” Trump said. “We’re gonna be talking about that next week in great detail. We’re going to be looking at it very, very closely.”

Trump’s railing against the WHO came as a group of senators wrote to China’s US ambassador demanding the country’s government close all wet markets over concerns about the sites exposing humans to zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19.

In a Thursday letter to Cui Tiankai led by South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, a Republican, and Delaware’s Chris Coons, a Democrat, the senators cited recent comments by top health official Anthony Fauci, who said last week that the global community should pressure countries where wet markets exist to close them down.

“It boggles my mind how, when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human animal interface that we don’t just shut it down,” Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Fox News.

“We understand and respect that wet markets are an important component to Chinese society and way of life, but we believe the current moment, which has disrupted everyday life around the world, calls for extreme precautions,” the lawmakers wrote.

Nine other senators, including Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, and Mitt Romney, a Republican representing Utah also signed the letter.

Additional reporting by Mark Magnier.


Owen Churchill joined the Post in 2018 after several years working as a reporter and editor in China. He covers US-China relations, human rights, and China's influence overseas. A co-founder of the Shanghai-based news outlet Sixth Tone, he is an alumnus of SOAS in London and Fudan University in Shanghai.


Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief. He spent 11 years in China as a language student and correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires and Bloomberg, and continued covering the country as a correspondent and an academic after leaving. His debut novel, The Wounded Muse, draws on actual events that played out in Beijing while he lived there.

Review | Who caused the opium war? British merchants of Canton, argues new book by Singapore academic

A faction of merchants known as the ‘Warlike party’, not colonialist British policy or Qing dynasty intransigence, cause conflict that forced emperor to cede Hong Kong and open doors wider to trade, Song-Chuan Chen writes


Peter Neville-Hadley Published:12 Jun, 2017

A 19th century painting of Canton harbour and factories. 

A faction of British merchants there orchestrated the first opium war, a new book argues.

Merchants of War of Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War
by Song-Chuan Chen
Hong Kong University Press
3.5 stars

The cover of Song-Chuan Chen’s book.
Until the mid-19th century, European ideas of China came largely from the exaggerated reports of Jesuit missionaries written hundreds of years earlier and from Marco Polo’s mostly fanciful account of his travels in the 13th century.

Both parties had self-promotion in mind, Polo aiming for reflected glory by describing an empire of marvels where he claimed to have held high office, and the Jesuits seeking continued support for their mission by describing a bountiful land where a philosopher king and an administration of literati ruled a vast population ripe for conversion.

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But from the 1830s, a new and supposedly authoritative source of information about China emerged in the form of British merchants who were trading in Canton (Guangzhou). From one frustrated faction in particular came a competing view of a backward, ill-governed China, contemptuous of foreigners, willing to offer insult to British honour, and resistant to the great British crusade for free trade despite the cost to ordinary citizens keen to engage in it. William John Huggins’ 1824 painting The Opium Ships at Lintin (present-day Neilingding Island).


In Merchants of War and Peace, a new history of the events leading up to the opium war of 1839–42, Professor Song-Chuan Chen of Singapore’s Nanyang Technical University offers a new alternative. He ascribes responsibility for the war not to commonplace culprits such as colonialist British foreign policy or Qing dynasty intransigence, but specifically to a coterie of British merchants who came to be known as the “Warlike party”.

During the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1654–1722), European merchants were welcomed with gifts, but by the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1735–96) the mood had changed. The Qing emperors, aliens from beyond the Great Wall to China’s northeast, were sensitive to their outsider status and knew that several previous dynasties had been overthrown by peasant uprisings. Like today’s emperors, they feared the collusion of “hostile foreign forces” with domestic discontent.

A painting of the Kangxi emperor, who welcomed foreign merchants.

The result was the 1757 decision that all foreign trade should be restricted to one port. The merchants and officials in Canton who lobbied for a monopoly used arguments about Qing security to win the argument.

Just as the British merchants controlled the information about China that reached London, so the Chinese merchants in turn controlled the Qing’s understanding of foreigners. The end result was that a troubled British government in danger of losing a vote of confidence was goaded into a war in which it had little conviction, and the Qing learned too late that the 19th century’s superpower was Britain, not China.

Book review: Opium and Empire, by Richard J. Grace
11 Oct 2014

The foreign merchants chafed against high port taxes, pay-offs to innumerable officials, and duties on personal items brought in to China. But as Professor Chen points out: “Officials involved themselves very little in the trade, and neither did they regulate the market. At most, they forbade the exporting of gold and silver, limited the amount of silk foreigners could buy, and banned the import of opium.”

Even these prohibitions were never properly implemented. The merchants’ present-day counterparts would tell them they never had it so good.

Occasional moments of dryness and repetition in Chen’s otherwise lucid narrative are relieved by lively language quoted from struggles in the pages of the Warlike party’s Canton Register and the Pacific party’s Canton Press.

A painting of the Qianlong emperor, under whose rule attitudes towards European merchants changed.

The Pacific party’s morally righteous anti-war view was that China might set what laws on trade it pleased, although this was coupled with the more self-interested observation that conflict always harmed trade. “Deceive ourselves as we please, we are smugglers,” wrote one anonymous contributor to the Canton Press in October 1835.

Abstruse debates about the meaning of yí, used to denote the British in Chinese official correspondence, provided almost comical examples of Old China Hand oneupmanship. Did it mean “foreigners”, “tribes from the east” or “barbarians”? The latter interpretation was favoured by those determined to find insults to British honour as an excuse for military intervention to increase trade.

In remarkably erudite exchanges, foreigners quoted Confucius, Mencius, official documents, and the 11th-century poet Su Shi on one side of the case or the other. But in the end the Warlike party won, its petitioners selling the British government of the day a narrative of wounded honour and national interest which disguised their own commercial imperative.

Life in a Chinese treaty port: 

Eurasian traces great-grandparents’ journey from London slum to Hong Kong and beyond 10 Apr 2017


It also provided a successful plan for the conduct of the war based on intelligence gathered during trading trips, thus proving that the Qing had been quite justified to restrict them in the first place.

The merchants of the recently dubbed “nation of shopkeepers” won all their demands: open ports, the right to year-round residence in them, and more.

But it was the British press that coined the now time-honoured but misleading title of “opium war”, and it wasn’t until after further conflict that yí was finally forbidden in official correspondence.

As Merchants of War and Peace shows us, the war of words is still going on.



Peter Neville-Hadley
Former China resident Peter Neville-Hadley is the author of multiple guides and reference works on China, and writes on Chinese culture and on cultural travel in general for assorted periodicals. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The Sunday Times (UK), and numerous other newspapers and magazines around the world.

Melania Trump savaged for controversial Italian coronavirus tweet - 'sick!'

MELANIA TRUMP has come under fire once again after tweeting about the coronavirus as the US faces one of its darkest days yet during the pandemic.

By GRACE MACRAE PUBLISHED: Thu, Apr 9, 2020

Coronavirus: Melania Trump gives hygiene advice to US families

Like the rest of the world, The US is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic with thousands of lives lost and the peak amount of deaths yet to come. However, they are by far the worst hit with the total number of cases climbing to 434,114 and a death toll of 14,762. Despite the worrying figures, US president Donald Trump is still keep to get the economy up and running again which experts have been warned could be in as little as four weeks time.


ONLY POSTED THIS SO I COULD SHARE MY MELANIA MEME

Melania and Donald Trump clash over coronavirus masks as crisis grows

Italy was also one of the worst hit countries, but the US has since overtaken it with almost four times the amount of cases.

Now, First Lady Melania Trump has expressed her condolences to Italy.

This comes after she spoke to Italy's own First Lady Laura Mattarella.

However, this has upset a lot of Americans, as many feel the First Lady of the US is yet to reach out to her own country properly during the crisis.

Melania Trump has come under fire once again after tweeting about the coronavirus pandemic

Italy was also one of the worst hit countries, but the US has since overtaken it with almost four times the amount of cases

First Lady Melania Trump has expressed her condolences to Italy

Melania tweeted: "Spoke today w/ Mrs. Laura Mattarella of Italy.

"I extended my deepest condolences for the Italians who have lost their lives to #COVID19.

"Hopeful that positive trend will continue in Italy & other parts of world soon."

Floods of disapproving comments soon poured in.

"Unless you meant to congratulate Italians on the positive trend of them losing their lives to Covid-19, you really need to get someone to proofread your tweets." said one user

"And yet you haven’t yet expressed condolences for Americans who have died...sick!" said a second.

A third added: "Our country has WAY passed Italy on this curve, darling, thanks to the ignorance and inaction of your "husband"

Another angry user said: "So what?

Many Americans feel the First Lady of the US is yet to reach out to her own country properly during the crisis

The US is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic with thousands of lives lost and the peak amount of deaths yet to come

"Have you done anything for Americans who are dying?

"Have you done anything for the healthcare workers who are sleeping in their cars so that they don't infect their families?"

More comments flooded in, also calling upon the First Lady for more action.

One said: "Hurray! you did something.

"When are you going to start making masks for Americans or doing some volunteer work?"

---30---