Category

Society

April 19, 2020
0

The curve has become flatter. It needs to be like this so it doesn’t overtax our health system. We have made model observations. We’re now at about reproduction factor 1 … that is an average of one person infecting another one. If we get to the point where everybody infects 1.1 people, then by October, we will reach the capacity level of our health system with the assumed numbers of intensive care beds. If we get to 1.2 people, so everyone is infecting 20 percent more. Out of 5 people, one infects two and the rest one, then we will reach the limit of our health care system in July. And if it’s up to 1.3 people, then in June we will reach the limits of our health system. So, that’s where you can see how small the margin is, and the whole evolution is based on the fact that we assume that we have an infection figure that we can monitor; that we can track. But it is this ice … or a fragile situation or really a situation where caution is the order of the day, and not overconfidence.

Angela Merkel
April 18, 2020
2

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts [serial killer] Whitman’s rifle and [serial killer] Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.

Robert F. Kennedy
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