Colin Charles Agenda

Up with relatively little sleep, had puttu for breakfast, bread (sourdough) for lunch, and for dinner it was pasta, mopped up with more bread. I’ve also been having some kombucha which I’ve grabbed from ChaCha.

Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation: 5,851 (+31) total cases, 4,032 (+75) recoveries, 100 (+1) dead. 36 in ICU beds, with 17 on ventilators.

Malaysia’s King is now concerned about the economic impact. Better late than never! In what seems like the government running on 2 tracks, MITI now says if you’re in an approved industry you can run at 100%. Why the sudden U-turn for the current phase of MCO? They seem to be silent on SOPs which is ridiculous. Even better? Malaysia attended to tabligh cluster nine days too late, says Health DG. Do you know what happened 9 days before March 9? Best to read this Wikipedia piece: 2020 Malaysian political crisis.

In other news, 42 days… we should have ended this tomorrow, but are still stuck. Lots of good things happen after 40-42 days, if you read religious texts…

I have been reading a lot, and tweeting a bunch of links, but maybe it is time to go back to legit long form blogging. There has been so much to read, and also so much to extract, that I should not be trying to fit things into 280 characters.

• App-based contact tracing may help countries get out of lockdown – the Apple and Google partnership, and also how other countries have fared.
  • “So far, however, this has been downloaded by only a sixth of the country’s population–barely a quarter of the 60% epidemiologists reckon is needed if it is to be effective in breaking the local epidemic. Perhaps the most used contact-tracing app in the world is that deployed by Iceland. Yet Rakning C-19 (“Rakning” is Icelandic for “tracking”) is used by only 40% of the country’s 364,000 people. If such a small, homogenous place cannot reach the required 60% download rate, what hope is there for large, diverse ones like America?”
• Covid-19: US and Europe paying high price for their freedoms, says Dr M – Dr. Mahathir is outdated here. Hong Kong can protest, South Korea has thrown their old premiere out, etc. so these people aren’t necessarily paying a high price for their freedoms.
• State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses – while science show this particular coronavirus seems to be naturally occurring, this revelation is an issue, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been there for sometime. Take the next link (that got ZeroHedge banned from Twitter) with a pinch of salt too: Smoking Gun? Chinese Scientist Finds “Killer Coronavirus Probably Originated From A Laboratory In Wuhan”
• Tech isn’t solution to COVID-19, says Singapore director of contact tracing app – apps have to work alongside human work, “The experience of Singapore’s contact tracers suggest that contact tracing should remain a human-fronted process”
• Coronavirus: the cost of China’s public health cover-up – The FT Big Read
• She Kept a Diary of China’s Epidemic. Now She Faces a Political Storm. – chronicle of life & death in Wuhan, Fang Fang was born in 1955, and the most interesting thing is where all this is stored? GitHub. Can’t censor that now, can you?
• Coronavirus and curbs on democratic freedoms – podcast, focused on “the threat to democracy as authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary exploit public willingness to have freedoms curtailed during the coronavirus crisis.” Applies elsewhere too.
• Hermès Store in China Made a Record $2.7 Million in Their First Day Open Post-Coronavirus – revenge buyers are out in force.
• Coronavirus: what’s behind Vietnam’s containment success? – 75,000 in quarantine/isolation, done more than 121,000 tests, from which only 260 cases were confirmed. However, on a tests per million metric, it is not as high as you would think, as evidenced here:Southeast Asia could be the next coronavirus hot spot – these charts show why.
• Asia struggles to find coronavirus exit strategies – important piece overall as there is no one exit strategy (and now let’s not forget, Singapore is under a Circuit Breaker).
• Mobility trend reports: Apple Mobility Trend Reports, Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, and TomTom Traffic Index (not COVID-19 specific, but useful and has comparisons too)
• Open art galleries and let us feed our souls 2m apart
  • “is the experience of shopping in a supermarket substantially safer than visiting an art exhibition in carefully controlled gallery circumstances? Would it not be possible to transpose the ground rules of safe shopping at a supermarket to safe queuing for an art exhibition, and then for visiting it?”
• Sex in the Time of Coronavirus – Stress and fear are big libido buzzkills. “A state of high threat, characterized by stress or anxiety, is not conducive to having sex,” says Justin Garcia
• Coronavirus modelling chief: Epidemic in retreat but only if we keep our distances – “Their research, due out this week, suggests the lockdown has reduced the reproduction number of the virus – meaning the number of new infections generated by each case – to below one, but only just. It means any significant relaxation could see infections soar, causing a surge in cases that could overwhelm the NHS.”

Up early to get working. Lunch and dinner was finished up yesterday’s fish briyani. Didn’t do a FlyProject workout, but 3 repetitions of Ping’s workout that I got from the Heineken Malaysia Instagram TV page. Much more fun. Work ended around 1.30am…

Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation: 5,820 (+40) total cases, 3,957 (+95) recoveries, 99 (+1) death toll. Only 37 patients are in ICU beds (17 on ventilators).

We claim to be wanting to do 22,000 Covid-19 tests next week. We are also seeing more hotels close down, e.g. Mercure Penang by Plenitude Bhd (public listed company), and even a hotel I’ve stayed at plenty of times (previously known as the Four Points by Sheraton Penang). It seems to be affecting several in Penang and Ipoh. We’ve also seen public listed companies like Sapura Energy cut management salaries by 50%, but worse, there will be a reduction in force, and also 5-45% pay cuts. Genting Malaysia did this before, as well.

Another weekend, not much different from the other weekends. Some Curb Your Enthusiasm. Lots of reading. Salmon pasta on Saturday, puttu on Sunday with fish briyani. Did a Saturday morning workout with Isabel & Marcus, and a Sunday workout with Theresa.

Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Saturday: 5,742 (+51) total cases, 3,762 (+99) recoveries, 98 (+2) death toll.

Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Sunday: 5,780 (+38) total cases, 3,862 (+100) recoveries, 98 death toll.

Considering I slept at 5am, being up before noon was quite the achievement. French toast for breakfast, fried chicken with chee cheong fun for lunch, and salad wraps for dinner. Exercise with Konea (FlyProject) was good too. Work was aplenty. But nothing new there.

Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation: 5,691 (+88) total, 3,663 (+121) discharged, 96 (+1) dead. If Malaysia is in the recovery phase, why is the MCO still extended? R0 is below 1, and a few weeks back they said they were aiming of R0=0.9, but not stated what it is now.

I’ve been engaging a lot more on Twitter, because its short form, and its easier to start sharing links. I am planning a longer blog post for today, for a Rona leading list (it’s been added to regularly for quite a few days). I guess the difference is I’m engaging there… finally replying to tweets, etc. It is a bit more time consuming, but while I wait for things, and am done with chomping on mail, I do manage to hit Twitter.

Went to bed much earlier, watched a little Curb Your Enthusiasm (always a fan, just never managed to follow it closely till now). Hit the episode where Larry David broke up. Leaving is sometimes, so easy, but has a long thought out considered process, chipping away at things… it kinda hit me.

Up to eating roti telur, then lunch was a huge amount of Chinese food, ordered in (butter prawns, lala soup, glass noodles, claypot tofu, and a yam basket), and dinner was some banana pancakes. I did another Aiman Ox boxing workout which I enjoyed tremendously.

Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation: 5603 total (+71), 3,542 discharged (+90), and death toll is 95 (+2). During the health department press conference, there was talk about how the MCO could not be lifted quickly, but via a soft landing approach. Sure, we know that. But the focus on border controls… a tad annoying.

By 8.20PM (the Prime Minister, late as usual) decided that the MCO would be extended for another 2 weeks. Today I was more active on Twitter long before the announcement because I fear we have no exit strategy and they are just making stuff up as they go along. For one, our tests are dismal, and I’ve also got a bit of an unpopular opinion but we’ve got to be careful of our heroes letting us down. Science is showing random sampling having very low infection rates. We’re seeing next to no useful information coming out of the Health Ministry (contrast with Singapore), and I’m worried about the increasing authoritarian nature of the government. Back to more science and percentages in areas under the EMCO and you wonder what is going on? Comments on Malaysiakini might be the best way to gauge what the people are thinking. And we never had a problem with flattening the curve, if you look at stats again.

Anyway, it is 5am. I just finished work for the day. It is amazing how much the world needs Internet infrastructure now. Catch you later.