If you haven’t heard this yet, the state of Maryland bought $9 million in test kits and used the National Guard to defend the cargo shipment from being taken by the federal government:
Maryland authorities were so concerned about the federal government seizing a shipment of COVID-19 tests destined for the state that they made special arrangements to receive and guard the tests until they could be distributed, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said Thursday.
Hogan cited the fate of 3 million N95 masks purchased by the state of Massachusetts — all of which were confiscated in March by the federal government at the port of New York — as the main reason for taking extra precautions to secure his state’s order of 500,000 COVID-19 testing kits from South Korea.
ABC News
You can read more at the link, but the governor’s wife is a Korean-American who helped facilitate the purchase.
This is actually pretty clever thing for the Moon administration to do:
President Moon Jae-in offered a virtual tour of his office for kids Tuesday, as a replacement for an annual Children’s Day event on the Cheong Wa Dae lawn, due to the coronavirus.
Moon and first lady Kim Jung-sook participated in the production of a special video clip using the format of Minecraft, a popular sandbox video game.
With recordings of their voices and messages inserted as Minecraft characters, the clip features a tour of Cheong Wa Dae and a press briefing by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the country’s response to COVID-19.
Moon pointed out that children nationwide have been kept out of school for months.
“We are overcoming the coronavirus thanks to your patience,” the president said. “Please remember that just as you do, adults are endeavoring to beat the virus we are going through for the first time. We all are heroes.”
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
The KBO and ESPN have finally struck a deal to air Korean baseball games, however neither side is disclosing what the financial terms of this arrangement are:
The U.S. sports cable giant ESPN will broadcast South Korean baseball games to its American audience, starting with the first day of the season on Tuesday.
The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) announced Monday that ESPN has struck a deal with Eclat, the Korean company with international distribution rights to KBO games. ESPN will air one game per day and six games per week, with an opening day game between the Samsung Lions and the NC Dinos leading things off. The game is set to begin at 2 p.m. Tuesday Korean time, or 1 a.m. Tuesday Eastern Standard Time (EST).
The KBO said ESPN will also offer KBO highlights.
In its own press release, ESPN said it will become “the exclusive English-language home” for live KBO games, and the deal covers the postseason and the Korean Series, the best-of-seven championship final here. Games will mostly air on ESPN2 and on the ESPN APP.
ESPN will announce its game selections on a week-to-week basis. It added that its play-by-play voices, analysts and reporters will provide commentary in English, remotely, from their home studios. The group will include Karl Ravech, Jon Sciambi, Eduardo Perez, Jessica Mendoza and Kyle Peterson.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but it will be interesting to see how American fans take to watching Korean baseball. It is too bad the stadiums will not have fans because it would be interesting to get American reactions to Korean baseball fans.
Here is a long, but interesting read from Australia’s Daily Telegraph about a leaked document supposedly prepared by western governments about the possibility of the coronavirus being unintentionally released from the Wuhan lab:
China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion.
The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.
It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.
Daily Telegraph
You can read more at the link, but even though there is no direct evidence yet that it was unintentionally released from the lab, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing that way laid out in the article. Unfortunately it appears that circumstantial evidence is only relevant depending on ones politics.
Another step towards normalcy in South Korea:
The government has decided to further loosen its guidelines on social distancing, beginning Wednesday, amid clear signs of a slowdown in the number of new COVID-19 infections here, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said Sunday.
Korea Times
Under its “Distancing in daily life” plan, the government will allow the phased reopening of facilities that have been shut down amid the coronavirus outbreak, Chung said.
The government will also allow meetings and events to be held as long as participants abide by some basic quarantine guidelines.
You can read more at the link.
