On Monday, Minister of Health Magnus Heunicke announced that the healthcare system would begin resuming normal operations (DK) this week. Ordinary activities have been suspended since the outbreak of the epidemic, but now the epidemic is considered to be under control and the system has the capacity to treat other health issues as well. Patients normally have a right to be treated within 30 days. A backlog of cases needing treatment by both GPs and specialists has accumulated during the crisis, including thousands of elective surgery procedures.
The administration reached an agreement with organizations representing the Regions, the Municipalities and the Danish Medical Association but not with the other political parties. Last week, the opposition parties called for concrete measures to reestablish patient rights. Heunicke stated that he wished that the administration could have reached a broad agreement on reopening the system with the other parties, but the “political will” was lacking. The Ministry of Health has not set a date for formally reinstating the treatment guarantee. The chairman of the Danish Medical Association, Anders Rudkjøbing, stated that it would be irresponsible to reinstate the guarantee (DK) now because the system cannot yet operate at full normal capacity.
Are recovered patients immune?
The health authorities are working hard on an antibody test (DK) that will show whether recovered Covid-19 patients have acquired immunity to the disease. According to Martin Tolstrup from the Institute for Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University, who heads the project, most people who are infected develop antibodies, but it is not yet certain that they have developed immunity. His group is applying antibodies to live viruses in petri dishes to see whether the antibodies kill the viruses. This is an important issue, not only because the results will determine whether recovered patients, including healthcare personnel, can return to work. Plasma from patients with strong antibodies could also be used as a treatment for new Covid-19 patients. But that part of the project could take up to a year, says Tolstrup, around the same amount of time for a vaccine to be developed and approved.
Margrethe Vestager, the European Minister for Competition, has recommended that EU member states be prepared to take stakes in private companies because there is a risk that China will attempt to take over companies that are in a distressed financial condition because of the epidemic. Vestager, who is the former chair of the Danish Social Liberal Party, was speaking generally and not in reference to Denmark in particular. But DR’s business correspondent Jakob Ussing says that the warning applies to Denmark (DK) as well as to the larger European countries. China has had an interest in acquiring infrastructure and technology companies. After the financial crisis, a Chinese company bought Greece’s largest harbor, in Piræus, for example. China is interested in green energy, one of the fields in which Denmark excels, and a Chinese company has already acquired a tower plant from Vestas, Denmark’s leading wind energy firm.
Man’s Humans’ best friend in a crisis
International business competition is not the only area where a watchdog is needed. The Dansk Kennel Club reports a large rise – around 40 percent – in demand for dogs (DK) since the lockdown. Other dog breeders have seen similar interest, and animal shelters have fewer occupants than usual because of adoptions. According to breeders, the reasons that people want dogs now are that they have more time for pets at home under quarantine and they are not making plans for summer travel. A spokesman for Animal Protection Denmark, Jens Jokumsen, however, warns that a pet should not be an impulse purchase. People must also be prepared to care for it after the epidemic ends. They should also take time to consider what is the best breed for their family.
Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that published the infamous Mohammed cartoons that caused violent demonstrations and boycotts in the Arab world in 2005, has done it again. It has picked on another bloc of more than 1.3 billion people to offend. On Monday it published a drawing of the Chinese flag with the five stars replaced by images of the Wuhan coronavirus. The Chinese ambassador to Denmark called it insulting and demanded an admission of misjudgment and an apology. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Denmark concurred.
JP’s editor, Jacob Nybroe, responded that the drawing was not intended to be offensive, that the paper has a right to freedom of expression, and that China’s response reflected a “different type of cultural understanding.” He maintained that there was nothing to apologize for. The illustrator himself, Niels Bo Bojesen, made no comment. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was also asked whether she would apologize and responded in the same vein (DK): “[W]e have a very, very strong tradition in Denmark not only for freedom of expression but also for satirical drawings in Denmark, and we will also have it in the future.” Other party leaders concurred.
Satire in the eye of the target
In Denmark political cartoons are referred to as “satirical drawings,” but it is not clear that this one is satire. Readers may differ in their perception of satire. The paper says the drawing is simply a representation of a major world event at the moment. The flag image is used as a way of identifying the origin of the coronavirus, but it does not explicitly mock or demean China. It has no text except the word “Coronavirus” and no other elements besides the flag image that suggest a particular interpretation. The paper had previously used other national flags to identify issues. It seems to have deniability.
Does Frederiksen think it’s satire, or was she just using the usual name of the genre? If it is satire, then it is satirizing something in particular, presumably the Chinese nation or government. What would the implied criticism be – that China should have done something to prevent the outbreak? That the Chinese might have risked something like this happening because they eat wild animals, as in the SARS outbreak?
It wasn’t critical, but if it was, it had a right to be
In any case, this has become a confused game of imputation and double-guessing. It’s not just any country that the drawing refers to; it’s one with the most powerful censorship apparatus in the world and the only one that can bully the most powerful corporations in the world such as Google and Apple into complying with its censorship policies.
Whether or not China is being hypersensitive, once it takes offense and demands action, it elevates the drawing to an international incident. If the drawing itself is a test of China’s international diplomacy, its response poses a test for the Danish players and then the Danish players’ response in turn poses another test for China. Frederiksen’s statement was less “offensive” toward a superpower than her seemingly spontaneous comment that Donald Trump’s interest in buying Greenland was “absurd.”
Finessing deniability
Did JP knowingly or deliberately provoke China, even with its deniability? Was the paper being callous and unsympathetic toward the Chinese people suffering from the outbreak and the Chinese authorities scrambling to contain it? Should it have refrained from publishing the drawing because of the Chinese government’s sensitivity to possible criticism and the possible repurcussions on Denmark’s exports to the country?
Perhaps the “satire” was aimed indirectly at China’s censorship policies. That is, even though the drawing itself didn’t contain any particular criticism, it was a stealth attack that provoked a reaction by China that could be criticized for trying to curtail freedom of the press in another country. In this reading, the illustration thus gained a measure of ridicule or absurdity that true satire requires – even the wordplay found in much classic satire – insofar as China itself has publicized the “insult” far beyond JP’s weekly domestic circulation of 120,00 – the population of a mere village in China – and caused it to go viral, like the bug depicted.
