Coronavirus Government Global Briefing: April 6

Welcome to Coronavirus Government Global Briefing, Mandarin Premium’s morning update on everything in local and global government responses to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Beware the billionaire saviour

Since downplaying the “coronavirus panic” as “dumb” in early March, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spread a great deal of misinformation. As Gizmodo unpacks, this has included doubting a shortage of ventilators, claiming that children were “essentially immune”, that “false positives” could account for up to 80% of virus tests, and attempting to keep Tesla factories open in the face of California’s shutdown.

Then, Musk announced on March 24 that he’d bought over 1,255 “FDA-approved ventilators” from China and would begin delivering machines from ResMed, Philips and Medtronic — Tesla stickers and all — across America.

The only problem is that, as Financial Times discovered, the ResMed ventilators pictured above appear to be ~US$800 BPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) machines, which, although sometimes known as “non-invasive ventilators”, are primarily used for sleep-apnea to maintain consistent breathing patterns rather than...