The Covid19 shambles

When I first wrote a warning about Covid19 at the beginning of February I was not sure how big an event it would be but suspected that it would be profound. But even I have been shocked by what has happened. I am not talking about the health implications which by comparison to any historical pandemic have been underwhelming. Spanish flu for example killed 4% of the global population within 18 months - Covid19 has killed around 1.2 million out of a population of 7.8 billion people to date. A personal tragedy for each family but hardly society breaking in nature though there is still time. 

What has been more shocking has been the utter shambles which has been the response to the disease across much of the West. Take my country for example in late February / early March the UK government appeared to settle on a strategy of herd immunity. This is the idea that you allow the virus to spread through the healthy population building up a systemic immunity whilst attempting to protect the most vulnerable. This is or was the accepted strategy in most expert associations and institutions across the world. 

The response from the media and many experts was immediate and unrelenting. Accusations of politicians simply wanting to kill off the elderly, of them being cruel and or even labelling them as murderers became the norm. These came from the media but were largely powered by many ‘experts’ who we would have expected to show a modicum of professionalism - alas for many the last four years had clearly been too much and they were unable to rein in their political preferences when the country faced a crisis. 

This was further exacerbated by the daily briefings from Downing Street where political journalists were too lazy and incompetent to actually understand the science behind infectious diseases and simply kept asking the same retarded questions again and again on the hunt for a story or ‘scalp’. So instead of genuine questions and an attempt to hold the government to account we had gotcha questions with zero depth. 

Due to their abject failure to try and understand the basic science the briefings soon deteriorated into journalist after journalist demanding to know when the government was going to lockdown. The same question repeated again and again so that the journalists could get a video of themselves for their social media accounts. “Lockdown for what?” I would find myself shouting at the TV “What are the implications?”. Sadly these basic questions eluded the journalistic class. Why worry about the future when you can try and get some cheap headlines today. 

Sadly parliament was no better. A brief perfunctory set of debates and they rushed for the doors after handing the government near unlimited power to do what they wanted. We can be thankful for the right of the Tory party who at least worried enough about governmental power to insert guillotine clauses into the legislation. The left by comparison who barely months earlier had been shouting about Johnson trying to pull off a coup rushed to give him unlimited powers. 650 bed wetters who couldn’t bring themselves to engage with the problem or take big decisions - an utter waste of space and an absolute shameful abdication of responsibility. 

From what I could see not one journalist or parliamentarian asked what would happen to the economy, the healthcare system or to mental health. No one asked what the long term plan was or even how we would get out of a lockdown. No one cared enough to ask basic questions before the country undertook the largest curtailment of civil liberties in our history. Incompetence, laziness, stupidity or just disinterest - take your pick.

So into lockdown we went. 

I remember watching Unherd TV interviewing Johan Giesecke from Sweden who was advising their government, he actually warned that governments would find it very hard to leave lockdowns once they entered them because they would be asked “Why are you willing to let people die now?”. 

He was right. (Link)  

The lockdown was supposed to last a month or so, it actually lasted for four months. A nice long sabbatical for the loud middle classes who couldn’t cope with risk and who had a whale of a time in their nice big houses with gardens. These were the people who had the money for tuition for their children and might even have worked throughout remotely. Not so much for the working class or those trapped in the cities in small apartments but you know who cares about them.

Even before the lockdown ended those pesky implications were being shouted about by those in the know. It didn’t take a genius to realise that if you took most of the economy offline for an extended period there would be ramifications. Pretty soon the GDP figures started rolling in -10% - 15% - the numbers were meaningless as so large. The same class of people who had screamed about Brexit causing the economy to grow 15% less over 15 years suddenly didn’t care about a real economic catastrophe. Why would they - they were sitting at home relaxing with the kids. Labour took to screaming “You want to put money before people” at anyone who flagged this, happily missing the economy was people’s lives in aggregate and unemployment kills. 

Non-politicised doctors like Karol Sikora tried to raise awareness of the health implications warning that between 75 - 150,000 extra deaths would occur because people were not getting cancer screenings and treatments. That was just cancer - what about heart disease, mental health and plenty of others. That was just in the UK, pretty soon the UN was warning of a global famine of biblical proportions due to supply going offline as demand collapsed. 40 - 100 million are now in danger globally over the next 12 - 18 months. The silence has been deafening from politicians, journalists and experts with a few exceptions. Apparently worries about people's lives don’t extend to non Covid19 sufferers. Almost as if admitting the problem was admitting culpability for pushing lockdown. 

The media have shown itself as stupid, incompetent, lazy and politically biased. Normally I would accept that it bad news sells and when your business model is dead you need all the help you can get but not when we are in the middle of a crisis. The last nine months have been an extended shitshow of journalists using every statistic to prove how badly the UK is doing. Any pretence of impartiality has been thrown in the toilet as they continue their petty Brexit war by other means. Week after week of comparison to country X or Y who are doing better than the UK because of masks, then testing, then track and trace and then better governance - normally defined by having a vagina. Then some cleverly massaged statistics to show what a failure the country is. When one theory fails just move onto the next. 

Politicians showing all the statesmanship which we have come to expect from the pygmies that ‘lead’ the West now decided to get in on the act by pointing and laughing at the USA. “Ah but at least we are not America run by Trump, look at the state of that, Europe is far superior”. You wouldn’t mind if they had done it private but no they did it all over social media. Utterly contemptible and amply demonstrating their meagre intelligence. 

Just embarrassing. 

It shouldn’t have come as a shock to any marginally interested person that infections would go down in the summer when UV light is high and it is warmer and would go up in the winter when Vitamin D deficiency kicks in, UV light is low and it is cold. This is the norm for all respiratory diseases. Spanish flu did exactly the same jumping across the equator as the seasons changed - that is why there was a second wave. But it appears to have shocked politicians, experts and journalists who have all started looking confused as infections have risen in countries across Europe. They aren't laughing at the USA anymore. 

Lockdowns don’t make the virus go away; they simply force down the infection rate. As early as April I had said on Twitter that countries that locked down early would need to keep their borders shut or they would just get it twice as bad later on. Alas basic logic eluded the chattering classes. They have watched as their lockdown champions, those who they had patted on the head and declared were far superior than others get overrun by Covid19 and seen hospitalisations surge. Suddenly suppressing the virus in the spring doesn’t look so smart as their systems struggle to cope. Of course you get silence from those who pushed the solution - culpable moi?

Throughout this pandemic testing has been pushed as the only way out of the 'crisis'. But at the moment this appears to be an utter farce. The PCR test which is used is so unreliable that it could be finding up to 3x more infections than actually exist. The actual test magnifies the genetic code within the sample - effectively doubling it in every cycle. Some labs are using 25 cycles - some up to 40. At that level of doubling anything left over will show up. Furthermore within countries there is no stable testing environment. Capability is rushed to perceived problematic areas where dead or live viruses are picked up showing a massive spike in infections regardless of whether this is true not. The basic truth is if you massively expand testing with a bad test you will find alleged infections.

This is easily available information should the media be interested but barring a few exceptions it is not. The experts and politicians keep pushing the perceived infection rate as 'proof' of the virus being out of control within the UK but infections don't equal hospitalisations. The truth is that in the UK Covid19 appears to have burnt through whole regions such as London where there has been no substantial uplift in people admitted to hospital. But the media doesn't care because it doesn't sell - their lazy disregard for data and facts is sadly the norm now. 

That is not to say that infections have not climbed in places with a knock on effect on hospitalisations. As I said this is expected with a disease which is endemic to the population. Much as it might annoy many, local lockdowns are a logical way of trying to manage the impact on the healthcare system. But sadly here politics has gotten in the way. The political parties are stuck trying to outdo each on showing how authoritarian they can be in saving lives. I mean who cares about civil liberties or a functioning economy especially if you are left wing and you can virtue signal. It is fine for the 3 devolved assemblies - they don’t have to pay. It is merry England that will end up stumping up the cash as they are net beneficiaries of money from us.  

So into a national lockdown we will stagger (along with much of Europe) with even the government admitting that they have no understanding of the economic or health implications and still with no plan. I mean SAGE itself only thinks that it will push back infections by 28 days. So after that what another and another and another? The saddest part is the data shows that the regional lockdowns were working with hospitalisations coming down in many places. But that is just evidence and if the last nine months have taught us anything we live in emocracies now. Societies where emoting and saying the right thing is more important than doing the right thing.

And all for what - a hope for a vaccine that may come next year but in all likelihood won’t be 100% reliable and almost certainly won’t work on every mutation of Covid19 because it is an RNA virus and hence mutates continuously. So it will help around the edges but countries will still need to deal with the reality of a virus which is now endemic across much of the world and so will enter any country as soon as they open their borders. So all those people trumpeting New Zealand or Australia may want to consider that they will be here soon enough - probably in February when their autumn starts and biology kicks in with the all the predictability of a screw being turned. 

What an utter shambles.