Covid-19: what should have been done and what is to be done

This list of failings is not just being wise after the event. All but one of the measures have been applied elsewhere in the world or even belatedly in the UK.

General principles

Make sure that the National Health Service can not only cope with seasonal emergencies but also can gear up quickly for the sudden unforeseen. There were warnings with the swine 'flu pandemic of 2009 and later bird 'flu epidemics, so much so that the Cameron government commissioned the Cygnus exercise. The findings were virtually ignored. A strategic stock of personal protective equipment for health service and social care workers has to be maintained and any time-limited items replenished. The English stock was run down.

Learn from others' experience

If an exotic disease emerges elsewhere and its symptoms are known, test incomers for those symptoms. Do not wait for the perfect specific test. As we know now, asymptomatic victims will be missed but the most obviously infectious cases can be identified and possibly hundreds of lives saved. This is what Taiwan, with justified suspicion that they were on the edge of a new SARS, did from January 1st.

Do not wait for the World Health Organisation or the European Centre for Disease Control. They are worthy bodies good at organising public health campaigns but because of bureaucracy, move slowly. 

Protect people most at risk

In addition to providing PPE to health and social care personnel, press retail outlets and public transport organisations to do the same for their staff who have to interact with the public. Do not force hospital staff to work overtime - stress increases the risk of infection. And the one original suggestion I would make is to stand down over-50s, given that this is the cohort most at risk.

Use existing techniques and facilities

Identify hot-spots and apply quarantine ruthlessly. New Zealand did the latter. Use the existing contract tracing arrangements for notifiable disease, "boots on the ground" and encourage local community coordination and action. In addition to China, Italy, France and Spain soon emerged as spreading centres of the disease, but the UK delayed quarantine measures until  July. Do not stake all on new technology. South Korea achieved wonders with a smartphone-based track and trace system, but this is probably the most connected and tech-savvy country in the world. Ceredigion has shown the way with traditional methods and common sense. Although infection figures have risen with the influx to Aberystwyth of students for the new term, the county maintains the lowest infection figures in Wales. 

Take the public with you

When you say you are consulting people before imposing control measures, really consult. Listen to people and, when you reach a decision, inform them before you release it to the media.

There is more that can be done, no doubt

 - but surely if the measures above had been applied swiftly, there would have been no need for a general lock-down, with all the implications that had for the economy. Local clusters of infection would spring up but they could have been identified swiftly and dealt with.

Herd instinct is an illusion. It is based on the experience with the MMR vaccine, which does give practically life-time protection. Documented reinfection cases show that Covid-19/SARS2 behaves more like other corona viruses, such as those that cause common colds. 

Cummings and Johnson continue to make mistakes. There is not just one alternative to draconian lock-downs; Phil Hammond MD writes in the current Private Eye:

"No one sensible is suggesting the virus should be allowed to run free.
But plenty of sensible people are wondering how other countries are
controlling the virus without the need for more lockdowns.

"Wild spread of Covid-19 is slowed by doing the basics: hands, face, space
and indoor ventilation. Because so much spread is asymptomatic, it is
vital to stamp on symptomatic infections as soon as they occur. The UK's
test and trace system cannot cope. It has rationed tests so thousands
can't get them, and delayed contact tracing of more than 15,000 positive
tests by up to 10 days because of a 'computer glitch'. So up soars the
wild spread.

"Countries with a grip on the virus without lockdowns have ruthless test
and trace systems. Testing, reporting, tracing and quarantining are all
done at high speed, with high efficiency. The poor are supported to
isolate. There is a focus on breaking chains of transmission. Each new
case is treated as if it were the first. And levels of public trust and
compliance are high because the public services are efficient."

To see how the UK is doing in comparison with other countries, CNN and Johns Hopkins University provide figures here.

 

Nightjet

This is the brand name for Austrian Railways sleeper trains, as The Man in Seat 61 explains. Now there is to be an expansion. Railway Gazette reported this summer:
Austrian Federal Railways held a groundbreaking ceremony on August 21 to launch the construction of a €40m facility at its Wien Simmering depot for the maintenance of its Nightjet overnight train fleet. The project includes construction of a 235 m x 24 m building with two tracks, equipment for removing bogies, movable platforms for accessing the train roofs and a train preheating system. Completion is planned for early 2022. The Nightjet network currently comprises 19 routes. Speaking at the groundbreaking, Federal Minister for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation & Technology Leonore Gewessler said Wien was already the EU city with the most night train services, and ÖBB CEO Andreas Matthä said the new depot would facilitate further expansion of the services.

Two things occurred to me when reading this article. First, why cannot a UK minister hold a portfolio which specifically includes climate action and environment along with energy and technology? Secondly, the time is ripe for a thriller set on a state-of-the-art train in succession to The Lady Vanishes, Murder on the Orient Express or The Narrow Margin. Perhaps Austrian Rail will sponsor one.

According to Railwatch magazine, president Macron of France has announced a rail expansion programme which will include two new night train routes to be launched in 2022. In the same year, Sweden has plans for sleepers to Brussels and Hamburg.

Neglected Composer

 Radio 3 has incorporated a thread of neglected composers in its afternoon programming this week. This is a very worthwhile exercise to restore to the repertoire music which for various reasons has been forgotten. However, the BBC continues to turn its back on Alan Bush. The original objection to playing his music was clearly his Marxism, though no doubt his use of folk melodies alla Vaughan Williams would not have endeared him to the R3 chiefs devoted to the Schoenberg revolution. Now that the threat of Soviet communism has disappeared, and there has been a return to accepting all schools of music, there is surely a case for restoring Bush.

When anti-Semites like Wagner and many French composers, including the Nazi collaborator Canteloube, continue to be aired, surely Bush's communism is no longer an obstacle?

Capitalism has not failed

 No matter what Extinction Rebellion or even the Pope may say, capitalism has not failed. It has brought human civilisation to its current high pitch of development. It has been and continues to be a driving force through virtually all civilisations since man discovered the benefits of the exchange of commodities. It even flourished underground in supposedly socialist states.

What has failed is civil society (in the end, us as voters) in curbing its excesses and regulating it. The warnings of Adam Smith have not been heeded, that the state was in danger of capture by merchant elites.

According to an article by Paul Sagar on Aeon's web pages,

The context of Smith’s intervention in The Wealth of Nations was what he called ‘the mercantile system’. By this Smith meant the network of monopolies that characterised the economic affairs of early modern Europe. Under such arrangements, private companies lobbied governments for the right to operate exclusive trade routes, or to be the only importers or exporters of goods, while closed guilds controlled the flow of products and employment within domestic markets. As a result, Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of cabals of bosses. Smith saw this as a monstrous affront to liberty, and a pernicious restriction on the capacity of each nation to increase its collective wealth. Yet the mercantile system benefited the merchant elites, who had worked hard to keep it in place. Smith pulled no punches in his assessment of the bosses as working against the interests of the public. As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’

Up until the cementing of universal suffrage in democracies in the twentieth century, the barons of industry needed to lobby powerful chief ministers and appointed officials. They now have to buy representatives to achieve their aims or, in the latest twist, buy votes via social media.

Their aim was and is to concentrate capital in the hands of as few people as possible, to the detriment of common humanity. In this they are almost as inimical to the power of market capitalism as the most totalitarian socialist state. 

We need genuinely to "drain the swamp" - not of public servants of integrity, but of placemen and lobby groups which have embedded themselves in the government machine. We need transparency and fairness of elections overseen by a genuinely impartial Electoral Commission with genuine power of enforcement. That should produce governments prepared to lead in the public interest.

Cambridge Analytica messed with your minds

Channel 4 News obtained a copy of the voter database used by the Trump campaign in 2016 and seemingly being mined again for the current presidential contest. In broadcasts last week they showed how the well-endowed social media campaign targeted BAME voters with the aim of deterring them from voting  and white voters appealing to their basic instincts. The importance of Facebook to this strategy was highlighted. It seems that in spite of protestations to the contrary from Mark Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg, FB had permitted to circulate on the platform fake videos attacking Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the time of the first presidential debate of 2020. (One of these videos superimposed an earpiece on the image of Biden, implying that he received outside help or direction during the debate; another showed Biden and Harris laughing and cheering against a background of black riots.)

The black arts of voter dissuasion are nothing new. Indeed, the nastiness of campaigners for the two big parties in door-step canvassing (all oral and non-attributable, of course) has put off many Liberal Democrats and independents  from standing in local elections after just one effort. What has changed is their potentiation by the application of technology.

GDPR was supposed to have put a stop to voter-profiling via collection of personal data as an aid to targeted political messages. These techniques were exploited ruthlessly to the full by the Tories between 2010 and 2015 to erode Liberal Democrat support particularly in the south-west of England, using mail-shots, in a campaign which the Electoral Commission surprisingly ruled as legal. All GDPR has done is to militate against the aggregation of data by political parties. But why build up your own voter database when the likes of Cambridge Analytica, mining existing resources via the Web, can do it for you? As a consequence, movements funded by rich corporations or oligarchs have an advantage over traditional political parties.

Did she get round to the bass player?

Is it really fifty years since Janis Joplin died? It seems so. She once said that there was nothing wrong with Texas if you wanted to settle down. Texas could not cope with the outrageous, and she was outrageous. Of her free-and-easy sex life and touring with her band, she is quoted as saying "I'm saving the bass player for Omaha".

Hollywood migrates to New Zealand

 In another place, I mused about the possibility of Radio 3 making up for the lack of live music broadcasts by relaying concerts from New Zealand. As we should all know by now, NZ led by Jacinda Ardern and her expert advisers has not seen a Covid-19 epidemic. Consequently, it has been possible for live performances for a full concert hall audience to return in the depths of the antipodean winter. Classic FM has a link to a YouTube of that first celebratory concert.

Hollywood has latched on to the possibilities of low-level virus precautions in state-of-the-art production facilities. Radio New Zealand reports that "more than 200 film and TV production workers will have arrived in New Zealand by the end of the year, despite border restrictions.".  

The New Zealand Film Commission said the productions would do many shoots on location, which would help spread the benefits around the country. But head of international screen attraction Philippa Mossman said it was not just about the money.
"We speak a lot in economic terms but it's also very uplifting I think in hope for everybody to see this exciting activity going on and see New Zealand reflected back on those screens when those productions are finally released into the world."
[...]
The policy had its critics, though.

Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway accepted it must be hard for those who could not get back into the country at the moment to see these crews given a green light.

"I just want to acknowledge that it is a very, very difficult situation for thousands of temporary visa holders who have been asked to make that sacrifice in the interests of keeping the virus out of New Zealand and maintaining that status we have held for quite some time." 

 Lees-Galloway said the exemptions were made with the economy in mind. "The film crews that are coming here, it's not just them that will be working. They are creating jobs for people here in New Zealand - New Zealand citizens and residents plus potentially some people who hold work visas that are here in New Zealand as well. So people who meet those criteria are able to come because they offer that significant impact for New Zealand."

Me, I am hoping against hope that The Brokenwood Mysteries will continue in production.

National poetry day

 This is a day for the enjoyment, discovery and sharing of poetry as the organisers' web site puts it. For me, it is a time for recalling favourites, not all of which are by the great names. As we are approaching winter, autumnal themes come to mind. J.D.C, Pellow's "After London" in these days when great cities are having to adjust to life after pandemics is particularly apt. 

One of the few poems I can still recite by heart is by Walter Savage Landor, known in these parts for his favourable comparison of Swansea Bay with the Bay of Naples. It is good to learn from the wikipedia entry that he was a Whig and an influence on Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, two more of my heroes.

Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.