The Flu (Health)

[Mick Harper]

I need to take a backward step but before that an important point made by an impressive woman on Newsnight. If you ban soccer crowds those crowds will go and do something else e.g. go to the pub which is actually collectively more detrimental. She didn't go on to say, so I will, that the best way to keep soccer crowds at home is by showing soccer matches on the telly.

Now the NBA has just closed down its season minutes after one player tested positively. (My sister rang, she was watching her Utah Jazz when it all kicked off.) But nothing's going to happen to that basketball player, nothing's going to happen to footballers playing matches in empty stadiums. Sure they're going to spread it to one another and then onwards to vulnerable people but they will do that anyway. So, not only should football continue it should be staggered so there are matches every night. They can do that easily enough without having fans to factor into the rejigging.

Now the step back. Coronoavirus is different from bad flu in one respect, it gums up intensive care. So, I agree, some different steps may be necessary. Probably not the ones they are taking but ones that do not reflect my own insouciance.

[Mick Harper]

Speaking of which, as a recluse, I am particularly invulnerable to coronavirus since my only meaningful interface with human beings is at the Tesco checkout. Save for West Ham vs Wolves on Sunday. Assuming I catch it there, and assuming we are thirteen days behind Italy as everybody says, I will be arriving at intensive care just as the overloaded NHS is going into triage mode. That will mean some smarmy git is going to be passing my bed with his retinue and his clipboard saying, "Michael John Harper, what are the prognostications?" "It says here he called you a smarmy git." "Make him Category Three." "Oh, Sir, he's an Applied Epistemologist of some repute." "Category Four."

[Grant]

Interesting how many public figures are going down with it after getting the sniffles and insisting that they be tested.

Of our 650 MPs one of them definitely has the bug. If you multiply the population of our country by 1/650 there are 100,000 out there spreading it about. Any attempt at containing the spread won't work any more.

[Mick Harper]

And surely never did. I have formed the deep impression that epidemiologists are either not out of the top drawer or out of their depth. It may even be that epidemiology does not exist as a field of study.

[N R Scott]

[Mick Harper]

I'm not sure these figures are so out of line given the rate of expansion and that most sufferers are, as it were, pre-sufferers. Or even, we have been told, non-suffering sufferers. Wouldn't 'epidemiologists' say that 100,000 'out there' is about right?

[N R Scott]

[Mick Harper]

Well no. As I understand it, it all depends on how far along the 100,000 are in the infection window. The same numbers will eventually and presumably come out at the end. Although, having said that, maybe they won't and we will be able to make a start on working out what works and what doesn't work. But there are so many variables (one per country, one per part of a country) I predict not. That's epidemiology for you. Their numbers will be going up exponentially though so the explanations will be going up exponentially too.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

The genesis is important. If you recall, the big difference this time was "we were waiting for it". And it got given a name early doors. The nearest thing I can recall was the Avian Something or Other that was killing domestic fowl and we watched transfixed as it spread (via unstoppable birds) towards us. And went away. The other biggies were treated, like you say, as just This Year's New Bugaroo. Apparently we developed herd immunity quite rapidly with those (a few thousand didn't).

However there was one other difference this time and that was the Wuhan Situation which still, to my mind, has not been explained one little bit. So it started there. So what? The rules of epidemiology apply there as they do throughout the rest of the universe.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The WHO has a financial incentive in declaring a pandemic.

Those who invested in pandemic bonds will be cursing the declaration.

https://bit.ly/2TPUIKE

I might as well give up. I have become N R Scott. He does this sort of thing better.

[Mick Harper]

The Iranians have just asked for five billion in emergency funds from the World Bank and as the worst affected country bar China ought to be a shoe-in. It will be interesting to see how Trump reacts (the World Bank rarely moves without American approval). It would be good politics to approve it smartly but my guess is La Donald will delay it sufficiently for the crisis to be over by the time it arrives and the Iranians will be able to spend the money funding terrorists.

[Mick Harper]

I daren't turn on the news these days without hearing of a new horror. I just caught the words "over-seventies will have to self-isolate for four months" before putting it on pause to type this. The whole world is going ape-shit to stop something that can't be stopped in order to stop something that will stop all by itself.

Maybe the world going ape-shit will prevent some deaths; maybe the world going ape-shit won't prevent any deaths; maybe the world going ape-shit will actually increase the number of deaths. Nobody knows. But, as far as I can see, I'm the only person in the world who is saying that whatever the number of deaths it will absolutely pale into insignificance compared to the cost of the world going ape-shit. It is always a joy to me occupying a unique position, but on this occasion I'd rather I didn't.

Now to return to the prospects for the over-seventies. It looks like no-change for me.

[Mick Harper]

I will have to backtrack once again with the news of 368 deaths in Italy in a single day. This is so staggering, so out of kilter, that we must pause to make sure it isn't either a mistake, a statistical artefact of counting (Sundays can be different) or just a true statistical freak. But assuming it is true, and assuming Italy is nothing special, we have to conclude that this is not like any flu we have ever seen. Assuming pro rata, ninety thousand a year in a single country is still only in Spanish flu territory (1918) but we have to accept that those were different times and such figures nowadays would be panic-inducing rather than pandemic.

It certainly re-invigorates the idea of herd immunity -- more mocked than perhaps it should be -- and, more practically, of introducing a vaccine that hasn't been given the usual years of testing. That would be dangerous to the individual but it would have to be, nevertheless, mandatory to have the desired effect. However, I still can't rid myself of the notion that these things have some kind of pre-ordained quality and closing down the world just makes it later rather than sooner.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Chad is the numbers man.

Still.

Italy is an older population. If you have a lot of 80 plus' (with a weakened immune system) this is more likely to happen. Countries with younger populations will have lower rates. Italy health system is overwhelmed, countries with better health systems might not have this sort of problem. These deaths are not caused by simply Coronavirus. They are caused by multiple health problems and Coronavirus.

Let us not forgot a heatwave in 2003, is thought to have killed more 30,000 in Europe. It didn't, it killed 30,000 people with multiple health problems many of whom were elderly.