The Flu (Health)

[Mick Harper]

Two important developments yesterday. Newsnight devoting a whole programme to it and Donald Trump coming out on our side. But let's not get too downhearted.

Assuming the whole thing blows over as a result of a combination of the flu cycle and the news cycle, does this mean the world has discovered another water cooler phenomenon? One pundit pointed out a possible water cooler crossover: "The cancellation of so many airline flights and a decline in economic activity generally will do wonders for global warming." And doubtless Alt-Right conspiracy theorists will worry about the increased possibility of a One World Government. I myself worry a little about the increased possibility of a Chinese World Government.

Certainly the world will never be the same again. So no change there.

[N R Scott]

[Mick Harper]

I wasn't very impressed by your video evidence -- seemed routine Chinese clunkiness to me -- but the Wuhan/World Military Games connection is interesting. I presume, as they always do, that the Chinese cleared the entire city of anything foreigners might find the least bit objectionable. So what do you get after rounding up all the low-life, herding them cheek-by-jowl in some insalubrious spot, and then allowing them back in after the round-eyes have gone? It's called coronasomething or other.

[Mick Harper]

I am reminded of our last (and biggest by far) outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. This was (albeit allegedly) traced back to a Yorkshire farm where the bloke was inadvertently creating microbial stews by shoving dead (i.e. diseased) animals into slurry pits.

[Mick Harper]

Jeez, the shit is hitting the worldwide fan from all directions. It's in free-fall. Time to take stock. Have we got it all wrong? This is the weird thing -- every time I bring myself to listen in on the details, the surer I am it's all bollocks. Take the facts I discovered today

1. Most of the deaths are males, over eighty with pre-existing conditions. Good riddance to the old farts. What I mean to say is they are the people that are taken from us every flu season

2. Sixty per cent will get such mild symptoms that either they won't know they've got it or bed rest at home is all that is necessary. Like flu. But what about the other forty per cent? How do you know when it's time to say, "Darling, it's no use, I'm getting worse not better. You've been an absolute angel but I think it's time to ring for an ambulance. I'll email the wife." The reason I ask is, what can a hospital do that you can't do at home? There's no magic potion. Anyone who's been in a medical, as opposed to a surgical, ward will know it's all they do, give out the potions and steal your Lucozade.

3. It's spread to New Zealand.

The clue came at the end when everyone started denouncing some Trump adviser who when asked what he would advise, said, "Tell people to turn their televisions off for twenty-four hours." Yup, it's our old friends the professional cadres who have found a purpose in life and aren't going to let this one go in a hurry. But another aspect shortly. If I last the night.

[Mick Harper]

Here's a very wispy straw in the wind. A woman has gone down with the virus in California with no known prior contact with a sufferer. 'Puzzling,' they're calling it. One hardly sees why since it can be caught from people having it but not knowing they've got it, but this is not the aspect that interests me.

You will recall mad cow disease which was caught from eating infected animals that had themselves been eating animals. It was all very weird (and very frightening) at the time but everyone said we understand it and can put a stop to it (which apparently they have). Except for one young woman who had been an absolutely strict vegan and caught it anyway. Everybody shrugged, the exception that proves the rule. Except you're not supposed to have exceptions in science.

[Mick Harper]

The cancellation of the UAE bike race (see the Sport thread) has been a major event in both the cycling and the medical world. It was because of two suspected cases among Italian support staff. Now, it turns out, that "at least one" doesn't have the virus. I'm pretty sure that such a circumlocutious formulation means the other one hasn't actually proved positive. There are about five hundred people involved in a World Tour Cycling event and the chances that two of them will be suffering from a cold at any one time is quite high.

[Mick Harper]

People are dying, so fucking what? That is the bit nobody ever gets right. Suppose somebody is trapped underground, what are we prepared to pay to rescue them? Basically there's no upper limit. What about installing a traffic calming measure that will, on average, save one life? Now there is a limit -- it used to be half a million -- but anyway the government has some actuarial figure that represents a human life. It's the difference between an actual person and a statistical person. So it is with flu. We can fiddle around at the margins, hand out vaccines to the elderly and whatnot, but basically some people will die and we don't fucking care.

Even if twenty million die, as with the Spanish Flu, we only care in a sort of "Oh dear, isn't it awful" sort of way. It is true that something has changed because at this scale someone we know will have died of Spanish Flu. But it's like the twenty million people that were dying contemporaneously in the First World War, it statistically won't be ourself and statistically it won't be someone that will affect us personally. It might be cousin Bill, but even that is a case of "Oh dear, isn't that awful".

Except it isn't... We have decided that the First World War was a tragedy that we have to spend the rest of the century having a fit of the vapours over and the Spanish Flu is something we watch on a Channel 4 documentary saying, "Ooh, I didn't know that. How awful." We treat one lot of twenty million deaths completely differently from the other set of twenty million deaths.

Now for some reason we have decided that the coronavirus is going to be like the First World War. I don't know why, and it's not too late to stop it, but there it is. The real tragedy I suppose will be if the stock market crashes, economic activity nosedives, every large scale gathering is cancelled and it turns out only to be a million deaths. Or a hundred thousand ... well, actually even if it turns out to be a hundred million. I accept that, maybe, going hysterical might actually reduce deaths, maybe even majorly, but my general advice to the world is to take your chances. Be a chartered accountant when you grow up, they have the right attitude.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

There was an ad campaign in the sixties "Nobody got fired ordering IBM" which is actually quite sensible advice. You'll know soon enough when it isn't. But the present situation has taken this to unfortunate extremes. "Nobody got fired advocating even more extreme measures than anyone else." Don't worry, they'll soon catch up.

[Mick Harper]

I do not follow the logic of these cancellations -- apart from the cancellation of the London Book Fair because it is attended exclusively by the elderly. ("Cheap, Mick"). The most obvious site of mass mingling is rush hour and I have not heard a single voice suggesting that this be staggered. Once you are relaxed about most of the working population spending several hours a day hugger-mugger I can't see it is really worth outlawing them spending several hours hugger-mugger in a rugger stadium. ("Cut 'bugger', family audience") I understand that one is elective and one is not but, hell, let people be elective then. Ditto rock concerts. They can go or they can stay. ("Don't try to be 'with it', Mick.")

And we have yet to hear the recommendations for the Third World from the great and the good, the high and the mighty. Nobody will dare to say that what is OK for countries that can afford the luxury of a precautionary approach might not be OK for countries that can't. It's no use ten thousand being saved from coronavirus if a hundred thousand die of malnutrition. Who's going to be racist enough to say, "Upper Volta, don't do as we do, do as we say"?

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Let's just make sure we're on the same page as everyone else even if we're reading the page differently. Every year a new strain of flu comes out of somewhere and current vaccines are not effective against it. That's my memory from past 'scares'. Indeed I distinctly remember the phrase, "The elderly are still recommended to have their jabs."

These new strains pass through the population (world, British) with relatively little fanfare beyond an occasional mention, usually in connection with winter bed shortages in the NHS. A proportion of mostly elderly sufferers die, again without fanfare. The proportion is never disclosed but it would (I guess, otherwise we would hear more about it) be less than the 2-3% the current bug is carrying off. No special precautions are advised though I do recall from time to time there are stories about this or that anti-virus medicine is in short supply and what is the minister doing about it?

So the question is: Are we better off with Plan A (above) or Plan B (global meltdown)? The AE version of the same question is: "Are we satisfied that the world is making an informed choice?" They can make the wrong choice -- AE has no problems with those -- as long as they are making a choice about the right thing.

[Mick Harper]

We are seeing the same pattern as with terrorism incidents. An elderly woman has died in Berkshire. She had coronavirus but whether she died of it is not established since she had severe health issues. In other words she is exactly what would be expected whether this was ordinary flu or a particularly malign strain of flu (or something else that happens to behave just like flu). But, and this is what happens with terrorism, we get the Prime Minister no less on the telly offering the nation's sympathy to the relatives etc. Then he goes on to hint it is time to change policy -- from containment (which he told us meant washing our hands ... I only wish we would of him) to ... I forget, level two blue alert or something.

This is absurd. Why are we reacting to something that we knew was inevitably going to happen? For months now we're going to have ordinary people dying of an ordinary cause blazing across our screens as though they were victims of bomb outrages. We might even get their funerals if it's somewhere picturesque.

Cut to a care home and an illustration of why washing your hands is completely daft. You've got to give them a five minute surgeon's scrub to make them germ-free. Then on to a quick Donald-bash. Trump in his bumbling way says most corona-sufferers will be well enough to go to work. Everyone promptly accuses him of telling corona-sufferers to go to work, which is not what he said at all. If coronavirus doesn't get me, nausea will.

[Mick Harper]

Some good might come from all this. We must look ahead to when the world looks back on all this a bit shamefacedly. If we're wrong we'll be wrong alone so little harm done (if you see what I mean). We can be wrong in two ways: 1) it's a mega-event and all the activity was justified, whether effective or not 2) it wasn't anything special but the world never even notices that it has just lost 10% of WGNP for nothing. The comparisons would be with global warming but the difference there is we won't be around when the truth comes out.

But it provides a model. A much speeded-up model since we have already been through the stages 1) alarm 2) traction 3) denial 4) unanimity 5) action. But not 6) re-action. This last is interesting because its absence (you conspiracy theorists/ conspiracy theory checkers should weigh in) is surely significant. Why is there no 'fossil fuel lobby' hard cases holding out? Why isn't even Michael O'Leary sounding off?

We must be up against the human condition. Human beings have an evolutionary adaptation that programs them to panic when faced with species extinction. No, that hasn't worked with global warming. More research is needed. Still, in the meantime, we must come up with a word that means "the cure was worse than the disease". That there isn't such a word in the English language ... now that is significant.