The Flu (Health)

[Wile E. Coyote]

What I don't still understand is why the west copied Xi Jinping with the lockdowns. There are no western scientific papers before 2020 recommending lockdowns for trying to deal with a outbreak of a respiratory illness or flu variant. Lockdowns were not mentioned in documents for pandemic planning. This lockdown paradigm was not the thinking of WHO. It was the response of Xi Jinpeng.

Most likely, Xi Jinpemg imposed the Wuhan lockdown as a political remedy to stop internal or international criticism of his government. Ish has speculated that this might have been because of cell phone masts. But it might have been for example the fact that Xi Jinpeng knew the COVID19 strain was created or leaked from a Chinese lab. You take your pick. My emerging theory is below.

What is unclear is why the west followed Xi Jinping's example.

We know that Xi Jinpeng visited Imperial college on his 2015 state visit. We know that Mr Cai Qi, Secretary of the CPC Municipal Committee for Beijing, visited in May 2018 and saw some of the ways Imperial has become the UK’s number one academic research partner with China.

We also know that Chen Jining is an Imperial alumnus who serves as Mayor of Beijing.

This collaboration between Imperial and the Chinese universities and corporations is over data, concerning air quality, transport infrastructure and smart technology.

Could it be that China closed down Wuhan as part of a massive experiment to be a world leader in technology to improve air quality in cities. Imperial supplied the data scare, so the Wuhan example was followed in the west?.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/air-quality

Cities First.

[Wile E. Coyote]

What was needed were closures, and then re openings, to measure the impact that traffic was having on cities, so that new smart technologies could be developed. These closures could only be achieved by the creation of a health scare, so the closures would be seen as beneficial.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Smart Track and Trace technology is doing nothing to control Covid 19 but is providing valuable data to track an individual's movements. This will be the basis for a much better understanding of how we live and move around cities.

[Mick Harper]

Good stuff! Whether I agree with it or not. What I am thinking about is Next Time. For sure there will be a next time, such is the way of the world, but will it be a case of Pandemic Fatigue? Will people say, 'Let it rip, we'll take our chances." That was my original view and, modified, it sort of still is. (I am unusually unsure.)

Thus, if we had isolated and thrown money at the Care Homes early doors, things would have gone slightly differently. But something happened between the first wave and the second wave, about which I am far from clear. Suddenly, the sheer numbers meant that the Care Home deaths were the least of our troubles -- and, callously, are always the least of our troubles, maybe a bit of a boon on the quiet.

The Big Divide remains this: do what various populist regimes did, masterly inactivity and watch the number go dizzyingly high, or do what the Norms did and watch the numbers go uncomfortably high. If I thought the various academic honchos and the civil services were capable of learning the lessons (or even learning how to apply the old ones properly) I would advocate masterly inactivity (i.e. no lockdowns) but plenty of ... ah, there's the rub.

[Grant]

Surprisingly Mick isn’t thinking clearly. Must be that bout of illness a few weeks ago. The stats make it clear that Covid is nothing like the disease the media tell us it is.
I’ve already explained nearly a year ago that the cruise ships were a wonderful experiment in trying to ascertain the ultimate death rate - about 0.15% of the population. I’ve just realised there’s another one - the death rate amongst doctors

[Grant]

At the beginning of this crisis we were told that doctors were at particular risk and that many had already died. These scare stories stopped in the middle of 2020. It’s very difficult to get accurate statistics- as though no-one cares any more. But it looks to me as though the deaths amongst doctors in the UK is around 150-200. That’s out of 130,000 registered doctors. A death rate uncannily near the death rates on the cruise ships.
How can this pandemic be anything other than hysteria when the death rates amongst doctors is so low?

[Mick Harper]

Your thinking is all too clear. You should try fuzzy logic sometime. I've never said that I am ruling any of this out. The difference between me and you is that I formulated an assumption early on but a) it only coincidentally coincided with nut-job explanations and b) I wander all over the shop as stuff comes in. Or new thoughts strike. As you say, one of the stuff that has come in is a constant change in victim profiles (or a perception of this, or the reporting of this.) If true, this could be sociological, but it could also be viruses mutating. Or a third reason.

[Ishmael]

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Wile E. Coyote]

Scientists who were skeptical about Lockdowns were labelled as COVID deniers. Those like Trump who stated that COVID was out of China, a common labeling convention up to then, cf South African variant, Kent variant, Brazilian variant etc etc.. were labelled racists.

The Chinese paradigm had replaced the western.

We clapped along. https://bit.ly/3dNjjK6

[Grant]

At a time of deep chaos, where I agree no one really knows what’s going on, it is even more important to study the evidence. The death rate hardly rose at all in 2020. In fact the rate was higher ten years ago. Therefore, this pandemic is not worth shutting down the economy for.
There is no point in constantly changing your opinion as more “evidence” comes in. The truth is in the death rate.

[Grant]

But this is truly a fascinating phenomenon. We are busy demonstrating that we are just as irrational as those medievals we like to sneer at. Leeches and blood letting are much more rational than this madness.

[Grant]

And it’s chastening that Mick, who rightly sneers at the group think shown by academics, appears to have been taken in by this particular example. I must go back and examine some of my favourite hobby-horses.

[Mick Harper]

I am not sure what I am being accused of. (He sobs.) Which particular group am I being accused of being a group-think member of? Since I have changed my position it follows that I must be part of several groups, albeit sequentially. But then, with the possible exception of Ishmael, nobody has claimed to occupy a unique position, so we must all be guilty of group-thought.

[Wile E. Coyote]

I am all in favour of new paradigms. Fuzzy thinking, rather than evidence, is important in the development process. It does not bother me whether Xi Jinpeng a Chinese communist came up with something better than that of Western scientists, that is, if it works.

However, to his discredit, Coyote has a lot more experience of ending up in the canyon, than you lot. Practice does not make perfect, it generates an awareness of when things are going terribly wrong, and a plunge beckons. It comes when the research programme is not opening up interesting questions and new possibilities, but instead you have to scramble round to close down debate. You try more and more obscure ideas to justify your original theory.

It is now known that American states which did not lock down have fared no worse than states that did. This is still not evidence that Lockdowns don't work, there could be climatic differences, or different population densities, but it certainly is not evidence that Lockdowns are effective. Mysteriously, we do not have evidence that those locked down were less impacted than those essential workers (other than those working on COVID Wards) who have gone into work as normal.

Switching to the latest area of concern is not evidence that lockdowns work. India is a big country, regrettably in the region of 250,000 to 300,000 people die every day. The figures show that so far about 195,000 have died from Covid19 since it started. The Indian public health service is stretched and in crisis, but as a country India puts in very little resource to public health so this is not an unusual situation. This does not make it right, but it is not proof of a Covid pandemic which requires locking all down. I really doubt locking down in Asian cities which have large slums would be more effective than locking down in Western cities.

The Indian govt, not unreasonably, has based its response on vaccine production but there are of course a lot of people to vaccinate.