Tuesday 31 March 2020

Kinglake's 19 days in Cairo in 1835, at the worst point of the plague

I loved Eothen when I was, I bitterly regret to say, an idle undergraduate reading anything that was not on my syllabus. I am now rereading Alexander Kinglake's account of surviving the plague in Cairo, attended, if my memory serves me, by a man who had been Byron's servant. 

I thought it was one of the books that one 'had to read', though anything but a chore, but like most of those books my life experience has taught me that nobody else has. Dr Johnson said, talking of Greek and Latin authors, that it is remarkable how little literature there is in the world. Nowadays that's true too of English classics.

Kinglake's nineteen days in Cairo must have been at the high point of the plague, when the death rate rose from 400 to 1,200 a day. He ignored the advice he was given that touching someone with the infection meant catching it. All the people he had anything to do with in the city, including his banker, his doctor and even his magician, died of the plague in those nineteen days. When he did develop a fever he was the very epitome of sang-froid, a French expression for an English thing. He hid the food he had no appetite to eat from his servants and, in the end, a cup of tea made him feel better.
"When first I arrived at Cairo the funerals that daily passed under my windows were many, but still there were frequent and long intervals without a single howl. Every day, however (except one, when I fancied that I observed a diminution of funerals), these intervals became less frequent and shorter, and at last, the passing of the howlers from morn till noon was almost incessant. I believe that about one-half of the whole people was carried off by this visitation. The Orientals, however, have more quiet fortitude than Europeans under afflictions of this sort, and they never allow the plague to interfere with their religious usages. I rode one day round the great burial-ground. The tombs are strewed over a great expanse, among the vast mountains of rubbish (the accumulations of many centuries) which surround the city. The ground, unlike the Turkish “cities of the dead,” which are made so beautiful by their dark cypresses, has nothing to sweeten melancholy, nothing to mitigate the odiousness of death. Carnivorous beasts and birds possess the place by night, and now in the fair morning it was all alive with fresh comers—alive with dead. Yet at this very time, when the plague was raging so furiously, and on this very ground, which resounded so mournfully with the howls of arriving funerals, preparations were going on for the religious festival called the Kourban Bairam. Tents were pitched, and swings hung for the amusement of children—a ghastly holiday; but the Mahometans take a pride, and a just pride, in following their ancient customs undisturbed by the shadow of death.

Coronavirus Tuesday 31 March 2020

To use the most popular opening conversational gambit these days, I am no epidemiologist. I  just try to make sense of the news. I do however mightily distrust the media for good reasons.

32,137 out of the 685,623 people in the world who had tested positive for Covid-19 by Sunday had died - meaning 4.7% - but this death rate is meaningless. Half of people in Iceland who are test-positive have no symptoms and most of the rest have mild cold-like symptoms. This does not tell us much either, except that Iceland tests a lot of people and the virus came to Iceland more recently than to, say, Italy.

What is noticeable and hopeful is evidence that the virus is already surprisingly widespread in many countries and that most cases are not detected because the infected people have few or no symptoms.

Measures to prevent deaths sometimes cause deaths. In a German nursing home for people with advanced dementia, 15 test-positive people died, but not necessarily from the virus. Some of these people may have died as a result of the changes to their routine: isolation, no physical contact, staff wearing masks.


I quote from an interesting article today in the Financial Times:

Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies programme, has outlined four factors that might contribute to the differing mortality rates: who becomes infected, what stage the epidemic has reached in a country, how much testing a country is doing, and how well different healthcare systems are coping. But there are other sources of doubt too, including how many coronavirus victims would have died of other causes if no pandemic had occurred. In a typical year, about 56m people die around the world — an average of about 153,000 per day. 


Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have estimated that, in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, the likely death rate was 1.4 per cent — much lower than the previous estimate of 4.5 per cent, which was calculated using official statistics on the region’s cases and deaths. In the UK, where the government has been criticised for a slow initial response, only the most serious cases are being tested. In total 1,231 people have died out of 19,758 confirmed cases, giving a death rate of 6.2 per cent. Rosalind Smyth, professor of child health at UCL, said official UK coronavirus data was “so misleading that it should not be used”. Using conservative estimates, the true number of people infected “is likely to be 5-10 times higher”, she said.  

But different countries are also reporting cases and deaths in different ways: in Italy, Covid-19 is listed as the cause of death even if a patient was already ill and died from a combination of illnesses. “Only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus,” said the scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health last week. Spain’s national government simply lists how many people with confirmed cases of coronavirus have died and provides no extra information on any other medical conditions. 


...In the UK, about 150,000 people die every year between January and March. To date, the vast majority of those who have died from Covid-19 in Britain have been aged 70 or older or had serious pre-existing health conditions. What is not clear is how many of those deaths would have occurred anyway if the patients had not contracted Covid-19. Speaking at a parliamentary hearing last week, Professor Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, said it was not yet clear how many “excess deaths” caused by coronavirus there would be in the UK. However, he said the proportion of Covid-19 victims who would have died anyway could be “as many as half or two-thirds”. 

Italy does not distinguish between people who die with and people who die of the Coronavirus but there is evidence that many deaths of people with or of the virus are not being reported as such at all. This is very worrying.

I quote Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. He is pessimistic and alarmist about everything but has strong arguments to alarm us.

We have a ‘real time’ laboratory before our eyes. What is happening at the Italian coal face is not remotely consistent with claims being made by some that the death rate from Covid-19 is akin to seasonal winter flu at around 0.1pc.

....The mayors of Bergamo and Brescia - two Covid-19 hotspots - say the reported deaths in their cities are a small fraction of the true numbers. An epidemiological portrait is easy to construct. You compare deaths since January with seasonal averages over recent years. Corriere Della Sera has done exactly that.


The small town of Nembro has 11,600 inhabitants. Typically it would have 35 deaths over the first quarter. This year it had already had 158 deaths by March 24. Yet the official data counts just 31 Covid-19 mortalities. The implication is that the real pandemic death rate has been four times higher.

The same method showed that deaths were 6.1 times normal in Cernusco and Pesaro, and 10.4 times higher in the city of Bergamo. This is partly because Covid-19 care is crowding out treatment for other diseases. But that changes nothing in practical terms. It is all part of the same drama.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard suspects that the Government’s original strategy of herd immunity wasted weeks when was happening in Wuhan and Lombardy was ignored and that Boris Johnson 'overruled bad counsel in the nick of time'. I am told by insiders that the reverse is true, that the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) wanted a lockdown earlier and were overruled by Boris.

It is too soon to guess at what the social and political consequences of the epidemic will be. Will it mean more globalism and more movement of people or more emphasis on the local?  More respect for experts and the state or less? Fortress Europe or Europe as an immigrant society like the USA?

The virus could symbolise the dangers of globalisation and interconnectedness or it could make young people see the value of both.

David Aaronovtch, archglobalist and neocon, advocate of the invasion of Iraq and ardent critic of Brexit, thinks the latter is certain.


After COVID-19 there will not be some snapping back to ancient virtues of faith, flag and family. Those who imagine that the young, freed from a psychological and social austerity imposed upon them for the sake mostly of their elders, are going to decide to live for ever in such a condition are fooling themselves.

Inevitably NGOs are arguing that conditions in migrant camps make them dangerous breeding grounds for the epidemic but in fact COVID-19 is not a deadly plague slaughtering wholescale like the bubonic plague. It kills overwhelmingly the old and infirm. The migrants in camps or being expelled by Turkey, are mostly in their 20s. To allow them to settle in Europe because of the virus is to give up on a European external border. That in turn means giving up on keeping Europe European.


In the case of Syrian migrants, they can be sent back to Syria in return for some pay off for the Syrian government but very few refugees now are Syrian and those mostly Syrians who have been in Turkey long before the war. Almost all are economic migrants seeking a better life. European states - unfortunately - really must resile from the 1967 Protocol to the Geneva Convention on Refugees obliging them to take in refugees from outside Europe. Turkey has never signed this protocol, by the way.

Monday 30 March 2020




I thought EXACTLY the same as the estimable Lilico. 

This essentially is what worries me about what the media reports. They seem to ignore the fact that very large numbers of people over 65 or 70 die everyday anyway, and at times of a nasty new virus the number shoots up a long way.



This may be why Italy and Spain are in grave trouble. In Sweden there are (I was shocked to learn) almost no families in which three generations live together and virtually no mothers who stay at home with their children. Sweden has no lockdown and so far 110 deaths.

Coronavirus in Romania: Monday 30 March

Raed Arafat said last night that in Romania there were 1,815 known Coronavirus cases, 52 patients were in intensive care and 43 people have died.

1,213 people are in quarantine and 162,374 are in self-isolation.

When the number of cases reaches 2000, as it will today, Romania goes up to level 4 of the lockdown.

Since movement restrictions were enforced, on March 25, almost 33,500 people have been fined, with fines totaling RON 46 million (EUR 9.5 million).

I adore long walks and had hoped to enjoy lots of them in deserted streets, but then they brought in the restrictions on movement. 
I left the house only to walk short distances at the weekend, intimidated because the old town in Bucharest, where I live, is full of policemen and women, enjoying the sunshine, chatting and not minding me. I'd love a long walk along the Dimbovita or Calea Victoriei. 

A sporty friend told me she went for a 8 km (5 mile) walk yesterday without any trouble.
Adevarul has a couple of stories of people with declarations written out and in order getting fined. One wanted to go into the centre of Timisoara from somewhere on the edge of town to a bakery that baked bread she liked. Although I too am a gourmand, I think they probably got her bang to rights.

Saturday 28 March 2020

Coronavirus Saturday 28 March


People should isolate themselves and if possible stay at home and work from home. In three weeks we shall have much more information about the Coronavirus. It is much better to be safe than sorry. 

However, there are a lot of interesting scraps of information already that I am trying to make sense of. One of my main reasons for blogging is to clarify my mind.

The most concerning news at the moment is from Italy but what is happening there and why?

In Italy 969 died yesterday with (not necessarily of) the Coronavirus.  Normally, on average, 1750 people die in Italy per day. 

The latest figures from Bergamo show that total mortality there almost quadrupled in March 2020, from 200 to 300 people per month to around 900 people. It is unclear what proportion of this was due to Covid19.

In total, 9,134 people in Italy have now died with Covid-19. Around one in seven are under the age of 70.

A number of people have said that the high number of deaths in Lombardy is a crisis caused by lack of facilities for geriatric care. The ageing population does not help. 

Northern Italy also has the worst air quality in Europe, which has led to an increased number of respiratory diseases and deaths in the past.


Two professors of medicine at Stanford, Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, say that the lethality of Covid19 is overestimated by several orders of magnitude and probably even in Italy is only at 0.01% to 0.06% and thus below that of influenza. The reason for this overestimate is the greatly underestimated number of people already infected (without symptoms).

Friday 27 March 2020

How infectious is the Coronavirus?

Thousands of foreigners were evacuated from Wuhan city in late January and February and quarantined for 14 days. Back home in their various countries, 0.6% tested positive, so the virus is not very infectious and yet it is, because it gallops fast across the globe. How is this paradox possible?

The British Chief Officer told us a while back that mass gatherings are not dangerous - the disease is spread between people who live or work together. Now we mustn't leave the house unless really necessary - this change of policy in the UK is based on a report from Imperial College, London which is contradicted by another one from Oxford. Neither report is very convincing
.

LOVELY SPRING WEATHER

For those who remember William Boot's telegrams in Scoop:

LOVELY SPRING WEATHER BUBONIC PLAGUE RAGING.

Biden is clearly becoming senile

This clip from the Jimmy Dore Show shows that Joe Biden is clearly in the early stages of senility. By the way, CNN describes the Jimmy Dore Show as "a far-left YouTube channel", so Jimmy Dore's mockery comes from the left not the right.

Thursday 26 March 2020

Don’t Make Trump Worse

I have no time for people who use the Coronavirus crisis to score partisan points about Boris or the Donald or anybody else. Criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party are something else. 

The American media obsess about fact checking but are intolerably unreliable and politically biassed, consumed with an obsessive hatred for the President. The story of the poor people who died after swallowing fish tank cleaning fluid was a low point. Very low as the media have been, this was yet lower.

I link to a good article in the National Review on this subject by Kyle Smith, headed


Don’t Make Trump Worse


"...The president is not us, but for now he is tied up with us. We want him to succeed, do we not? Is it not obvious that, even if you despise everything the man has ever said and done and want his presidency to end so spectacularly it’ll make the Hindenburg look like a Duraflame log, it would be good for us if he got us through these next few months with the least conceivable damage to life, health, and wealth?

We know that the president is unusually thin-skinned and capricious, that he is keenly and perhaps unhealthily focused on what the media are saying about him at any given nanosecond, that he has a short temper and a quick fuse. He goes through cabinet secretaries like a newborn goes through diapers. And pointing out his errors is the legitimate business of CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, etc. But the way the media are trying to gin up a feud between Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci is disgraceful and disgusting.

Folks, and by “folks” I mean you absolute freaking Muppets, are you trying to get Fauci fired? Do we really want to start over with a new specialist in infectious diseases in the White House? Would you be happy if Omarosa were Trump’s chief adviser on epidemiology? Would you be more secure if Jared were the last man standing during the medical briefings?

The incandescently moronic jibber-jabber (I won’t call it “reporting”) about the bizarre case of the Arizona woman whose husband died after taking fish-tank cleaner he and she incorrectly supposed to be the drug Trump touted in the White House is the kind of barnyard waste product that shouldn’t even make it to national news reports, and ordinarily wouldn’t, except that the media seem to be getting a near-erotic thrill out of any scrap of information they think might set off Trump. The dead Arizona man didn’t take chloroquine. He took chloroquine phosphate, in a massive dose. Please run the tape for me where Trump said, “Everybody take a spoonful of fish-tank cleaner to save your lives.” “The difference between the fish tank cleaning additive that the couple took and the drug used to treat malaria is the way they are formulated,” dryly noted CBS News. Oh, you don’t say? Because I was going to put rubbing alcohol in my martini tonight. Or is rubbing alcohol differently formulated than gin?..."

Monday 23 March 2020

Lies, damned lies and statistics

All figures for mortality rates and for numbers infected with the virus are suspect. All dead and dying people in Italy are tested for the virus although they are usually dying of something else, whereas in Germany dead and dying people are not routinely tested for the virus. This is much of the reason that Germany has far fewer cases of the virus than Italy.

According to Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to the Italian health minister, 'only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus.' Yet, he says, 'all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.'

Researchers at Imperial College London predicted between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths in the UK from Covid-19, but the authors of the study have conceded that many of these deaths are part of the normal annual mortality rate, which in the UK is 600,000 people per year. Many would have died anyway.

I do not know, because I am not a virologist, if the biggest problem is the number of deaths taking place this year or the fact that the deaths are happening at the same time, depriving many dangerously ill people of beds.

Death in Lombardy

Last week 400 people died in Bergamo and 12 neighbouring towns, which is the place in the world worst afflicted by Coronavirus. 400 deaths is four times the number in the same week the previous year, according to the mayor’s office.


A fourfold increase in the mortality rate since last year is a hard and very alarming fact.


Of those 400 only 91 had tested positive for the virus. What does this mean? That only 91 had the virus, of whom most had other conditions too? Or that many of the others had the virus but hadn't been tested? The history does not relate but the latter sounds more likely to me.


If few tests are being carried out in Lombardy this would explain the very high mortality rate (expressed as the number of people who died with the virus divided by the number of people in whom the virus was detected.)

Sunday 22 March 2020

Quotations for Sunday morning

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.” Montaigne

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.” Anthony Burgess, Homage To Qwert Yuiop

“I've spent my entire life playing it safe.. just to avoid being exactly where I am right now.” This Is Where I Leave You (2014) 


“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

"The salutary effect of surviving a heart-attack: One felt that nothing mattered beyond kindness, good manners and humour." Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd

Saturday 21 March 2020

Boris did not take Chief Medical Officer's advice about lockdown

Modelling by researchers at the Universities of Exeter, Bristol and Warwick has showed that, without any measures to limit it, the Coronavirus epidemic would have peaked in late June or early July. It is reassuring to know this but social distancing will delay the peak for a very long time, unless the epidemic is suppressed by the emergency measures or defeated by drugs that are discovered in the months to come.

Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) estimate that up to 23 million people in the UK may have the virus without symptoms. The Daily Telegraph said the scientists feared that the number might be that hig but they should rejoice if it is so, because people who have had the virus but don't know it will not get it again, at least for some time. This is the herd immunity that the British Chief Medical Officer spoke about at the first Corona virus press conference, standing beside Boris, although the immunity is not necessarily permanent and anyway viruses mutate quickly

Talking of that first press conference, I was told today by a very good source that before that first conference the Chief Medical Officer had advised the Government to adopt the drastic measures that Boris. 


Boris overruled him because, understandably, of the terrible damage they would do to the British economy. That, gentle reader, IS  a scoop. You read it here first.

Good news about the virus outbreak

A combination of zithromax and chloroquine has been shown in a clinical setting safely, effectively and rapidly to clear the coronavirus infection from patients.



These drugs have been prescribed for decades. However, Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief adviser to the White House on the coronavirus, said yesterday that more trials are needed.

Why can't clinical *trials* determine optimal dosage while the drugs are used by doctors today?


In fact, that is what is starting to happen, even though Dr. Fauci in yesterday's press conference created the erroneous impression that this cure cannot be given to the public for however long it takes for clinical trials to conclude. 


More good news. Oxford Economics predicts that the world economy will jump back once this is over - after all consumption and business have been suppressed for medical not economic reasons. 


This is very persuasive, though we do not know how soon the virus will stop being very dangerous and we can expect it to come back, perhaps every year or perhaps whenever the isolation measures are relaxed.


More good news. A test to discover if a person has had Covid-19 (and therefore be significantly more immune) is expected to become available imminently.

Antiracism and the coronavirus

Dr. Giorgio Palù, Professor of Virology and Microbiology at the University of Padua, says that decisions on travel restrictions and border controls were taken too late because of politically correct fears.

The attempts to minimise potential "racism" and "stigmatisation" in response to the corona virus were an initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO), which was then adopted by the left-wing Italian left.

In February, the mayor of Florence went a step further and launched a campaign urging Italians to hug a Chinese in the street to "stop the hatred".

Friday 20 March 2020

Books on the plague to read on your Kindle while self-isolating

What books are there to read on the plague? A surprisingly long list. 

Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. 

Camus's The Plague. 

The Masque of the Red Death by Poe. 

The Decameron, which my father told me was naughty but which seemed disappointingly proper to me as a child. 

Love in the Time of Cholera by Marques, which I liked but never finished in hospital 30 years ago, in a country that no longer exists. 

Death in Venice. 

Old St Paul's. Available for free on Kindle. In my early adolescence I decided that it looked creaky and melodramatic and was no longer a book one 'had' to read, but I think it will be fun now.

Pepys's and Evelyn's diaries cover the Great Plague of London in 1665 and the Great Fire the next year. I found Evelyn much less fun than Pepys. 

I recommend much more Kinglake's account of the plague in Cairo, where he found himself surrounded by dead and dying Cairenes.


The Roses of Eyam, about the Great Plague of 1665 in a Derbyshire village, was the most moving TV programme I ever watched (today it would be called a film). It reduced my mother, sister and me to floods of tears. My father refused indignantly to watch it. It's on YouTube.

I asked on a forum I belong to on Facebook for suggestions and received these. They included a book we all mean to read but few do, Manzoni's The Betrothed, The Last Man by Mrs. Shelley, which I hope is less dull than Frankenstein, and The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham, which I am sure is more fun than Mrs. Shelley.


The other titles were unknown to me and form a long list.



Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Plague Maker - Tim Downs

Company of Liars - Karen Maitland

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis


Fever by Deon Meyer – ‘best book of the last 100 years’ said the man who recommended it.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Y: The Last Man by Brian K Vaughan


Don Lawson Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter


Shirley Jackson  The Lottery

Blindness, by Jose Saramago

L'Œuvre au noir, Marguerite Yourcenar

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks and The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman.
Lucretius, the plague of Athens in De rerum natura.
Year of Wonders

Stephen King's The Stand – he’s pulp fiction, isn’t he?
Jose Saramago, Blindness.

Diane Gardner Premo Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel.

Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

The Corner that Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai

The Holy Bible, Exodus 11-12 KJV. Exodus 7-12 RSV.

Virus update 20th March 2020

Romanians face up to 15 years in prison if they know they have the disease, break the quarantine rules and someone gets infected and dies as a result of their actions.
Anyone failing to respect quarantine rules faces up to three years in prison and up to five if his actions leads to the infection of someone else.


Around 3,800 people have been placed in quarantine in Romania, because of returning from high-risk places or being in contact with a confirmed or suspected coronavirus patient.

Things are starting to return "not to normal but a new normal" in China, according to an article in yesterday's Daily Telegraph.



Donald Trump said finding that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine cures the virus was a "tremendous breakthrough" and said it would be available almost immediately to fight coronavirus. But the FDA contradicted him.

Other drugs are said to be effective too. The Australians have found one, as I blogged previously.


Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, international business editor of the Daily Telegraph, writes that the EU has failed badly once more.

America has mobilized for total economic war. The Trump treasury, the Pelosi Congress, and the Federal Reserve have come together with formidable force.


Washington was slow to act. Covid-19 denialism wasted three vital weeks. But the US is now moving with the sort of determination shown after Pearl Harbour. It is an impressive beast when roused, even if it cannot alone stop markets repricing the frightening reality of an economic sudden stop for the whole planet.

It is Europe that now looks bitterly divided and incapable of meaningful action, the world’s weakest link, and rapidly becoming the greatest danger for the international financial system.

Bel Mooney put a very good post on Facebook.
"I just made a comment on somebody's timeline which I will share here. It is so depressing to read carping about Boris Johnson all over the place and the opinion that naturally Corbyn would be better. So this is what I put - and I'm not inviting discussion, just telling you what I think. Which is pretty straightforward.

"I have no doubt Corbyn would stumble along, out of his depth but doing his best - just as BJ is. And so would Keir Starmer. Which politician of any stripe has the magic bullet to see off a deadly virus, a collapsing economy, a people in need, food panics, and the rest? The people who are still carping along tribal political lines have already stripped the shelves of their brains - not only of intelligence but of decency and fellow-feeling too.'"

I agree with her. Same goes for the USA but, at the risk of being political myself, I do think it should be remembered by everyone that Joe Biden and Ursula v d Leyen condemned Trump for his ban on people coming to the EU from Schengen.

What absolutely disgusts me are the people tweeting that the Tories are happy for the poor to die. People who think like that are very contemptible. And I usually never feel contempt. Not even for David Aaronovitch or the Liberal Democrats. 

“All of man's problems come from his inability to sit quietly alone in a room.”

“All of man's problems come from his inability to sit quietly alone in a room.” Pascal

"Solitude is the school of genius." Gibbon

I have self isolated for years and I love it. Some friends who, unlike me, are married with children tell me the same thing. 

Thursday 19 March 2020

British Chief Scientific Advisor thinks there might be a 'death rate of one fatality for every 1,000 cases'

The British Government's Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance answered questions from the House of Commons'  Health and Social Care Select Committee on Tuesday afternoon. The Committee chairman Jeremy Hunt asked him whether the expected death rate was one fatality for every 1,000 cases, which would mean that there is "potentially 55,000 cases".

Sir Patrick replied: 

"We've tried to get a handle on that in SAGE (the scientific advisory group for emergencies) and if you put all the modelling information together, that's a reasonable ballpark way of looking at it. It's not more accurate than that."

Let's hope the mortality rate is 1 in 1,000, the same rate as for flu. Disregard numbers of coronavirus cases reported in different countries, because they largely reflect how many people in a country were tested. This is why rich or important people, like the new Romanian Prime Minister, are announcing that they have the virus. They undergo tests. Figures for deaths are very much much accurate.

Wednesday 18 March 2020

C. S. Lewis on how to face atomic war


Image may contain: outdoor


“The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. [Bombs] may break our bodies (a microbe can do that), but they need not dominate our minds.”

C. S. Lewis (acknowlegements Madalina Dobraca)

Lockdown might last a year or even more

An unusually empty Piccadilly Circus in central London
Piccadilly Circus

Immediately after Boris Johnson, on scientific advice, had gone from being laid-back and British about the killer virus to ordering everyone who could do so to keep away from everyone else, Professor Neil Fergusson, England's leading epidemiologist, explained the reasons to a press conference of science journalists. He told them that he hoped for only 20,000 coronavirus deaths in the UK, rather than a possible 260,000. He said that, were no measures taken at all, between 400,000 and 550,000 people would die.

The change in strategy had been necessitated by new data. Whereas the new social-distancing measures had been temporary, now they would need to continue until a vaccine or treatment was found, which could take a year or more. 


New data has caused this change but, in any case, the British Government's Chief Medical Officer, whose modest but authoritative manner at press confidences is universally admired, had been giving the government and country culpably bad advice. 

He, you recall, said that large numbers, even a majority of the British population would be infected and this would provide the population with herd immunity, meaning the virus would not come back each year.

Saloni Dattani, a PhD student in psychiatric genetics at King's College London, writes this in Unherd:

Finally, there is a lack of evidence that lasting herd immunity to COVID-19 was possible in humans when acquired by infection, and that recovered cases would be prevented from reinfection. “Typically coronaviruses don’t make long-lasting antibody responses,” tweeted Brian Ferguson, an immunologist at Cambridge University, adding, “if this is a deliberate approach it’s not scientifically based and irresponsible.”

The Government’s chief medical advisor claimed that part of the reason he believed cases in China had declined was because 20% of the Wuhan population had been infected by the virus and had acquired herd immunity and because a large proportion of cases were asymptomatic. 


But as mentioned previously, evidence from researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine estimated that 94.8% of the Wuhan population were still susceptible to infection at the end of January (i.e. had not been infected by the virus) and that “there was evidence that the majority of cases were symptomatic.” Daniel Falush, a statistical geneticist at the University of Bath, tweeted that these claims were contradictory, adding that “unfortunately, tragically, this error is driving UK policy right now.”


...The evidence was not conflicted, it was clear: the Government’s strategy of delaying the peak and inducing herd immunity was unscientific, unfeasible and dangerous. It is hugely unfortunate that the Government delayed aggressive social distancing measures, which will have already caused avoidable deaths and suffering, but it is encouraging that they quickly reconsidered many of their initial plans — for the damage must be mitigated swiftly. Countries around the world considering the British strategy should seriously reconsider. Containment is possible. Containment is necessary. Containment must be the goal.

Tuesday 17 March 2020

Romanian deputies vote one by one in special room to support new government

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The emergency parliamentary session to vote on the new government took place in a disinfected room. MPs wore surgical masks and disposable gloves and entered one by one to cast their votes. The vote to support Ludovic Orban's government was carried overwhelmingly, supported by most of the opposition, despite the same government having lost a vote of confidence last month.

The new PM and most of his cabinet did not attend the parliamentary vote, because they are in self-quarantine, after a senator of their party, the National Liberal Party, was found to be infected with coronavirus.


In the midst of the great coronavirus scare of 2020

In the winter seasons from 2013/14 to 2016/17, an estimated average of 5,290,000 cases of influenza-like illness (ILI) cases occurred in Italy. 9% of Italians caught ILI. There were more than 68,000 deaths attributable to flu epidemics. In other words, the average number of deaths from ILU over those four years was 17,000. This was roughly the same figure as in the UK.

The proportion of people infected with the new strain of coronavirus who die ('the mortality rate') entirely depends on how many cases were detected, which in turn depends on how many were tested. Most people who catch it have no symptoms at all. Others think they have a cold or mild flu, so are not reported or tested.

In previous years various types of coronavirus existed but no tests were made for them and no figures kept, so no comparisons can be made.

I don't know whether this suggests that there is less to worry about than people think but I certainly hope so. Still it's probably a good idea for Romania to close her borders.

I read somewhere that the overall death rate in Italy recently has not been higher than in other years, but I have absolutely no idea if this is true. That is what to look at, but certainly a lot of people are dying suddenly in Italy - eight priests in Bergamo alone!

I note the ridicule of Donald Trump by clever people when he banned people from most of the EU entering the USA. Joe Biden said it was reactionary and pointless. So did Justin Trudeau's government two days before he did the same thing. Macron also turned on a coin yesterday.

I still hope it all turns out to be an exaggerated scare like bird flu and swine flu, which killed lots of people but which were not nearly as bad as people predicted. If it does WHO needs to be reformed.


I do not have an opinion on how bad this crisis will be or how long it will last, beyond hoping and suspecting it will be less bad than people imagine. Experts, whom everyone prefers these days to politicians or bishops, and with reason, say different things. Remember the Hollywood maxim: nobody knows anything.


Still discretion is the better part of valour. As Leonardo de Vinci said, cowardice preserves life just as courage endangers it.

Saturday 14 March 2020

Very hopeful news from the Orient

From the South China Morning Post, March 8.
"The Guangzhou team based their study on every novel coronavirus case confirmed around the world between January 20 and February 4, including in more than 400 Chinese cities and regions. These were then modelled against official meteorological data for January from across China and the capital cities of each country affected.
"The analysis indicated that case numbers rose in line with average temperatures up to a peak of 8.72 degrees Celsius and then declined."

(Acknowledgements, Mark Patton.)

Friday 13 March 2020

Philosophical debate du jour: Can the virus be contained or only delayed?



This tweet by the LBC political correspondent seems accurate. 

Can the virus be contained? It is notable that the numbers of infections in Wuhan in China do seem to be falling. I do not necessarily trust Chinese figures but they show that new cases of coronavirus have dropped to single digits for the first time since China began reporting daily numbers in mid-January. 

Bloomberg reports:
As of March 12, China has eight new cases and seven additional deaths, said the National Health Commission on Friday. The dramatic plunge to a single-digit increase -- from the height of nearly 15,000 cases added in one day on Feb. 13 -- is another sign that viral outbreak has come under control at its epicenter for now, despite accelerating its spread in Europe and the U.S.
General Secretary Xi recently visited Wuhan, which suggests the virus is under control there. Presumably this is because of the severe quarantine, cutting off the entire province of Hubei from the outside world, or is it?

Russia has very few cases of the virus, after closing her border with China early on. I am not sure if closing the border with China explains it. South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong are also seeing much lower infection rates than in Italy. What is the explanation? 

Is the virus going to be around for many years like Aids? Possibly. Will it infect half the world's population killing between 0.5% and 1% of them? Nobody has any idea.

But Ross Clark writing in the Spectator is more cheerful and asks if the virus will slow its rapid progress now that the warm weather is here, just as flu does.

There is a good reason to wonder whether there is a natural element to the decline of Covid-19 in China. We know that other viral illnesses such as flu tend to fall back when spring arrives, with viruses less able to survive outside the human body as the temperature rises. Hubei province, the seat of the disease, is in the centre of the country where spring arrives a little ahead of when it does in Britain. Daytime temperatures in recent days have been around 14 degrees celsius, several degrees higher than in Britain or in Lombardy, where the Italian outbreak is concentrated. It is nine degrees in Milan this afternoon and 11 degrees in Venice, falling to six degree celsius in Bolzano. It might be that coronavirus is simply responding to ordinary seasonal decline.


Either way, the Chinese experience is in sharp contrast to the panic being witnessed around the rest of the world. We are still being fed worst-case scenarios where 80 per cent of Britons catch the disease and 100,000 of us die from it. There is nothing in the Chinese experience to suggest this is remotely likely. In Hubei, only 20 per cent of the population caught the disease – and for the moment it seems unlikely that the total Chinese death toll will rise a lot further beyond the 3,100 who have so far succumbed. The question is, though, how much of the decline in China is due to drastic containment measures and how much is due to the natural limitations of this virus?

Thursday 12 March 2020

LOVELY SPRING WEATHER BUBONIC PLAGUE RAGING

Letter in today's Spectator, published under the rubric, Coronavirus predictions
Sir: While precautionary advice regarding the coronavirus should be followed, Ross Clark is right (‘Feverish imaginations’, 29 February) to urge an open mind on the doomsday predictions which are edging us towards panic. In 1996 the then government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Kenneth Calman, predicted that 500,000 people could die within a few years from the human form of BSE. Another official adviser, Professor Richard Lacey, described the disease as ‘the time bomb of the 20th century, equivalent to the bubonic plague’. In the event, the reported death toll was 177, while the scare cost the UK an estimated £7 billion. 

In 2005 the then government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, warned that avian flu could kill 50,000 people in the UK. There is no public record of a single death. In July 2009 he told the NHS to plan for 19,000 to 65,000 deaths from ‘swine flu’ during that winter. The actual number of deaths was 457, and the government was left with 60 million doses of Tamiflu vaccine, which are said to have cost taxpayers around £500 million.Maritz VandenbergLondon SW15

Trump will stand or fall on his coronavirus test

"There’s no doubt that the president’s response so far has been uneven. One of the nation’s leading infectious disease specialists tells me the president deserves more credit than he gets for his decision early on to suspend flights to and from China, and to limit travel to other seriously affected countries. It was a decision that was attacked at the time as a spasm of nativism by the same people now attacking him for his recent inaction. But it’s possible it bought the country precious time in the battle to “flatten the curve” of the incidence of coronavirus cases to spread out the pressure on healthcare facilities. He notes also that the administration was slower than it might have been in ramping up production of test kits, which it is finally starting to do."  

That was Gerald Baker in an article headed


Trump will stand or fall on his coronavirus test

in the Times today, published just  before Trump announced stopping travel from Europe. 

He is having a good crisis, clever politician as he is, but he is trying to prevent the virus spreading while the UK sees it as inevitable and wants to delay it to the summer. Angela Merkel said yesterday that 75% of European population might catch it. She is right - anything 'might' happen. Time to read Camus' The Plague, which I was supposed to read at school.

Boris Johnson said yesterday that banning mass gatherings (as Romania has done) would be counterproductive. He said,

“Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science.” 
However, Richard Horton, chief editor of The Lancet, the world's leading medical journal, commented: 
“The UK government — Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson — claim they are following the science. But that is not true. The evidence is clear. We need urgent implementation of social-distancing and closure policies. The government is playing roulette with the public. This is a major error
I think the British government is right that the spread of the virus can only be delayed, not stopped (in Europe anyway), if only because of the long incubation period, but delay is good so that the big hit is in summer when hospitals are less crowded. 

News of declining number of cases in Wuhan is good but do we believe the Communist regime in China? 

(Why is the Syrian government a regime and the Chinese Bolsheviks a government?)


Anyway Trump looks good taking drastic measures- and stopping travel would be effective if it were not a cure worse than the malady. 

Trump's travel ban may be an overreaction and has sent the stock markets reeling, but in November, when I hope this thing is over, it may play very well. The Democrats may feel forced to oppose it, which will play badly for them. Nobody loses votes for doing too much in order to save voters' lives.

I think we are seeing an understandable overreaction to a virus that for most sufferers will feel like flu or a cold, but a quick spreading, lethal virus that has huge consequences for supply chains and the world economy was an inevitable consequence of cheap, easy transport and globalisation. This will not be the only such virus to wreak havoc.

The symbolism is so obvious that, were it fiction, readers would complain. The virus is very globalist and the reaction is protectionist, nativist and, in a word, Trumpian.


Sunday 8 March 2020

How many did previous pandemics kill?

I said that the bad flu of the winter before last  killed 58,000 people in the UK, compared to the usual number of deaths from flu of around 19,000. It got very little attention. How many died in earlier years, in flu pandemics that did receive a lot of attention?

The Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968/9 killed an estimated 80,000 people in the UK. 

Before that was the Asian flu of 1957/8 which killed approximately 69,800 in the US and 14,000 people in the UK, after more than nine million people in the UK were infected.

The famous Spanish flu of 1918-20 was much worse and is thought by WHO to have infected a third of the world's population. The most recent investigation in 2018 found that about 17 million died, not the 50 to 100 million of a previous estimate. What made it much more terrible than the later flu pandemics was that it killed very large numbers of young, healthy people. The Spanish flu killed more people in 24 weeks than HIV/AIDS killed in 24 years.

Corona virus deaths may surpass numbers who died of flu two years ago

The Sunday Times says the British civil service think 100,000 deaths are the “central estimate” of numbers expected to die of the Corona virus. That's almost half the number who died in the UK in famous Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919, the worst pandemic in the modern era, which worldwide killed more people than the First World War. 

They are no longer talking about the worst case scenario of 500,000 deaths to prevent panic. 

The figure of 100,000 includes those likely to die from flu, which has averaged 17,000 over the past five years. To put 100,000 into context, due to a very unpleasant strain of flu in the UK the total number of deaths from flu in the year 2017-2018 was at one point estimated to be 79,000. The estimate was later reduced to 61,000 and then 58,000. No-one noticed or talked about it at the time.

Some middle-aged people in China have died, but overwhelmingly the deaths from the virus in China and elsewhere have been of people aged over 60 and usually over 70 who had serious pre-existing conditions, like diabetes, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

TCovid-19 has so far infected 80,000 people in China and killed more than 3,000, if you trust Chinese government figures, which I do not. This is out of a Chinese
 population of almost 1.4 billion. Italy, with a 60 million population, has seen more than 200 deaths from some 5,800 cases. The UK has 209 cases and two deaths, Romania 8 cases, all people freshly arrived from Italy.

Coronavirus has a mortality rate of around 2% in the epicentre of the outbreak, Hubei province, and less than that elsewhere, according to the Guardian, though 3.4% is the figure according to WHO. Flu usually has a mortality rate below 1%. Donald Trump said on Thursday, 'I think the 3.4% is really a false number' and he is right. 

He had a ‘hunch’ that the real death rate is less than 1% and this is probably right too. I quote from the Spectator:
Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College was on the radio on Thursday making exactly this point. Referring to the outbreak in Italy he said: 'for every person who dies we think there might be 100 or over 200 people infected.' If he is right, that would give a death rate of one per cent or less – exactly as Trump has claimed.
We do not know how contagious the coronavirus is, though it seems to be moving fast across the world, due to the ease of modern travel. Of course, unlike for flu, there is no vaccine.

Saturday 7 March 2020

How old are the people dying of the Corona virus?

As far as we yet know, the Corona virus will kill the people flu kills - that is, frail, old people weakened by pre-existing severe illness. All deaths are regrettable, but why the hysteria?

I asked this question of the wisest of my friends, Yorkshireman Dominic Johnson, because he is a vet, and he replied

People like a palaver. Remember when Jacob-Creuzfeld disease was going to turn everyone who had ever eaten a hamburger's brain to mush?
Yorkshire vets are down to earth and unfazed. Everyone else also responds as you'd expect. 

My conspiracy theorist friend asks if the virus is a CIA biological weapon. (I ask him how the CIA intends to restrict its effects to China and Iran and he replies airily that he was just asking a question.) 

I respond to the virus like the Tory sceptic I am. 

The left, who are by definition conspiracy theorists, think all problems, even diseases, can be solved by goodwill and brains, which they possess, if only wicked, occult forces allowed it. They are moving  from thinking it is racist to worry about the virus to thinking it is somehow the fault of President Trump. (After three and a bit years 'President Trump' still sounds odd.) They do not blame Communist China, I note, or globalisation, of which they and the rich approve. 

Will Hutton in the Observer talks about 
a wholesale abdication of global leadership over Coronavirus
and jumps to this.
It is the triumph of nationalism and anti-Enlightenment values across the world. So of course Johnson, leader of the supremely anti-Enlightenment and nationalist Brexit project, complete with its disdain for experts, gave a press conference last week in which he could not call for an internationally coordinated response and the rebuilding of European and international public health capacity.
Since people are being hysterical they should have the courage of their hysteria, but they don't. Italy seems to be where most cases are in Europe, so why are the Italian borders not sealed? Instead, the Romanian Government rather limply asks Romanians in Italy not to come home for Easter and flights from Romania to Italy are being reduced but not stopped. 

Note: since writing this the Italians have imposed fines on people entering or leaving an area including Lombardy, Parma, Modena, Padua and Venice. The restrictions are to be in place until at least April 3. Good for them. The number of dead in Lombardy has risen over the past day to 257 from 154, a worrying jump.

Sunday 1 March 2020

Reassurance in the time of Coronavirus

Most people who are not elderly and do not have underlying health conditions will not become critically ill from Covid-19. So says The Guardian today. It will kill the people influenza kills: old people and a few younger people weakened by other severe illnesses. 

It is possible that it will kill ten times as many people as normally die of the flu, but about 50,000 more people than normal died of the flu in the UK in the winter of 2017/2018 and nobody paid any attention. 

It should be noted that the vast majority of COVID-19 cases in China do not involve pneumonia and many people who contract the virus think they have the common cold, which is in the same family of viruses as COVID-19.

Donald Trump got this one right when he likened the virus to a strain of flu. This brilliant little blog post explains more.

Why are we so scared? A human need for an eschatology (belief in the last days of the world). Perhaps a deep cultural fear of Europe's competitor, the Chinese? I forget the name of the virus from India that killed big numbers. The fact that I have forgotten it is because it was hardly reported. Ebola continues to kill but far away from Europe and is forgotten.

However if the fears about the virus are greatly exaggerated the fears themselves are very real, very important and could cause a world-wide recession, even conceivably the calamity of President Sanders.

Politicians will use this for politics and to injure their opponents because that is what politicians do. The mainstream media nowadays are political actors too and do the same.  The left-wing press complains that fears about the virus are racist, but the next moment says that Donald Trump is doing nothing about this huge problem. Still, he always knows exactly how to play his opponents like a fiddle and they never work out how to play him.