Coronavirus

Communist China is angry with a Danish paper for printing this cartoon. It's the paper which held the Draw Mohamet competition.

Andrew Neil@afneil 

When even President Macron says supply chains will have to become more French, from food to pharma, then you know globalisation will be in serious retreat in 2020s.

The coronavirus and other epidemics could have been prevented internationalism, i. e. by costly action by what used to be called the Great Powers and are now called the G7. On the other hand globalisation and mass movement of people around the world caused this disaster.


This virus panic will have lots of consequences but no-one knows what. But stress reveals us all and will reveal Donald Trump, Boris, Macron and all the leaders. People may admire Boris's manliness (perhaps I mean fortitude or substance) and notice Trump's lack of manliness and general oddness - but it all depends on how this plays out.The EU has been revealed to be essentially a corpse. The EU cannot aid Italy because there’s no central EU Government with the tax revenue to do so and why should other countries give money to Italy? A poll in Italy said 49% would vote to leave the EU.

How will the USA emerge from this? Nobody knows. China will have fewer friends in the West for sure.


An anonymous British Cabinet minister told the Daily Telegraph: 

“We won’t be able to lift the lockdown until the public feels ready for it. The Prime Minister’s illness has probably added another week to when that point will come, because it’s made everyone feel as if they know someone who has come close to losing their life to the virus and it has changed attitudes." 

Surely this means that people will continue to self isolate etc etc until they feel it is safe not to, even if no longer required to do so by the police, and this seems to me to be a good outcome.

Sweden with no lockdown might not be doing so badly despite the stuff in the media, according to an article in Unherd. Apart from our other problems we have the perennial problem of unintelligent and misinformed journalists copying one another.

Americanisms

Of interest to those people who passionately (murderously in some cases) dislike Americanisms, the word furlough, which is much in the news, is not one. Dr Johnson's Dictionary defines furlough as "a temporary leave of absence from military".


Lengthy and talented, on the other hand, are Americanisms and so, I think, is hotel.

I love the vitality of American English. I love 'mall rat', 'babe hoover' and 'fuzzy math'. I take some 1990s examples, because I am out of touch. 

But I don't want Americanisms to replace English English as the American grey squirrel has replaced the English red one. I am proud that I have taught a dozen Romanians to pronounce the first syllable in schedule as shed. 

I have even gone so far as to teach one or two to say 'frightfully' in order to annoy Americans.

Coronavirus statistics for England and Wales can be misleading

The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 27 March 2020 (Week 13) was 11,141; an increase of 496 deaths registered compared with the previous week (Week 12) and 1,011 more than the five-year average. I wonder how it compares to 2 years ago when 40,000 excess deaths from respiratory diseases were recorded, i.e. 58,000 instead of the usual 18,000. 

Of the deaths registered in Week 13 in England and Wales, 539 mentioned "novel coronavirus (COVID-19)", which is 4.8% of all deaths; which compared with 103 (1.0% of all deaths) in Week 12. This means deaths where the dead person tested positive for COVID 19,not that it is what killed him. The figures for week 14 are not ready yet. 

The graph below is based on ONS data for England and Wales up to March 27 (Week 13), but the figures for the last week are provisional. Of course, the death rate for the week ending March 27 is lower than it would have been had it not been for the lockdown. In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland deaths were not above average in Week 13 or Week 14. N.B. two years ago 58,000 died from respiratory illnesses in England and Wales, instead of the usual 17,000 or 18,000.

Thoughts on the eve of an Easter with all the churches closed

Someone said in the 1980s or 1990s that 'hypochondria is the only religious enthusiasm of our times'. Since then Muslims showed that that wasn't true but now, even if it isn't the only one, it is still up there. Of course Europe is dying anyway, without the coronavirus. The coronavirus is symbolic, as well as all too real. Decline in belief in life after death makes death much harder for our dying civilisation to bear.

Is the American lockdown necessary?

The data for the virus are all over the place and very misleading. People who are susceptible to other types of pneumonia are also at a higher risk of the Wuhan virus pneumonia and they end up dying of the virus instead, or if not at least with the virus. You can't die twice.

Fox News mocked the seriousness of the virus until suddenly they turned on a coin and started liking the lockdown. Now they seem to have changed again, but then the story is very fast moving. 

Whatever you think of Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and understandably many hate him for his enthusiasm for Donald Trump, three days ago he made some very interesting points. They suggest that the worst is over in New York. Let's all hope so.

'For many years, the CDC has tracked the total number of Americans who die every week from pneumonia. For the last few weeks, that number has come in far lower than at the same moment in previous years. How could that be?

'Well, it seems entirely possible that doctors are classifying conventional pneumonia deaths as COVID-19 deaths. That would mean this epidemic is being credited for thousands of deaths that would have occurred if the virus never appeared here.

Iceland has tested 10% of its population: between 0.3% and 0.8% have Coronavirus

Iceland has tested 10% of its population, more than any other country. Between 0.3% and 0.8% of Iceland’s population is infected with the Coronavirus and half of those who tested positive were asymptomatic as the time of their tests.

Since mid-March, among people not of advanced age or with pre-existing serious health conditions, the prevalence of the virus has stayed stable or decreased. This without a national lockdown, though Iceland has banned gatherings of more than 20 people. This strongly suggests that the disease is not going to multiply like exponentially and kill huge numbers and that lockdowns are overreactions. As of yesterday, Iceland had 1,600 Coronavirus infections and 6 deaths. They permit flights so that Icelanders can return home and tourists leave. In the future, when things become easier, I imagine they will have to be very careful not to allow foreigners with the virus to come to the island.

Elsewhere, in America and Germany, the virus seems to be much more widespread. In the district in North Rhine-Westphalia, interim results for the community of Gangelt show that probably 15% of the population there has already been through an infection with the virus and is now immune. The figure had previously been estimated at only 5%.

All-cause mortality in Europe, including Italy, in March was no higher than normal

In March the number of dead from all causes in Europe and in Italy was still normal or even below-average. Is this only because of the lockdown? Possibly. 18,000 have died in Italy with (not necessarily of) the virus. This compares with the 6,000 in normal years whose cause of death is recorded as flu. US data, according to a new paper by Justin Silverman and Alex Washburne quoted in The Economist, shows rates for 'influenza like illnesses' have soared in the USA, which suggests that the virus is widely spread there already and that the death rate among people infected with the virus might be as low as 0.1%.

The median age of all deaths with the Coronavirus in most countries in Europe, including Italy, is over 80. In the overwhelming majority of cases the deceased had another serious health problem as well.

It looks like most people are going to get this virus sooner or later, unless a vaccine is developed and there might never be one. Angela Merkel said last month that 70% of the population would be infected.

What I think might be a good idea is if - initially- people under thirty were allowed to go about their normal lives (and wreak havoc?), while the over thirties stay cooped up.

There are a lot of things to question about the epidemic. Lombardy has one of the oldest populations and the worst air quality in Europe and this is obviously a large part of the reason for the many deaths. In South Korea only about 70 deaths with a positive test result have been reported so far. As in Italy, those affected were mostly high-risk patients. 

Virus test kits may give a false positive result in some cases. Some persons who show positive may not have contracted the new coronavirus, but one of the many existing human coronaviruses that are part of the annual common cold and flu epidemics.

Coronavirus, for those who need to be hospitalised, can be very, very nasty indeed, as this article by Dr. Qanta Ahmed in The Spectator describes.

It was watching a colleague intubate a patient of mine with a ‘GlideScope’ — a fiber-optic camera that places a tube into the patient’s airway to connect them to a respirator — when I first saw the coronavirus effect. I watched on the screen. The secretions (or gunge, if you will) bubbling up from the lung were unlike that of any other disease I had ever seen. The discharge was not pink and frothy, as you see in heart failure, nor purulent, like in bacterial pneumonia. It was extremely gelatinous, thick and translucent. You could only imagine how it packs the lungs. I watched the screen longer than I should have (exposure risks are very high during an intubation procedure). The mucus looked like a monstrous creation in a Ridley Scott movie. That was when I knew this was not influenza, or anything like it.

Some doctors, by the way, think intubation (who knew that word two weeks ago?) can be counter-productive.

Ali Sharif Razavian does research in Data Mining, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He guesses, in an article he published on www.medium.com, that 1 billion people will catch the bug. He thinks a great many of these people already have or have had the virus, meaning that the peak infection period has already passed. The eventual mortality rate will be 0.06%, slightly less than the seasonal flu, he believes, but the chances of getting it are 300 times greater. He also thinks the pandemic will be over by July.

How curious human beings are

Dan Hodges
@DPJHodges

I've said it before. But the desperation amongst some people on here to see death rates sky-rocket just so they can prove a political point is sickening.

Persians invade Kent

Despite the coronavirus crisis illegal immigrants continue to come to England. 23 people, apparently Persians, are reported to have landed in Kent, as Hengist and Horsa once did. 

Vortigern, according to legend, did not see too much danger from Hengist and Horsa and the British media are sanguine about illegal immigrants. This news story only makes the Hastings & St. Leonards Observer and the Brighton Argus.

Crude death rates are very misleading and Neal Ferguson is pretty unreliable

Today 17,700 people in Italy are reported to have died of Coronavirus this year. In fact they died with the virus, rather than necessarily of it. 

91% were over 60. 

81% were over 70. 

I suspect that most of these people would have died even had they not contracted the virus. (Two thirds of deaths would have happened anyway guessed Prof Neal Fergusson - not my favourite person nor Boris Johnson's, since he brought the virus to No 10 Downing St. that infected so many ministers and others.

Scottish deaths announced today on the BBC are in much the same age range and the same caveats apply.



As for Professor Ferguson, he has got things badly wrong in the past. He is the man responsible for Boris instituting a lockdown. In contrast his former colleague Sunetra Gupta produced research suggesting the virus may have infected up to half of Britons, and that less than one in a thousand may be at risk of serious illness. In other words the UK was well on the way to herd immunity before the lockdown.

Scientists dislike Ferguson’s model because they are not sure he has one. His modelling consists of several thousand lines of dense computer code, with no description of which bits of code do what. He himself says

“For me the code is not a mess, but it’s all in my head, completely undocumented. Nobody would be able to use it."

Looking back at the way Britain dealt with the virus from the start might be pointless

I know from well placed sources that the British Chief Medical Officer wanted a lockdown a long time before Boris Johnson agreed to it. The PM wanted if possible to do what the Swedish government is doing, until Professor Neil Ferguson scared him with the prospect of 250,000 dead.


Professor Ferguson, who has made some bad mistakes before, must take the blame if the lockdown proves to have been unnecessary and, in any case, he must take the blame for infecting a huge number of people in Downing St, probably including Mr Johnson. Let's pray that he isn't remembered in history as the first man to have killed an English Prime Minister since Bellingham shot dead Spencer Perceval.

It seems from this Reuters article that the medical establishment had in mind all along a bad flu epidemic, rather than a SARS epidemic. They still think that that made little difference but some argue it made all the difference in the world.

'Johnson, who himself has sickened with the virus, moved more slowly than the leaders of many other prosperous countries to adopt a lockdown. He has been criticised for not moving more swiftly to organise mass tests and mobilise supplies of life-saving equipment and beds. Johnson was hospitalized on April 5 and moved to intensive care the next day.'It is too soon to judge the ultimate soundness of the UK’s early response. If history concludes that it was lacking, then the criticism levelled at the prime minister may be that, rather than ignoring the advice of his scientific advisers, he failed to question their assumptions.

'Interviews and records published so far suggest that the scientific committees that advised Johnson didn’t study, until mid-March, the option of the kind of stringent lockdown adopted early on in China, where the disease arose in December, and then followed by much of Europe and finally by Britain itself. The scientists’ reasoning: Britons, many of them assumed, simply wouldn’t accept such restrictions.

'The UK scientists were also mostly convinced - and many still are - that, once the new virus escaped China, quarantine measures would likely not succeed. Minutes of technical committees reviewed by Reuters indicate that almost no attention was paid to preparing a programme of mass testing. Other minutes and interviews show Britain was following closely a well-laid plan to fight a flu pandemic - not this deadlier disease. The scientists involved, however, deny that the flu focus ultimately made much difference.'

"I'm certainly glad we did not have a real catastrophe like a bombing or infectious outbreak for real."

A canny American project manager friend emailed me this.

Yeah, the lockdown is a bit crazy and overkill. At least here, it has exposed the idiots in government and proven that each and every one of us is truly on our own. In a country of 335 million people and in a country that spends $700 billion a year on defense, we apparently had just 12 million units of gowns, masks, gloves, and protective gear. New Zealand, with a population of 12 million, had 18 million reserve units of hospital gear.

I'm certainly glad we did not have a real catastrophe like a bombing or infectious outbreak for real. And if they don't remove the lockdown in the next 30 days, there won't be an economy to save at all. I think that goes for every country too.
My thinking is that they will soon find a drug combination that will keep most people out of the hospital. So no vaccine for a while, but a way to just keep nearly everyone from the ICU ward.

Here, the politicians don't understand there is a real cost to forcing everyone to stay at home. Drugs, alcoholism, depression, even domestic abuse - people are not hard wired to stay indoors and alone. Plus, all the politicians are rich so they have plenty and live in their nice houses.

The end of an era?

"But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.


"The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without

Good news from Germany about Covid-19

The latest figures from the German Robert Koch Institute show that the number of people who test positive per number of tests is not increasing exponentially and was only around 10% at the end of March. 

Professor Klaus Püschel, who has been director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Hamburg University since 1992, says: "The astronomical economic damage now being caused is not commensurate with the danger posed by the virus. I am convinced that the Corona mortality rate will not even show up as a peak in annual mortality." 

He said that in Hamburg "not a single person who was not previously ill" had died of the virus".

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and th' action fine

St Nicholas's Church in Strada Blanari is a lovely church though it's not old. The present building only dates back to 1867. Unusually for an Orthodox church Mass is held every day.




It's close to where I live. The door was open this morning and I was welcomed in.

My old China

China comes out of this catastrophe worst, then WHO. The EU never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity but this time has done nothing when European coordination was vital. Yet the media seems to ignore them and to treat Donald Trump with undisguised hatred. Not that he has done that well. 

Mauro Ferrari resigned as head of the ERC citing institutional resistance and bureaucratic infighting in the EU's complex structures to his proposal for a big scientific programme to fight the coronavirus: 

"I arrived at the ERC a fervent supporter of the EU... the Covid-19 crisis completely changed my views."

Was Andrew Marvell another Cambridge spy?

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,

As but th’ off-scouring of the British sand;

And so much earth as was contributed

By English pilots when they heav’d the lead;

Or what by th’ ocean’s slow alluvion fell,

Of shipwrack’d cockle and the mussel-shell;

This indigested vomit of the sea

Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

Thus begins one of my favourite poems, The Character of Holland by Marvell. Imagine my surprise to read today in The Times as I meditatively drank my third cup of coffee (with cream, a hard thing to find in Bucharest), that he was a Dutch spy.

Another spy who went to Trinity College, Cambridge (where I so wish I had gone, by the way). Or was he? The evidence seems weak to me.

He came from Hull, like another very good poet, Philip Larkin. Whereas Philip Larkin's father, the Town Clerk of Coventry, wanted Germany to win the war his son was neutral.

Patrick Flynn in the Daily Telegraph on the intense media hostility to Boris

Over recent days, leading up to the terrible news that the Prime Minister’s Covid-19 illness had become so severe he had been moved into intensive care, his detractors performed a handbrake turn on their intimations of laziness. Their new idea, theme and meme is that Boris Johnson is in fact a workaholic whose determination to keep directing the Government’s coronavirus battle from a hospital bed was detracting from his personal battle against the disease.

In fact, this later assessment is much closer to the truth. It is a difficult one for media operatives who have become obsessively hostile to the PM because it is based on the idea of selflessness – that in his determination to deploy his talents in the interests of the British people he has put himself in danger.

But the general public instinctively knows it to be true. They understood the bravery and grace under fire which he exhibited in the run-up to December’s decisive, logjam-breaking general election and saw that he would take any number of blows in order to keep his Brexit promise to them.

This explains the sledgehammer impact that news of Mr Johnson’s ailing health has had on so many people. The electorate knows that Boris Johnson has flaws, just as they have flaws. But they appreciate his courage and political genius. They are calling him “The People’s Prime Minister” now.

A sad and sour codicil has meanwhile emerged from within the British political class that so despises him. Numerous figures, from Alastair Campbell to former Guardian political editor Michael White, have put out messages wishing him better that are laced with superfluous and inappropriate reiterations of their basic hostility towards him. It is as if they are saying: “Aren’t I noble that I do not wish my adversary dead?”
No chaps, you really aren’t.

Small sample in China shows 80% of cases of Coronavirus are asymptomatic

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) reports that, according to the latest data from China, 78% of new test-positive individuals show no symptoms. Tom Jefferson, an epidemiologist and honorary research fellow at Oxford, said that these findings are 

"very, very important....The sample is small, and more data will become available. Also, it’s not clear exactly how these cases were identified. But let’s just say they are generalisable. And even if they are 10% out, then this suggests the virus is everywhere. If—and I stress, if—the results are representative, then we have to ask, ‘What the hell are we locking down for?’”"

Jefferson said that it was quite likely that the virus had been circulating for longer than generally believed and that large swathes of the population had already been exposed.


Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said a few days ago that the US can expect 100,000 to 200,000 COVID-19 deaths. Would most of those deaths happen this year anyway, even without COVID-19? I presume so.

100,000 to 200,000 COVID-19 deaths is a lot fewer than the two million deaths in America, or"millions of deaths", I saw predicted by people who expected the virus to infect people exponentially.


It compares with the three million deaths that happen in the USA annually in a normal year.

100,000 to 200,000 sounds rather like the British Government's Chief Scientific Adviser's original 'central estimate' of 100,000 deaths in the UK, a country which has one sixth the population of the USA. He thought we could accept 100,000 in order to achieve herd immunity. When Prof Ferguson raised the estimate to 250,000 Boris changed his mind and decided on lockdown. Professor Ferguson then said that two thirds of guesstimated deaths with, not of, the virus, would happen anyway, even without the virus.

The Swedish government is allowing transmission to go on in the spring and summer, when most people more easily fight off diseases, in order to prevent a second wave of infections in the autumn and winter and to prevent the destruction of their economy. Let's hope they hold their nerve and are successful. They may be pushed by voices on the internet into going for a lockdown. Belarus is less likely to care about foreign opinion. Iceland is a third European country not having a lockdown. Holland is also a partial lockdown.

Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care

A statement from Number 10, Downing Street said:

"Over the course of this afternoon, the condition of the Prime Minister has worsened and, on the advice of his medical team, he has been moved to the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital. The PM has asked Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, who is the First Secretary of State, to deputise for him where necessary."

Please pray for him.