Where We Are On COVID-19

There have been signs of infections flattening out in the UK but it is very early days. The effective continuation of lockdown where only the Isle of Wight, Isles of Scilly and Cornwall are outside Tiers 2 and 3 tells us that the Government remain very anxious despite the devastating economic effects of its mitigation policies. Nor has there been a great deal of change in the geographical spread of the disease. We have seen increases in London, Thames Valley and Kent (primarily North and North East Kent). The areas that are Tier 3 (the highest level of partial lockdown) are broadly those that were in a bad way before national lockdown (with the addition of Kent). We have seen the shifting down to Tier 2 of Liverpool and some other areas where the situation has improved.

Not a great deal has changed in the last four weeks other than the stabilisation of a situation that was getting out of control. The worst areas affected are in the same Northern half of Britain, South Wales and Avon, Central Scotland and the Western half of Northern Ireland as they were then with some shifts here and there as this or that local authority improves or worsens. Still, significant tracts of the North have been seeing their case rates decrease, hence the downgrading of Liverpool, but there will be nervousness that loosening restrictions, even marginally, may reverse this progress.

The prognosis is probably for a further lessening of cases in the penumbra of the Celtic and Northern regions and an eventual increase in the South so that 'flattening' hides the potential risk to Southerners. The shunting of the bulk of Southern England into Tier 2 certainly suggests fears that what happened to Kent (actually centred on only two areas) could happen anywhere. Interestingly Central, South and North London were a lot less badly affected than West and East London (at least last week) but nearly all parts of London are increasing so we cannot be sure how long its Tier 2 status will last. Sadiq Khan must be hoping that it can last at least until the other side of Christmas but diseases do not work to human timetables.

The European situation is also mixed but has definitely been improving in earlier hot spots such as the bulk of Spain, the bulk of France and the Netherlands - in short, it is acting like a wave and may have peaked in the worst affected areas of a month ago. The probability is of a subsidence or at least stabilisation during December, a surge after Christmas if lockdowns are not put in place and then a second subsidence or stabilisation in Q1 2020 just in time for the vaccination programme to reach its critical mass of 50-60% of the population! The economic crisis wave will have hit by then although it is more likely to result in a long term grinding doldrums and selective suffering than a general 'crash'.

The current prognosis on the economy both in the UK and EU is pretty dire in the short term with unemployment and business failures high during the first half of 2021, although not as high as in the aftermath of the 2008 crash only because of high government spending, spending that cannot go on for ever and which will exact its price much further down the line. Weaning the public off the drug of fiscal expenditures is going to have to start soon and some bullets will need to be bitten. The short sharp shock may be closer to that of the first Thatcher recession than that of the 1930s but there are going to be some serious long term structural shifts in economies.

However, the expectation remains of recovery in the second half of 2021 assuming the vaccination process works to plan and that manufacturing continues to its existing upward trend and pulls the services sector along with it. The recovery, although it will get us back up to a certain point, may fall into a Japanese-style economic doldrums of long term low growth simply because the aggregate demand in the system is going to be reduced by the necessity of managing debt. Every time the economy gets above a certain threshold, higher taxation will flatten it out again until budgets are, if not balanced, in shape to take future crises in their stride.

Our economic system is certainly not going to collapse (in fact, the financial system has proved remarkably robust) but we are going to have to live with the effects of this crisis for many years. Many behavioural changes are going to have to continue for fear of the costs of a third wave or other disease outbreaks in the future. If vaccination cannot meet targets, the risk remains of a summer third wave (there were three waves to the 1918/1919 epidemic) imported from outside the UK and Europe.

As to Europe today, the worst affected areas are those previously less affected (which is logical) - urban Castile (Madrid), a swathe around the Southern Alps, Italy, East-Central Europe, The Balkans and now (predictably enough) Sweden. The worst affected area is still Austria-Luxembourg-Croatia-Slovenia-Northern Italy as a bloc but there is also an anomalous hot spot in the Norte region of Portugal which is contiguous with the Castilian hot spot. Southern Britain and the bulk of Wales are about average for Europe. Northern England counts as a hot spot.

The delusion is that Governments can do much more than mitigate and yet they have no option but to spend vast sums on mitigation. Sweden is now showing us that its first wave strategy of limited intervention has had no effect on an increasing second wave. The US example shows us that simply waiting for the vaccine and not having a nationwide control mechanism may have given the US a more vibrant economy but it has also cost around a quarter of a million lives. We can all admire China's tough-minded Wuhan lockdown and rapid manufacturing-based recovery but no Western country would have tolerated the behaviour of the Chinese State in early 2020. The game is not over yet and, while secondary outbreaks have been handled well, a second major outbreak in China is not impossible.

Governments cannot really control much more than investment in technologies such as vaccination, provide exhortation and limited social control (less than the authoritarian East) and gear up production of essential goods and services (all of which they have done on reasonable time-scales despite media carping). The mass of the population can be incredibly naive about project development and management - it whines when things do not happen immediately but is the first to moan when fast action requires a bit of dodginess or over-fast action results in unsafe solutions. The dangerous negativity and stupidity of the media has proved the greatest discovery of this event even if it has not surprised us. The media have been both essential in educating the public from ground zero on practical public health matters (and perhaps eventually on economics) but they have also been destructive forces, megaphones for public hysteria.

Just as the general population has been staggeringly naive about the long term cost to themselves of lockdowns as an instrument of policy so they have been naive about epidemiology and the way that pathogens evolve precisely to exploit the behaviours of their host population. The pathogen will always get through because it has evolved and will continue to evolve to do so (as we know from seasonal flu outbreaks). It has to burn itself out, either coming up against the herd immunity of vaccination or the herd immunity of infections and mortality rates.

The latter is no longer a price we are prepared to pay in the UK or in Europe. Mitigation simply pushes forward the crisis until the point when a technological solution (vaccination) can be implemented or the population's willingness to behave against its own nature finally breaks down and it, rather than the authorities, decides to abandon concern for the weak and the vulnerable. One of the achievements of the UK Government has been to contain and limit the sheer bloody-mindedness of free populations but, without the institution of a police state, there are limits to this - changing some behaviours may become permanent but people will and must go to school and work and want to socialise and holiday for their own mental health.

There are a number of lessons from this event: a) that Governments are far more impotent in the face of natural events than they or the population dare to admit, b) populations (or rather their media) faced by natural events in a free society with mass communications quickly collapse into emotional hysteria (interestingly, they do the opposite and unify when the attack is from other humans), c) the consequent dialectic between impotent governments and an irrational mass can frequently result in measures that are, in the longer term, more self-destructive to state and human survival than more measured action and d) populations turn on the authorities for 'failures' where 'success' is impossible so that the authorities have no defence except more submission to self-defeating demands which then create more unfulfilled expectations.

The mass wants protection and its holidays so the government can be bullied into summer flights and then condemned when the second wave arises from those flights (which is what happened) - the mass wants a free lunch because too much of it is, bluntly, rather ignorant and some of it is, equally bluntly, a bit stupid. What the mass probably needed was a firm hand and we have not had the capability for a firm hand in British Government for many decades.

What we can predict is that desperate attempts to pacify 'public feeling' with measures that are fundamentally futile or counter-productive (like permitting foreign travel in the summer) in the long run will have costs that the population will not accept have arisen from their own demands (we can term this the infantile nature of the mass). This cycle of failure could start again with populations demanding solutions whose success in managing or mitigating disease is no more in the hands of government than before and whose effects (on, say, freedom and culture) will create yet another cycle of problems further down the line.

The bottom line here is that the disease is a natural event and our society is not structured for natural events - our urbanisation creates the conditions for the disease and our behaviours spread it. The solutions lie, accordingly, largely in our behaviours and in changes to social structures to deal with poverty, overcrowding, excessive and unnecessary travel and healthcare at the fitness level. These latter take time and the funds required have already been spent on more futile if desperately necessary projects of amelioration. The bottom line here is that we are being hit hard because we were not structured for long term resilience but only for short term gratification. A mentality of short term gratification has no psychological map available for dealing with existential crisis.

An infantilised and poorly educated population has demanded and been granted a world (a fake 'normality') that enabled the virus to spread - willing ignorance of urban deprivation, freedom to stuff yourself with crud, laziness as lifestyle, holidays abroad and urban excitement - and it will not give up on these lightly ... and we have not even had the worst possible pathogen to deal with yet. There is thus nothing sadder than those urban middle class inadequates screaming their outrage at authorities whose conditions of service they had already defined in advance and whose understanding of nature derives from watching David Attenborough documentaries and listening to Greta Thunberg rather than thinking about the essential crude brutality of natural competition. They revert to being savage children egged on by the media - stamping their feet, making demands, shouting, bullying ... doing absolutely anything but take personal responsibility for their condition and their actions.

The result is often a blame game that suggests that their behaviour depends not on reasoning for themselves but on following the example of others like themselves - weak, weak, weak! What Cummings did or did not do (and, in fact, he actually did play by the rules) should be utterly irrelevant to what you do if you care about your own survival and that of your neighbours.

If you do the best you can and the authorities do the best they can (and this would apply equally to a Corbyn government) in good faith and, still, the 'bomber gets through' and you die, then let us have some Stoic dignity about something no one could do anything more about. Shit happens! Luck is part of the game. And you do your own best to make your own luck. This pathogen self-designed to exploit us and we have played that game by our own lack of resilience and our determined ignorance. We need to grow up if we are to survive! There is no one to blame for what is happening but ourselves ... our own past voting records, our passivity, our short termism and greed and our personal conduct. Own it!