As expected by many, the travel restrictions imposed on those wishing to go from continental Europe to the United States have been extended to cover the United Kingdom. To adapt a very old and chauvanistic joke for the current situation, it’s a case of ‘Transatlantic travel from UK stopped, North America isolated’**. Personally I think that the US Govt did the right thing in restricting travel from the UK as the Covid19 virus is now firmly in the UK.
The number of infections of Coronavirus is steadily growing and the death toll at the time of writing stands at 35. It’s pretty obvious now that there is community transmission of Covid19 and this situation may have been the case for a fair while, maybe even from a time shortly after the information about Covid19 started to emerge from China back in December 2019. With so much to-ing and fro-ing from areas where Covid19 either emerged, China or first took a hold in Europe such as Italy, it was inevitable that this would not be contained.
Now that Her Majesty’s Government has moved from the ‘contain’ to the ‘delay’ stage, the government’s presentation of their plans on how to deal with Covid19 are looking much less slick than they did at first. The Prime Minister’s statement that they are trying to buy up as many ventilators as possible and are asking other engineering type firms to retool and make ventilators, doesn’t look like sensible resource acquisition or management, but does look more like governmental panic. I doubt that the government will be successful in acquiring a vast number of respirators as other nations with their own Covid19 problems will be doing the same.
Even if the vast majority of Britons escape serious harm of injury from Covid19, the emergency is going to show both Britain and the world just how piss poor the NHS is when it comes to dealing with nationwide health emergencies. We have a health system that readily spends money on wasteful shit like ‘diversity and inclusion’ staff but which has failed miserably to plan for the emergence of a novel disease that would require extra items such as ventilators.
Questions will without doubt be asked as to why there were not warehouses of mothballed medical equipment such as ventilators that could be brought out to be used in a time like this. I also suppose that some people will start asking awkward questions of politically correct health authorities and charities who in one case blew £4M on a study to find out why ROPERS who shag their own cousins for generation after generation produce sickly offspring. This £4M could have been better spent on preparation for a health emergency and I suspect that there is a lot of other money from the healthcare area that is not being spent directly on healthcare but instead is being pissed up a politically correct wall. Maybe in future we will have health administrators who put patients and healthcare delivery first rather than as the NHS has done which has spunked who knows how much money on 350,000 LGBT Rainbow staff badges. I hope that this emergency is not as serious as it could be but also that it acts as a spur for the NHS to stop the worthless political correctness and virtue signalling and start putting its service users first.
With both the Government and the media giving the impression of panic it is little wonder that panic buying is starting to bite heavily in UK shops. In my local Tesco this afternoon toilet roll was being rationed to two small packs or one large pack per person but at least the shelves were getting filled with the stuff. The same cannot be said for shelves of pasta, flour, part baked bread items, eggs and potatoes. There is however plenty of beer at least for the moment. The government and the food supply companies need to get to grips with these shortages or all that will happen is more people will see empty shelves two days in a row and will panic buy other stuff in a self sustaining public reaction.
On the subject of panic buying I’m hearing some pretty awful stories, not just about people fighting over toilet roll, which is bad enough, but of a Lidl supermarket in a heavily ‘enriched’ part of East London being completely picked clean by panic buyers and possibly by those who want to hang on to long life goods in order to profit from them in the future. If this is the case and we have various sorts of ‘enrichers’ (and in particular Islamic enrichers) profiteering from this emergency then it will do little to improve Britain’s currently shaky state of ‘community cohesion’ . This is the case even though some Muslim groups are engaging in making up food parcels for those who are now in isolation. The image of the bad piss taking profiteering Muslim is the one that many Britons will have after this, if this is what is happening, not the Muslim who does the right thing and helps the wider community. My contact who told me about the Lidl incident expressed concern that there is arising a situation where the elderly British pensioners in the area in question, people who didn’t get out when the area first started to go bad, and who only really go out once a week to shop, may be facing wasted journey’s to empty supermarkets or having to pay inflated prices at corner shops for basic goods.
This emergency is going to bring out the best in people and the worst in people. It’s going to create both heroes and villains, just like in previous emergencies such as World War II. This confict produced in Britain both selfless civilian individuals who gave time, effort and some of their own meagre rationed goods to help others as well as the ‘Spivs’ who profited from shortages and the looters who robbed the dead and dispossessed.
The Government is going to put before the House of Commons emergency legislation to cope with the Covid19 outbreak. It’s likely that this may involve enforced quarantine as well as giving the government powers to purchase healthcare facilities from the private sector and to hire hotels and other similar facilities to house those quarantined because of Covid or to become makeshift hospitals. We shall have to see what this emergency legislation contains when it is brought before the Commons tomorrow. I hope that the legislation will do something about panic buying as this has become a self sustaining public reaction where a shopper sees an empty shelf, panics and buys more than they would normally buy for a weekly shop, this in turn creates more empty shelves and therefore more panic and panic buying. I do worry about some of the things that I’m hearing that might be done such as releasing prisoners who are towards the end of their gaol sentences earlier than usual. This is because all this will do is just inject back into already struggling communities, communities suffering from Covid19, people who will do no good to these areas and will maybe even end up preying on the vulnerable upon release.
Both the media and the government seem to be trying to encourage some sort of ‘Blitz spirit’ that semi-mythical sense of the whole country pulling together to achieve a goal. It would indeed be good to see people pulling together to get through this but my worry is that we are much more atomised as a society than we once were and this goal may not be as readily achievable today. It is relatively straightforward for a government to marshal the population when it is, as it was during WWII, mostly homogenous and less individualistic and egalitarian than the one that has been created in the United Kingdom in recent decades. We are now a society where there is less loyalty to the Crown, to government and to nation than there once was. We even, unlike in 1939-45, have thousands of people who need to be monitored by the police in case they turn violent such is the hatred they have for the rest of us. This is in my view a far more grave situation with regards fifth columnists than that which existed during WWII where only a few British Hitler worshippers had to be detained under Section 18b. Whether everything works out well and people do put aside differences in order to help others or whether this emergency shows up in even starker relief the divisions created by multiculturalism, only time I’m afraid will tell.
There have I understand already been protests against the government over the government’s handling of the Covid19 emergency, however it turns out that one high profile protest was merely the eco-fascists of Extinction Rebellion exploiting the situation. I don’t expect these will be the only protests, especially if the situation gets worse and deficiencies start to show up in government policy towards Covid19. Scientifically I believe that the Government at present may well be doing the right thing in flattening the Covid19 curve, controlling as best they can, the rate of infections so as to not overburden an already creaking NHS. It is also possible that this policy of flattening the curve of infections and hospital admissions may have something to do with the fear that many of us have that although Covid19 is less deadly than the influenza strain of 1918, Covid 19 could have similar waves of infections as the 1918 flu pandemic. This, what we are living throught now, could merely be the initial mild stage of the illness which could be followed by a much more deadly wave and then a more minor wave. It’s more than likely that this will not be the case as modern medcial science is far more advanced now than it was in 1918. We know the structure of this virus, we know a great deal about how it operates, how it reproduces and how it effects the body. None of that information was available to those fighting the 1918 flu pandemic. They didn’t even have antibiotics to fight any secondary infections caused by influenza. I suspect that Covid19 may end up either as an endemic seasonal illness one that is relatively mild in nature or a vaccine is found for it. My money would be on the development of a vaccine as that would be the most effective and most cost effective way of beating this virus.
We are in for some interesting times over the next few months or so, maybe even a year or more before this disease is brought under proper control. It will kill some but I doubt that it will kill anything like the numbers, 500 million, that died of flu in the period of 1918-1920. When looking at things like Covid19 it helps to have a sense of persepective and to realise that although this disease is bad, it’s not the Great Plague of 1665 and neither is it 1918 all over again. Life is different, science is different and medicine is different. All these factors could see humanity beating this disease much more swiftly than it took to eradicate Smallpox.
Addendum
** The original British joke reads ‘There’s fog in the English Channel, the Continent is therefore isolated’.
Ann Coulter’s latest is interesting [link]:
Is all this really due to 2 Chinamen? Are those Italy’s ‘Patient Zero’ (or ‘Bìngrén líng’ 病人零)? Along with the cosmopolitan set and their holidays in Italy because they’re too good to go to Blackpool?
This page [link] provides current distribution of cases in Italy by region, which can be compared to the regions listed in the LoC report (link in Ann’s column); also this site [link] shows regional distribution of all immigrants. The correlation is not exact by any means—but it is suggestive.
Borders closing everywhere—but how much does it apply to UMIs? Our Border Force collected another 25 from the Channel the other day [link] There had been 55 deaths and 1,543 known cases when those UMIs were picked up; one might think that now, finally, we’d be getting serious about protecting our borders and just towing their boats back to France or even putting down rounds in their direction to let them know how unwelcome they were. But of course not—they got a free boat ride back here. There weren’t even any women and children to tug at the old heartstrings, all men according to the BBC (if any women were around, they were Border Force personnel—life in the 21st Century West: female members of our Security Forces rescuing brawny foreign blokes in the middle of the worst pandemic since the Spanish (Chinese) Flu. To paraphrase Plato: ‘Only the dead have seen the last of Clown World’).
The voice of reason: ‘An Analysis of the Covid-19 Response: Weighing up the Threat From the Virus, and the Threat From the Reaction’ from Pastor Rob Slane on his site, ‘The Blogmire’ [link]. Links in essay support his contention that we are likely massively over-reacting—one link was pulled by the SJW s**tpile that is ‘medium’ (as opposed to the SJW s**tpile that is reddit or the SJW s**tpile that is twitter or the SJW s**tpile that social media is in general—the only advantage of social media is it functioning as demonstrable proof that democracy was a mistake); but it can be found on the web archive [link].
(Rob’s quite good, if you’ve not come across him before; his comments section often turns into cancer but Rob himself is solid enough.)
And rather a good article suggesting caution from the BBC [link]; and also: Lachmann, A. (2020) Correcting under-reported COVID-19 case numbers. doi:10.1101/2020.03.14.20036178. [link].
I would have preferred an earlier, more robust response from HMG, but I was thinking more of closing borders from most countries, ensuring the quarantining of those allowed entry from abroad, and mandating the wearing of masks (even a handkerchief would go a long way of preventing the unknowingly infected from infecting others).
Instead of which the borders remain open [link], the UK Border Force continue to act as a UMI taxi service [link; 64 more, many from the virus hotspot that is Iran, the majority adult males], and our democratically elected, generously remunerated politicians decided to drive the economy over a cliff.
I increasingly suspect the over-reaction will turn out to be another South Sea Bubble, Tulip Mania, or other collective lunacy as described in Charles Mackay’s famous Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841, 2nd ed. 1852)—and Mackay himself was not immune, contributing to the ‘Railway Mania’ of the 1940s; see Odlyzko, A. (2011). Charles Mackay’s Own Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Railway Mania. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1927396. [link].
I believe the medical situation serious; but not ‘crash and burn the economy’-serious, ffs.
I haven’t seen Pastor Slane’s stuff I’ll have a look. I completely agree that the government should have shut the borders or at least put in restrictions on those travelling from Covid19 hotspots. I certainly believe that this is now the time when hard interdiction of the channel invaders can be both morally and politically justified. I’m really uneasy about both the policy of crashing and burning the economy and the imposition of the sort of emergency powers that will be difficult to remove once this emergency is over. Britain is already a less than free country when compared to the USA, the very last thing that we need is anything that makes that situation worse.
To give a more positive note, I’ve been reading the government’s 2014 influenza pandemic plan that was put together by Public Health England following an exercise in pandemic response that occurred sometime after the 2009 influenza pandemic. I was pleased to find out that much of what we are going through now such as social distancing and prioritising the delivery of food and services along with the protection of the vulnerable has already been thoroughly wargamed by the Govt. These are not back of the envelope panic measures, these have been thought out and that to my mind is a good thing,it means the government is not running around like headless chickens.
I cringe now at my first post here on this topic [15 March, link]. I was panicking: even the rich and powerful were coming down with it—O-M-G, no-one’s safe!. But I eventually noticed they weren’t dying; in fact, they were recovering, despite being at the more vulnerable ages. (Some Iranian pols died but maybe they were following koranic dietary and medical practices, as memorably described by David Woods in his ‘ISLAMICIZE ME!’ videos [link].)
I over-reacted. In saner times, I would now be rebuked: ‘And that’s why the boys down at Westminster get paid the big bucks and you don’t,’ and I would then retire suitably chastened. However, while I’m calming down, the boys and girls with the big bucks and blank cheque expense accounts are the ones panicking.
The Diamond Princess is probably the most useful barometer—the proverbial ‘canary in the coalmine’. Isolated environment, and initially almost everything went wrong that could go wrong. The horror script writes itself: [Orson Welles-type voiceover] A ship… sails the ocean… with an unseen passenger… a virus UNKNOWN to man… For the passengers… their dream cruise… was about to turn into… a NIGHTMARE…
So, how did what has been frequently described as a ‘floating petri dish’ do between the first COVID-19 test-positive on 1st February, through the final guest disembarkation on 27 February, to date (23rd March)?
1,045 crew & 2,666 passengers—3,711 in total [link].
Tested positive: 712 (19.19% of those on board)
Recovered: 567 (79.63% of the 712 tested positive)
Active cases: 137 (19.24% of the 712), of which 15 (2.11% of the 712) are reported ‘Critical’.
Died: 8 (1.12% of the 712)
8? 8 have died? Not quite the PLAGUE ship, the ship of CORPSES, we had been led to expect. As horror scripts go, it’s more Weekend at Bernie’s than Death Ship. I don’t mean to be callous but that figure must be compared to ‘an estimated 200 passenger deaths a year—[albeit] remarkably few given the 21.7 million people worldwide that cruise each year’ [link]. And those 8 were aged 70–89, with an average age of 58 on board—the most vulnerable [link].
The UK records (23 Mar) 335 COVID-related deaths; in comparison, from 1974–2018, Britain annually averaged 304,896 deaths from all causes, a daily average of 835 [link]; and 2018 recorded 76,603 dying from ‘Diseases of the respiratory system’ in England and Wales alone [link] (daily average 210).
So Boris was initially right and I was wrong; even my idea above of mandating everyone wear masks was, frankly, silly (maybe necessary, a worthwhile precaution, for those in contact with the vulnerable—the elderly, ill, etc.).
Unfortunately, from being the Voice of Reason, Boris then spazzed out.
Now, the population of Britain, along with much of the Western world, are under virtual house arrest, a level of tyranny that not even Orwell imagined. How much of this over-reaction stems from mediocre career pols, woefully out of their depth and terrified of a critical headline, their eye ever on the next election, simply panicking unreasonably, and how much stems from mendacious career pols seizing on the opportunity to create a totalitarian state, only time will tell. But this ‘crisis’ solved Macron’s Gilet jaunes problem.
The pending ‘Coronavirus Bill’ [link] is very worrying; and our SJWs-in-blue will be only too keen to use their new powers to hammer every Whitey and ‘Righty’ around.