Mask-up

Nothing illustrates the character of the British better than reactions to the mask-up. Here, when just about all but food shops and tobacconists were shut in a lock down, masks were compulsory from Day One. The first few days the law was in force, a staff member stood outside the door handing out masks to anyone who hadn't brought one. It wasn't over-prescriptive; a variety of scarves, pashminas and home-made coverings went unremarked - just so long as mouth and nose were covered. There were no arguments. Everyone complied. It wasn't a big thing.

More remarkably, there was practically no debate in advance over whether it would or wouldn't be effective, whether it was an unbearable imposition on civil liberties or on exactly how it was to be enforced. There were no impassioned declarations of defiance, no rebels vowing to die of starvation rather than don a mask in Tesco, no police chiefs planning cell capacity for mask-rebels. 

That the UK will present an almost totally opposite reaction is actually a good thing. It's part of a British character that would also not have accepted without demur that Jews had to wear yellow stars or Downs children must be handed over for euthanising. And yes, I'm quite sure the PM agonised over it. He really is a libertarian - as Michael Deacon points out in the Telegraph -

We appeared to be watching a wrestling match between two sides of Mr Johnson’s personality. The side that is libertarian, laissez-faire and stoutly opposed to State meddling – and the side that, on the whole, would quite like fewer people to die of Covid-19.

Well, I can only point out that Austria got on top of the first wave very quickly, with a mortality rate much lower than the UK's. How much of this was due to masks and how much to cleanliness, distancing and a very low population density I simply can't hazard an opinion. Mask prices here have fallen from 37.50€/50 to 15.99€/50 and as a second wave is now inevitable - which may actually be more severe than that in the UK - it's a good time to stock up.  

Aircraft and theatres

I trust you all had a decent weekend and hope that many of you managed a visit to the pub. The pub, of course, is far, far more than just a sector of the entertainment industry - it is local democracy in evidence, a temple to free speech and expression, free from the constraints of remote censorship but subject always to peer evaluation. Drunk people may be incapable of maintaining social distancing, one police service senior manager opined, and undoubtedly for many who managed to get a leg over at the weekend there will be a degree of gratitude for this grievous failure.

The question this morning is what is the difference between an aircraft and a theatre, in epidemic terms that is? Why is it OK to sit close to a group of people for several hours in an aircraft but not OK to do so in a theatre? I suspect there may be an answer in the air filtration and circulation systems, but it's hardly convincing.

It seems we've found the path to living with Covid some months after other nations - testing, testing and testing. Sweatshops, meat plants, overcrowded housing and other risk environments will all incubate new outbreaks, but the more swiftly we detect and contain them, the more the rest of the economy can attempt to recover before the big dip hits.

One final tiny point is niggling at me. Is the imaginary line that separates the legal and administrative jurisdictions of Scotland and England a border or a boundary? I'm genuinely not sure.

The truth is, there's some crap science out there

Looking back at the blog posts here in the week or so before the UK lockdown on 24th March, it is clear we all knew the likely risk of the Wuhan virus - roughly, a fatality rate of 1% and an R rate of around 2.3. That would give around 520,000 excess deaths if no action was taken. Those figures came as the median values from a large range of speculative figures from a host of scientists, and like a normal distribution curve there were some extreme outliers at either end of the bell curve. One of which, as the Speccie reports, is being touted by anti-government broadcaster Channel 4 - a silly forecast of over three times the median forecasts, with a potential 1.7m fatalities, from numpty scientists in a competing department at Imperial.

The posts also record, to be frank, in the days before lockdown, the scientific prediction that the measures would reduce the number of excess deaths to around 20,000. Well, they were way off with that one. We've already had 64,000 excess deaths.

In fact, as emerging evidence now suggests, everyone was already taking isolating measures a week before lockdown, again reported in the Speccie. We really aren't just sheep, and given the right information, we can make decisions for ourselves.

The confused but anti-government media are already making much of the testimony given by the discredited scientist Neil Ferguson to the Commons Science Select Committee. Testimony that is patently false given the probability that the disease had peaked a week before lockdown.

It seems that there is still a lot of crap science out there, and I have great sympathy for Boris and ministers who can't tell in advance who is a crap scientist and who is pukka, and even some sympathy for journalists who dropped all science in the fourth form in favour of arts and media subjects, and can't even add up a shopping bill let alone understand pandemic maths. The idiocy comes when, as Peston does, they then attempt to explain science they don't themselves understand.

Add to this the downright mendacity, distortion, omission and misrepresentation by scientific and government bodies when faced with scientific evidence they don't like, ably documented by both Dick Puddlecote and Christopher Snowdon. Some crap science is because they don't know better, some is because they refuse to listen. We need to be wary of both.

Bristol study from the Speccie - virus peaked a week before lockdown