Crap Chinese tests and OCD

Just two observations this morning - one critically important, the other of minor interest. The first of course is the news that the WHO has been talking bollocks, as they say. Even after their early failings, their palpable negligence, their misdirection to the world at the behest of their Chinese masters, one still paid some regard to the warnings and advice of the WHO. The most frightening of their warnings a week or so ago was that mankind might not develop immunity to the Wuhan virus. This was based on a number of cases in which those who had recovered from Chinese flu were subsequently tested positive for a second time. As the speccie reports, it turns out this was due to faulty and inaccurate testing. "Ah sorry lads" says the WHO "as you were. Turns out these crap Chinese test kits are all duff haha". This just reinforces a resolution on my part to deal with anything that comes out of the WHO in future as I do a K-Tel advert. Their claims may be true, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The second is one of those tiny nuggets that sometimes manage to penetrate the woke blather that the World Service has become, in this case the testimony of an American OCD sufferer who has been wholly vindicated by the Wuhan virus. For years he's been disinfecting door handles touched by others, maintaining infection-free distances and cleaning, bleaching, disinfecting, wiping and mopping from dawn to dusk to keep the microbes at bay. There was a touch of validated pride in his voice as he proclaimed that he was right all along, and the entire world is just catching up with him. More poignantly and realistically, he said that we now all know the anxiety he's suffered all his life, at people breaching social distance, at being forced into microbial risk situations, at people coughing. Every cloud, as they say. The world's OCD sufferers can now behave as their instinct drives them, masked, gowned and gloved, armed with Isopropyl alcohol sprayers and boxes of tissues, wholly unselfconsciously and free of public ridicule. Even the bloody virus can do some people a good turn.

Snake oil and miracle drugs

Science is galloping along at a healthy pace, thanks to the Wuhan virus. All over the world, medical and pharma researchers and practitioners are working with unprecedented focus on drugs to alleviate the symptoms of the virus or for a vaccine. The internet has enabled them to put their findings out in public instantly, many without peer review, and wholly by-passing the filtering and partiality of the medical establishment and the gatekeepers of the learned journals. I expect like me you will delve into the Pubmed site maybe once a week to see how they're all getting on, even if, also like me, a lot of the science is over our heads. And doctors themselves have established unofficial, unsanctioned 'Whatsapp' groups - at no cost whatever to the NHS, and not a single NHS £100k manager to administer them - to share clinical information.

Overnight, this eager and industrious research has overturned the shibboleths of the medical establishment; ventilators, it appears, are a very bad thing. Even if you're unlucky enough to be ill enough to be taken to hospital, where you have a 90% chance of surviving, it falls to 50% if they put you on a ventilator. And if you smoke, keep smoking. As more and more research and data is shared freely online, so the world will learn how best to care for those who fall seriously ill from the Wuhan virus, the most effective prophylactics and the best drugs to alleviate symptoms.

We're also learning in incredible detail the character of the Sars-CoV-2 package. A propensity to antigenic drift and/or shift may mean a vaccine is seeking a moving target - and the Wuhan virus may become an annual visitor, and just as we take a quad-vaccine flu shot each season betting on the four strains most likely to emerge in any year, we will have annual Wuhan shots with two or three likely variations included. However, unless something miraculous happens, no vaccine will be here before next year. And that means we must take a hit before then. And in the worst case, there may be no acquired immunity and no vaccine at all.

That's the bottom line for every nation. Lift lockdowns now to allow the Wuhan bug to climb to an R0 of say R1.05, just enough to be able to pinch it off once maximum NHS capacity is reached, and allow the economy to live. And if there's no acquired immunity, then the Wuhan virus will become a deadly variation of the common cold, one that carries-off an additional 100,000 UK citizens a year, and it will change forever the way we live.

Right now the energy, ingenuity and application of the chaotic anarchy of scientific research and scholarly internet publication is coming each day closer to letting us know the score. They're quite capable of filtering-out the snake oil, and we should be cautious of any pharma company claiming to have a miracle drug. If I clap anyone today, it will be those internet research heroes, the doctors and scientists delivering data and research hot on our screens each day.

Licence plate lockdown

Unlike UK licence plates, which belong to a particular car, Austrian plates are issued to an insured driver by the insurance companies on behalf of the government. They are yours, and can be used on up to three cars - you only pay an insurance premium for the most expensive. They clip and unclip from their mountings quite easily. But because they belong to the insured person, it is possible for each registration number to carry a residence-specific code portion, along with the wappen or arms of your Bundesland . If you move to a different Bezirk (think of it as about equivalent to a district council) you need to get a new licence plate.

A plate belonging to someone from Klagenfurt, in the state of Kärnten

If such a scheme were run in the UK, the first two letters of the licence plate would indicate your place of residence. For London, it would be a London shield symbol plus a borough code - say LA for Lambeth, WE for Westminster, BR for Bromley and so on. Any 'county lines' drug dealers here have a very hard time - but that's not all.

Country areas are naturally suspicious of outsiders even in good times, and the Wuhan virus has magnified mistrust of any vehicle with a 'foreign' licence plate - and by foreign, I mean a vehicle from a neighbouring district, never mind out-of-state vehicles or the Satanic chariots carrying the evil W for Vienna. Believe me, after a while non-local vehicles stick out like a sore thumb in the supermarket car park - and you can be sure if a car with plates bearing the shield of Tyrol and LA code that includes Ishgl, the seat of Austria's après-ski contagion, were spotted there the store doors would have been locked shut. 

I'm fascinated to learn how the locals will cope with the end-of-lockdown dilemna. They will be riven between mistrust of the outsider and the welcoming of the critical summer tourist Euros. It will be fun to watch. 

And second-homers in the UK can be very grateful for the anonymity of UK licence plates.

Deaths - all causes stats

The deaths - all causes stats are the ones to watch today. Looking at the shape of pandemic death curves, those that include all excess deaths at a time of pandemic, they seem to have a longer tail. Thus when the first 6k figure was released, I speculated a rough path would be a 6 - 15 - 8 - 4 shape, giving some 33k excess deaths for the first wave of the Wuhan virus. So far we've had 6 - 18. If my initial guess at the shape was right, we could be on a 6 - 18 - 10 - 5 trajectory.

The shape of the first wave is important as it can give us a clue as to the likely outcome of a second, enhanced wave. It seems we're going to have to take the hit, whatever happens. Neither the economy nor public order will survive an indefinite total lockdown, and people are voting with their feet.

The first wave of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic caused a fatality peak in mid-July, the second a fatality peak in mid-November, some four months later. The second peak was much bigger in 1918 - if 18k is the Wuhan first peak, the second would be 90k in the highest week if un-modified. That, of course, is what the government is desperate to avoid.

I think we'll need to keep those empty Nightingale hospitals open for the foreseeable future, in any event. 

Update
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Last week's excess deaths for all UK wasn't 18k but 17k. This week's (week 16) gives 11,854 excess deaths in E&W above 5 year average, 844 in Scotland and 134 in NI. 12,832 in total. So the pattern so far is 6 - 17 - 13, as far as I can see. 

A damning indictment of Whitehall's public health failure

The smug complacency of the Whitehall establishment prior to the impact of the Wuhan virus was sickening. They were - and are - convinced that gross centralisation is the answer to everything, but C19 has proven the fallaciousness of this delusion.

This country has had a long history of response to threats to public health, from Snow's cholera-infected Soho pump in 1854 onwards. We had local boards of health, and medical officers of health, one for each local government area. They ensured that adequate provision was made for burials, clean water, sewers and other public health infrastructure - but above all they were the nation's first line of defence against epidemics. Cholera, Typhoid, TB, Diphtheria. Being 'modern' is no defence against zoonotic or parasitic epidemics - as this paper, describing the challenges to public health post-1945 in Germany, describes -

... the following years were characterized by deficiencies of hygiene which had not occurred previously in Middle Europe during the 20th century. There were focuses of typhus, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and meningitis. Insufficiencies in the removal of faeces caused high incidences of shigellosis, hepatitis A, and ascariasis. As a result of insufficient body care, many people were infested with fleas, lice and scabies. The migration of large proportions of the population resulted in an increasing prevalence of syphilis an gonorrhea.

Our experiences in liberated Europe renewed our commitment to local public health, and a generation of Medical Corps officers who dealt with these conditions at first hand moved into environmental and public health positions in local government. For many years we benefited from their experience. The Guardian takes up the story from this point;

The system of local communicable disease control was established in the 19th century. After the NHS was set up in 1948, it was supported in England and Wales by national, regional and more than 40 local public health laboratories. But since local medical officers of health were abolished in 1974 – replaced by community physicians at different levels of the NHS – the system has been gradually but relentlessly eroded, fragmented and centralised.

Communicable disease control was centralised in the Health Protection Agency in 2003, and local public health laboratories transferred to NHS hospitals. Public health was then carved out of the NHS in England in the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which abolished local area health bodies, created Public Health England to fulfil the government’s duty to protect the public from disease and charged local authorities with improving public health – but with limited proactive scope for infectious disease control and woefully inadequate resources.

The woeful failures of Public Health England, which we have catalogued, are not the only consequences of woke centralisation. PHE effectively abandoned their responsibilities for epidemic control, implemented an unworkable and ineffective central system and concentrated their resources on the faddish obsessions of the middle-class woke well - smoking, alcohol and sugar. As the authors of that Guardian piece also point out, the concentration on NHS 111 - telephone helplines that simply collapsed under the weight of hundreds of thousands of anxious callers - left local GPs with direct local knowledge completely unused.

The utter abandonment of their key responsibilities has not been the only negligent direction that PHE has taken. As John Ashton reported to the Telegraph, PHE officials have run up 5.1 million air miles over the past 3 years on 'the global health security agenda'. It's easy to see what's happened. They've utterly neglected their fundamental local public health responsibilities in favour of quasi-academic junkets to Florida or Singapore, business class travel and international hotels on the public purse, when they should have had their heads down sewer-covers in Birmingham. As Ashton, a former Director of Public Health, comments carefully "PHE's time would have been better spent ensuring testing facilities were up to scratch throughout the country" he said. "It's been inadequate and they have failed to catch up with themselves even when it was shown to be inadequate," he told The Telegraph.

We must keep pushing the absolute necessity for localisation and decentralisation. We must keep exposing the manifold failures of the central Whitehall machine. They are costing lives.

Levels of TB in London greater than Iraq, Ethiopia or Afghanistan are a damning public health indictment

West moves to Phase II of Wuhan virus response

At slightly different speeds and in slightly different ways, the nations of the Western world are now moving together into Phase II of their response to the Wuhan virus. How hard lockdowns are being lifted will vary according to local conditions, but we now have confidence that the toll from the bug can be controlled if necessary. Now we know the brakes work, it's time to take our foot from the brake pedal.

It will change our behaviour for ever, just as AIDS did in the early '80s. Even if the Wuhan virus proves a great deal less lethal and much less transmissible - it's native R0 of ~2.3 is around half that of ~4.6 for AIDS - its character may mean that we must protect the old and vulnerable whilst the rest of us carry on as normal, polarising society. Grandparents would be separated from their grandchildren, the morbidly obese would need either to lose weight or adopt leper lifestyles and the immunocompromised remain behind closed doors.

Pressure will now be intense on the world's indigenous peoples to stop eating bats and monkeys - too many novel diseases have sprung from this practice, distasteful to Western tastes, since jet travel and increased prosperity enabled enhanced transmission. And China must stop sending her diplomats to lie and evade responsibility for the Wuhan virus; listen if you will to Friday's World at One interview with Chen Wen, China's deputy ambassador to the UK (from about 11:06 to 28:30). It's a stunning display of authoritarian delusion. No wonder the government have now removed the China line from the daily Covid-TV graphs - it's pure fiction. She also denied that China had any 'wet' markets at all that sold bats, beavers, badgers and other wild animals, dead and alive - not so she said. China had farmers' markets, which sold fresh meat and vegetables. Well, I've been to Blackheath farmers' market a few times and have never found live eating-snakes and Pangolin chops on the stalls there. Tom Tugendhat is actually right about China - I just wish he was a little more articulate and animated about it. And it's not just China. Africans must either close down their bushmeat markets or their visitors must face a month's quarantine before those wealthy corrupt ministers' wives, fat as butter, can spend their stolen cash in Bond Street.

Phase II will also introduce enhanced national security measures not unrelated to our having left the EU. Our waters and the fish that dwell in them have now become a national security asset in a way they weren't in December. There is zero chance that we'll now trade away even a scintilla of control. The new quarantine requirements for visitors will become a permanent feature - at least the requirement for visitors to register an address, for track-and-traceability. No great novelty there for anyone who knows Europe and has completed a fiche or meldezettel at a hotel or rented villa.

As for forecasts that Phase II will see the demise of cash - I'm not convinced. Oh for sure, our steel and nickel coins and plastic and paper notes are filthy, but that hasn't always been the case. Both silver and copper have strong antiviral properties, and I'm sure it is not beyond the wit of man to incorporate silver or copper ions in banknote 'paper'. Till-draw cavities could also be internally flooded in UV to allow constant viral destruction. Cash expresses our freedom from absolute State control, and we'd be foolish to allow it to be taken from us even at this time.

The debates, the research, the policy trials and errors will continue into Phase II. We don't yet have the answers, but we approach the next stage with greater confidence in ourselves and our abilities. Let's just ensure the world on the other side is a better one, albeit a different one, to that in 2019. 

Feel their pain

Spare a moment this morning, if you will, to feel the pain of the EUphiles. The Wuhan virus has targeted the old, and has targeted BAME persons but let us not forget it has also impacted supranationalists far more than internationalists. As nations and peoples re-assert themselves, the rediscovery of internationalism, of voluntary co-operation, of domestic priorities, is rapidly putting the world back in order. Everywhere, Globalism is in retreat. But you'd need a heart of stone not to cast a grain of pity for those who, having been floored by Brexit, are now being felled for a second time. Der Spiegel's cry is almost pitiable;

The fact that in the Alsace region, critically ill patients were transported to distant – French – hospitals despite the fact that beds in nearby – German – intensive care units were available is a function of the bad habits developed in an old world whose disappearance would be anything but detrimental. It is shameful that Germany, the most powerful country in Europe, has again neglected to take any steps towards strengthening the union. It has once again become apparent that EU headquarters in Brussels has no power and that, in the opinion of EU member states, shouldn't get any. 

Old, nation-state attitudes have deep roots.These attitudes are reflected in small things, such as the fact, for example, that political maps are consistently used to depict the expansion of this virus – as though it were a national problem. The colorings used on the maps are meant to show how each country is doing in the fight against the illness, while diagrams are used to identify model pupils (South Korea) and problem children (the United States). Each country's supply of face masks is carefully enumerated while national stockpiles of medical equipment are compared. It may sound cynical, but the daily tables showing the number of infections and deaths look almost like the medal counts from some macabre Olympics.

Stay safe.

Well fancy that ..

Following a previous post in which I outlined the early and sketchy evidence from China that suggested that smokers had some immunity to Covid-19, the phenomenon has gone European. Austria of course is the chain-smoker of Europe, and smoking in bars and cafes was only banned at the beginning of this year, greatly to the annoyance of the regulars at my local gasthaus.

Fags here are just over £4 a packet - unlike the UK, smuggled cigarettes from eastern Europe cannot easily be stopped, and though the health fascists would dearly love to tax at UK levels, they know that not only would it not reduce smoking but the government would lose tax.

As the Guardian reports, a study at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris revealed that only 4% - 5% of Covid-19 patients were smokers, when 25% - 30% of the general population smoke. So compelling were the findings that nicotine patches are now to be issued to patients and frontline health workers.

There is no confirmation that nicotine is the prophylactic agent, and the science is still out, but it's just possible that the nicotine fascists whose campaign against smoking (justified) has been extended to a 'war on tobacco' (no justification other than joyless bansturbation) will have nicotine vape blown in their faces. If, and it's an outside chance, some other component of burning cured tobacco leaf is responsible, the race will be on to produce it commercially. BAT, Imperial, Philip Morris and Altria will be happy.

Quinine and caffeine are also alkaloids. There's some evidence that the former has a prophylactic effect, but no suggestion as yet as to the latter. 

Update
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Christopher Snowdon in Spiked on this is well worth reading - and a savage condemnation of Public Health England and their fellow lying zealots whose lies will have cost lives. These fools must be indicted.  

Once again, Libertarianism wins out over authoritarian stupidity.

Our over-central State isn't doing so well

In the inevitable post-Covid inquiry, if it is conducted honestly, it will be found that we lost lives in part because of our over-centralised, ineffective, power-grasping State, obstructive and bureaucratised procurement practises and a refusal by Whitehall to localise, decentralise and delegate. We don't have to look far for the villains.

Public Health England, the woke body whose greatest achievement to date has been to ban smoking in hospital grounds and whose main policy thrust was a campaign against alcohol and sugar, has comprehensively cocked-up Wuhan virus testing, as reported in the Telegraph. With a fantasy aspiration to create a single national testing centre, a fantasy that killed health workers, they have now instructed everyone to switch to commercial tests.

And although the press are giving the government a hard time over shortages of PPE, it really isn't the Health Secretary's job to buy nitrile gloves. Each local health trust, hospitals, the NHS, have their own vast procurement departments - I've seen a figure of over 100,000 buying staff quoted. OK, we should have better maintained a national emergency buffer stock of pandemic gear, but as soon as the virus became apparent in January, these buyers should have been placing orders. And it may emerge that our statist jobsworths delayed buying PPE because of EU public procurement directives that require them to advertise across the EU for 30 days before issuing tender documents then another 30 days to allow tenderers to prepare bids, then a compulsory 'standstill' period, then give themselves another 30 days to evaluate the tenders ... an EU-compliant purchase order can take four or five months between starting the procurement and getting the first delivery. If any dickhead anywhere in our vast health infrastructure has insisted on sticking to EU rules they should be shot.

Everywhere are stories of an innovative, agile and responsive private sector banging on the doors of the State to offer testing, help, assistance, contacts, contracts, gear and lifesaving expertise. And everywhere are stories of official doors being slammed in their faces, of bureaucrats 'hiding behind websites', of unanswered calls, of uncontactable procurement departments, of senior civil servants deaf to advice.

It is clear already that we have been grossly failed by an over-central State. Whitehall is not the model we need. We need deep change in the shape of our government.

That's the thing about capitalism

Christian Wolmar writes knowledgeably about the madcap race for railways in the nineteenth century; fortunes were won and lost, risks were high but rewards could be higher. Investors willingly put their money into these uncertain ventures in the full knowledge that it could either all be lost or they would become wealthy beyond desire. That's the thing about capitalism. If you don't want risk put your money into gilts or premium savings bonds. It's a matter of choice.

Tax avoidance is also a matter of choice. It's quite legal and proper - though not of course compulsory. Richard Branson, who is seeking taxpayer help in both Australia and the UK to keep Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia afloat, has been a tax resident in the British Virgin Islands now for many years, and has not paid tax in either the UK or Australia since 2006. He's done well - though his £3.5bn fortune is largely in the share-value of his holdings rather than cash.

It's quite legal to pare-down the assets of a struggling company. It's quite legal to lease nearly all your aircraft and even to mortgage your LHR landing slots to bondholders. Nothing illegal there at all.

That's the thing about capitalism. If those Virgin airlines go bust, the aircraft will still be there, the pilots, air and ground crews will still be there and passengers, even in reduced numbers, will still be there when we start flying again. The public won't lose out. The brand was quite cool in the '80s but then so were shoulder pads and Walkmans.

I can't think of a single reason, therefore, why UK taxpayers should pay £500m to preserve Richard Branson's wealth. Why should we? I don't begrudge Branson his fortune, but won't shed a tear if he loses it all. That's the thing about capitalism.

Deaths all-causes stats 
The figures should be out today. After last week's 6k excess deaths, I predicted, if we're on the climb of the curve, that today could see 15k above the long-run average. I really do pray I'm wrong.

Peston on antigenic shift and antigenic drift

The sewer press must move on. Murdoch has done his globalist best to throw shit at Boris, after it became clear that having already left the EU we would not extend the transition period. Only the dawning of 1st January 2021 will convince the globalists and remainers that we've really left. The remainer dags on BBC, ITV and C4 - Peston, Kuenssberg, Bolton, Beth Rigby, Newman, Burley and the rest - must now crawl into even more latrine pits to find material with which to attack the government. I predict Peston, having demonstrated before millions that he doesn't know the difference between an antigen and an antibody, will instantly now become an expert on the difference between antigenic shift and antigenic drift as talk moves on to vaccine development.

Meanwhile there will always be those who look to the make the best of a crisis. Amongst them are those seeking to drive a wedge between China and the states of Africa. Africans, it appears, have had first hand experience of their Chinese overseers already and it has not been positive. Now it's emerging that the Wuhan virus is racist, killing people of colour to a disproportionate extent, the wedge-drivers are using social media to squeeze out videos of black people being abused and victimised by the Chinese and even one alleging to show a mob of Nigerians torching a Chinese factory. Whether these come from the CIA, FSB or just opportunistic sources, the effect is the same - they help to undo the billions spent by China in Africa as part of the belt and road drive. 

And finally of course Boris's illness also seems to have provoked hope in the hearts of ambitious Tories. As Boris came close to death, our MPs asked desperately who could possibly replace him, and for at least one Tory MP the answer it seems was 'Me!'

So here's your quiz question for the week. Which Tory MP whom you've probably hardly noticed in the past has been all over social media and the less-demanding broadcast media this week? Also with an article in the Sundays. A couple of clues. He's an obedient soft remainer and is possibly the most tedious and soporific writer and speaker in the parliamentary party. The man is living Ritalin. He could put an entire remedial class of ADD delinquents to peaceful sleep.

I want to be the 'Bells on Sunday' man

For the past two or three weeks the BBC has run out of contemporary recordings of change ringing for the 2-minute 'Bells on Sunday' slot on Radio 4. We've had old recordings instead. So what? many of you will be asking. Some of those bells were cast in the 1500s - they've sounded the same for over 500 years. Why does a few weeks make a difference? Yet in a strange way it does make a difference. You see, I have a strong mental image of that tiny department at the BBC.

It starts with the 'Bells on Sunday' man. He's provided with a BBC technician's van in Brunswick Green livery and each week makes his way to one or two small English or Welsh villages, booking into a small local 3* hotel before an English breakfast and a 10am meeting with the ringers and vicar.

"Righto - I'll use three mics. An external gun mike oriented to the tower louvres, one in the nave and the other on the ringing floor."

"Okay let's go for levels please - ring away"

Then, even if the first take of 'Campion quad bob minor' is perfect "Okeydokey let's go for one more take ..." because with two or three takes everyone feels they're getting their money's worth.

Then onto an agreeable solitary lunch in an ancient pub at least a village away before the next appointment. I reckon the BoS man does two recordings a week, probably by Wednesday, allowing Thursday and Friday for the programme editor, the BBC Controller of Bells, first, second and assistant sound engineers, offline and online editors, archive and rights manager and HR director, all on the payroll of the 2-minute BoS slot, to undertake executive meetings and decide which of the two or three takes from each church recording is to be broadcast. The head office team doesn't waste the time from Monday to Wednesday, you can be sure. On Monday there's the wash-up meeting following the Sunday broadcast -

"I thought the continuity was a little rushed, Jeremy. Schedule a meeting, will you, with the Head of Continuity, the Scripts Editor and the Facts and History Controller, say next week?"

On Tuesday the team meets in plenary session to agree the locations for forthcoming recordings, each with a fat file of photocopied letters from tower captains across the land extolling the qualities of their ring of eight tuned to E♭. 

And of course Wednesdays are for the clearance of the equalities statements with the BBC Equalities and Diversity teams. Wednesdays are the worst day of the week.

"I see you've got the next eleven rings planned. All villages. Cheshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire. All hideously white, from the demographics. And despite my previous memoranda, not a single recording of change ringing from a Moslem church"

"Uhm, Controller, there's a problem there. You see mosques don't have ..."

"With respect, I'm not looking for excuses. Just action. I want to hear bells from Moslem, Hindu and Jewish churches in the next three months. Clear?"

"Well of course we'll try. I Expect this is a bit of a change for you from the BBC Climate Change department?"

But most of all I want to be the BoS man in the little Brunswick Green van, never entering Broadcasting House from one year to the next, going home each week to a little pink cottage in a tiny hamlet in the Suffolk brecklands, a comfortable wife and a loving dog. 

Big State, small State, middling State

The Wuhan virus will not only change the world, it is set to provide evidence for scholars of social and economic theories for the next century. How many times have you heard economists say in the past "Haha yes it's only theoretical - we can't know for sure unless we experiment on an entire national economy"? Well, now we can. One of the glories of the diversity of national responses across the world is that they range across the entire spectrum.

At one end we have the big State authoritarianism of China and North Korea - curfew breakers shot, an iron fist of State control, people walled up in their dwellings, total command of the economy and no role for private enterprise in solving the crisis. At the other end we have the US, a nation whose collective mistrust of the State and federal structure together with a loosely regulated economy and patchy coverage of the healthcare system has meant a massive and immediate economic impact - and to Trump's chagrin, he doesn't have the power to control the Covid measures. Under the US constitution, public health measures are the responsibility of state governors. The federal government has issued 'guidelines' but they're not compulsory. Then we have Sweden, now far less certain about its laissez-faire approach to the virus as the bodies pile up. And between the extremes we have the mass of middling-State nations, including most of Europe.

Comparisons are not just body counts, of course. Economies will have various degrees of resilience, flexibility, responsiveness, survivability and agility, different patterns of trade, different mixes of manufacturing and services, differing resource supply patterns and the impact of the recession and recovery from it will also depend on the same social and economic systems.

And then of course there's demography. Young nations with educated, mobile, deployable workforces and low proportions of unproductive olders to be cared for as fragile and vulnerable porcelain, against those with less capable workforces, older populations, lower educational and trade knowledge infrastructures.

So which nations will win out? Which countries are the future? Where will the young be best placed to create a stable, secure and prosperous future for themselves and their families? Will it be authoritarian China or chaotic America?

Predictable and unpredictable

Just as the EU's manifold and abysmal failures to co-ordinate the 27 nations of the EU during the Wuhan virus crisis are becoming clear to all, the cabal of technocrats continues to act entirely to form. They are dealing with Covid-19 as they deal with everything else - slowly. Agile the EU is not. So it's creep, crawl, a little bit of consensus, iron over the immovable barrier, and a bit more creep and crawl. Sadly, the Wuhan virus moves a lot faster then the EU, and by the time they reach an agreement, the nations of the world will already have found a solution. And of course, as the crumbling behemoth is facing an existential crisis, some official pops up to warn the UK, in relation to the Brexit trade talks, that at this difficult time we must not be irresponsible by refusing to accept the wonderful partnership agreement that the EU has crafted. All this madness from the EU is entirely predictable. 

Likewise the slurry of health fascism embodied in that failed and unfit for purpose pressure group, Public Health England. This is the organisation that counts its biggest health policy triumph as banning smoking on hospital grounds, whilst conveniently ignoring levels of multi-drug resistant TB in London greater than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Ethiopia. PHE has not only failed in every respect to prepare for a novel pandemic, it has failed to co-ordinate measures to combat the old ones; our crowded cities are as vulnerable to Cholera, Dysentry, Typhus and parasitic diseases as they were in mid-Victorian times. Now they are actually obstructing efforts to fund a way out of the virus stasis. But it seems that for the most important departments in PHE - those charged with campaigning against alcohol, sugar and fried chicken - it's business as usual. A prize for the first reader to spot the PHE advice warning that drinking alcohol at home during the Wuhan virus crisis should be banned. Again, entirely predictable.

D-list celebrities are finding it hard to break through the new hard mood of national purpose. Several have made efforts to use the crisis for self publicity only to be slapped down with great force by social media (I knew it would be useful some day ..). Even Meghan Markle, who must be throwing tantrums of frustration at her lack of column inches, has become transparent. Her latest wheeze, spending an hour handing out sandwiches in an LA homeless shelter, then having her people 'leak' the story of her 'secret' charity work, has fallen as flat as a damp chapati. Give your money to the NHS, sweetie - it's the only thing that works, as the Duke of Westminster (£12.5m) and Ed Sheeran (£1m) are finding. And Capt. Tom Moore has raised £12m from the little people. All entirely predictable.

Rod Liddle, always a ray of sunlight in the gloom, penned a thoughful piece on the importance of cigarettes during the crisis for the Speccie. He even joked

It is even just about possible that the precise opposite is true, and that smoking conveys a degree of protection against Covid-19, much as it does against Parkinson’s disease, ulcerative colitis, endometrial cancer and possibly skin cancer and thyroid cancer. Though I wouldn’t bet on it.

Well, it may not be such a joke. It seems that ACE2, the protein to which the SARS-CoV-2 virus sticks in the upper respiratory tract in a fresh infection, in impacted by nicotine in a way that enhances resistance to the virus. The evidence is not in the bag as yet, but initial anecdotal evidence about the low incidence of Covid-19 amongst smokers is now being thoroughly tested - and you can bet that the tobacco giants are putting their hands in their pockets to help fund it. Now if it turns out that shares in BAT, Philip Morris, Imperial and Altria are as much marked as winners as Glaxo, that truly would be unpredictable. And if vaping nicotine in offices and public places became an accepted prophylactic against the Wuhan virus, prescribed and funded by the NHS, the increase in apoplexy amongst the nation's health fascists would be a small price to pay.

The curve

When, a couple of weeks ago, the death figures for w/e 20th March came out, I commented that we'd have to wait until the first week or so in May, given the 11 day delay, to see whether the lockdown had reduced the R0 of the virus to below 1. Yesterday's figures, to 3rd April, show an overall increase of some 6,000 deaths a week. So far, I still hold with my early take on the roll-out. The 10th April figures, out on the 21st, will give us the curve. My guess, and it's no more than that, it that we could be 15,000 deaths a week above average. So far I knew personally only one victim of the Wuhan virus, who died last week. I suspect some of you will be in the same position.

The government is doing what anyone piloting a boat in grunty weather does, balancing course and speed over ground with the effects of wind, waves and tide. To avoid going beam-on in dangerous seas you may have to go in a direction for a while you don't want. Or in really grunty weather, get into deep water and ride it out. The government is balancing excess deaths against both their ability to maintain public order and keep the economy from tanking by more than 20% of GDP.

You'll find various bloggers and tweeters around the manor all claiming to know exactly what the answer is. Well, if they were really that clever, someone in authority would have noticed by now, I reckon. So like most folk of the Realm, I put my trust in the government's response, knowing it to be flawed and imperfect, but nonetheless better than any alternative. I don't know the answer, you see, and don't condemn anyone else's opinion because like the lucky sod picking the winner in a sweepstake they may be right. Or they may have picked the munter that falls at the first fence. We need the evidence - the curve - to validate future plans.

However, the realisation across the world is that herd immunity is the only outcome that will allow us to rescue what we can of the world we had at the end of 2019, and that means getting some 60% of the population infected, starting with those most likely to survive. That means allowing the R0 of the Wuhan virus to rise above 1. That's why Denmark, Germany and others are planning to re-open schools and universities and manage a return to a simulacrum of normal life. Albeit one in which facemasks will be the norm for some time to come. Whilst continuing to protect those at most risk.

And that's the next hurdle. There seems to be a consensus about opening schools early in May, but hundreds of millions of facemasks will be needed, and indications are that supplies are not due to come on-stream until July and August. If the MSM knew their arse from their elbow, instead of destroying their own cred by trying to ambush the government, that's the sort of question they should be asking.

The Telegraph reports the spike in deaths

Boris's trickiest manoeuvre

With the news that Boris is out and convalescing I'm sure we all breathed a huge sigh of relief. The latest polls give us a lead of more than 20% over Labour, and Kryten is spending his first week in the new job dealing with a schism in the party so deep it may split it altogether. The leaked report details the deep disloyalty to Magic Grandpa from the senior ranks of Labour officials, and the comrades have now convinced themselves that they could have won Disaster May's vanity election in 1917 2017 had the Mensheviks and Agrarians Blairites and Fabians united behind the Bolsheviks Momentum.

Kryten's troubles and Parliament's holiday are giving Boris's ministers an easy ride. And some of them are not doing so well. I suspect many are unable to manage their civil servants, and those unmanageable civil servants are seeking as much to cover-up and rationalise their past blunders as to solve current problems. It may be uncomfortable for ministers to face a grilling either in the House or in select committee, but it produces a better result for us all. The minister is really just the medium through which our scrutiny of the civil service passes, and the opposition are acting as our scrutators. So yes, Parliament resuming its effectiveness in a week's time is in all our interests.

Boris's dilemma is his gross personal popularity, behind which both his ministers and their civil servants will seek to hide. He must now manage the trickiest manoeuvre - leading a collective cabinet whilst leaving individual ministers sufficient distance to answer for their own performance. One or two may have to be swapped-out pour encourager les autres. A couple of weeks convalescence leaving Dominic Raab at the despatch box (he's sound and secure in his job and can take the knocks - and is loyal to Boris) is not a bad thing.

We can only hope that the comrades manage to focus. The party is not exactly short of lawyers, and signs over the weekend are that they are getting ready to sue the arse off eachother over either (a) their anti-Corbyn comments having been leaked  or (b) their having sabotaged Corbyn's leadership. sadly, their antics may prove more diverting than the real business in Parliament. However, we have the BBC and MSM to help ensure that coverage of Labour's infighting is minimised whilst fighting their own partisan media war of attrition against the government.

Labour's leaked report will give some chortles over the breakfast table

Food, farming and nitrile gloves

Supply chains, maritime trade, nearshoring and onshoring manufacturing from China and the far East, diversification (HT Mr Drew and C@W) and such things are part of the national dialogue for the first time in a generation. Possibly since Suez. And there are any number of Who Knew? realities being revealed. I'm learning, even from Twitter. @Uncle_Albert_ posted a thread pertinent to the PPE debate asking us to remember that latex and nitrile both come mostly from Malaysian rubber (Albert claims) and that as trees take several years to grow, the current global demand for gloves may easily outstrip all possible production.

Of course it may be that if we don't buy tyres because no-one is going anywhere, there will be more rubber for gloves, but it won't be anytime soon. And even if we push to the head of the 'Top Glove' (the world's largest single manufacturer of latex gloves, he says) queue and buy a batch FOB port, you may still have great trouble getting it because of the shortage of ships and containers, many also locked down in port. Ha, OK, so you'll fly them in - except much of the previous commercial freight capacity was in the bellies of passenger aircraft, mostly also now grounded.

And then there's food.

Back in the days, I kept half a dozen hens running in a little six-tree orchard at the back of my little cottage in Needham Market. I supplemented their foraging with frost-damaged spuds bought by the sack and similar, and with Pauls and Whites layers' mash (cue Edward Spalton). The only problem was, it not only stank of fish but made the eggs taste of fish. Some time later, I think the feed manufacturers reduced fishmeal in their mixes and increased grain, corn and suchlike. Back then we were such destructive bastards that we would hoover up fish from the sea just to crush the entire catch for animal feed. Now every fish counts - and we will need every square nautical mile of our exclusive economic zone from the end of the year.

Not only do we only produce half the food we eat, but much of it is the wrong food, according to Tim Lang. The reviews of his 'Feeding Britain' in both the Telegraph and in the Guardian are instructive. Firstly, we're eating far too much Ultra Processed Food, he says - fruit loops, biscuits and chicken nuggets - and it's killing our guts (cue Stephen J) and making us obese, diabetic and natural Wuhan virus victims. Half the UK diet is UPF. It may seem cheap at the supermarket, but the true cost must include the increased health care costs of eating harmful crap that makes us fat. And then we're growing the rest the wrong way.

Instead of growing maize and cereals to feed livestock for meat, we should use that acreage to grow fruit and veg instead, and put animals out to grass. We could up our self-sufficiency in food from 50% to 80% if we do it right. And farmers and fishermen must get much more of the price we pay for our food - "Currently primary producers do most of the work but are only left with 8 per cent of the Gross Value Added from food"

And to be frank, gaining a diet rich in fish, seafood, grass-fed beef, seasonal greenstuffs and natural butter and cheese and losing one packed with fruit loops, reconstituted chicken, carcass slurry burgers, chemicals, palm oil, fillers and preservatives is, in my opinion, no bad thing.

Some things are not easy to say

I've always hated waste. Not just cost, or carelessness, but the idea of waste. I never accepted that 10% of bricks or roof tiles would be broken by handling, or 15% of plasterboard deliveries would be wasted. I always challenged such assumptions - and when I became a CEEQUAL assessor, would try to gently nudge jobs I was assessing not to drop points by careless waste. It didn't even have to be related to value; I once watched a worker assisting in the application of a skin-irritating substance needlessly change pair after pair of latex gloves. It was just deliberately throwing away someone else's money - out of irritation at being employed, being instructed, being constrained. Even an office worker who throws a new biro slow to start writing in the bin before giving it a chance is in part just kicking his boss, his firm and his office. If he was at home, if they were his own gloves or his own biros he wouldn't do it.

So I can understand Matt Hancock's difficulty yesterday in urging health and care workers not to cream through the nation's stocks of PPE quite so vigorously. It's OK to wear the same mask to see two patients in a row; you don't need to change plastic aprons every 15 minutes - well, I guess that's what he wanted to say but couldn't really say it. Can you imagine the press fury at asking NHS workers who are losing their lives to cut back on 10p latex gloves?

We need to remember that just as not all soldiers are gallant, not all health workers are selfless. Many will be feeling pissed off at their well-paid indoors job with no heavy lifting suddenly turning lethal, with no hiding place at home because the bloody neighbours are all standing in their drives clapping every morning at going-to-work time. What makes the workforce as a whole exceptional is that 85% do turn up each day, and care diligently and conscientiously for our sick and dying.

So some PPE will be wasted out of genuine fear and ignorance - this is a training matter. Some will be wasted (a very small proportion, I'd guess) by those wanting to run out of PPE to make a political point - this is a disciplinary matter. But some I'd think will be wasted because wasting a mask, gloves, gown or apron is about the only gesture open to workers working under the most stressful of conditions, with the nation's gaze upon them. I think we must just accept this as a small price to pay.

The media have failed - and the public know it

There are three malign motives driving many of the mainstream media in the UK. First is Brexit - which many London journalists have great difficulty in understanding has happened. "Do you think this is a good time to be leaving the European Union?" asked one gigantic numpty of Rishi Sunak at the daily Number 10 press conference; "We have left" replied Mr Sunak. Bitterness over having failed to reverse democracy pervades the newsrooms of the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky and has coloured their coverage of the Wuhan virus.

Second is their left-wing bias. Hence the suggestion that no one has ever made outside the febrile minds of journalists that Mr Johnson should share power with assorted failures and has-beens, mostly of the left but including a Remainer or two to frustrate our EU trade negotiations. Yeah sure. We have a majority of 81. Good reason to let Tony Blair and John Major join the cabinet.

Thirdly is their hatred and envy of Boris himself. Emily Maitlis made her own dislike of the PM very clear in June of last year, when she chaired (appallingly) that ridiculous TV debate with Sajid Javid, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and a jejune attention-seeking Rory Stewart, all perched on uncomfortable bar stools while Emily launched dig after dig at Boris.

Fortunately, they're stupid enough to imagine that using their privileged airtime to slag-off the PM, our government and the nation's response will rouse public anger against the government. Well, cretins, it's had exactly the opposite effect. Our little media heroes have been stunned at the ferocious reaction against them on social media. Peston, Kuenssberg, Maitlis, Boulton, Newman, Burley, Morgan and the Snows hardly dare venture onto Twitter these days - they're immediately destroyed by an enraged public. And this at a time when newspapers are facing severe challenges from loss of physical sales and online advertising, as is Channel 4, and the BBC is facing an imminent decriminalisation of the TV tax. Yep morons. You're facing nemesis.

The final straw is their failure to ask serious questions of China of the sort that Niall Ferguson asks in the Boston Globe - serious and searching questions on the origin of the Wuhan virus, the cover ups, the conspiracy and the disguising of the truth. Peston's stupidity, Kuenssberg's malice, Matlis's meretriciousness and all the rest trying to find gaps through which to shove needles at Boris whilst giving the PRC a free pass have not been missed by the public.

All of which is reflected in the latest popularity poll from JL polling for Times Red Box (9/4); China may be down -45%, but the media is close behind at -29%.

Update
=====
The Boston Globe comes up fine for me, but for anyone missing the linked piece, Ferguson's questions are

First, what exactly was going on in Wuhan that led to the initial emergence of SARS-CoV-2? If, as first claimed but now seems unlikely, the virus originated from a bat at one of the disgusting “wet” markets (for wildlife intended for human consumption), which your regime inexplicably has not shut down, that would have been bad enough. But if it originated because of sloppy practices at the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, that is worse. It is insanity for research on potentially lethal zoonoses such as coronaviruses to be going on in the heart of a vast metropolis like Wuhan.
Second, how big a role did the central government play in the cover-up after it became clear in Wuhan that there was human-to-human transmission?
Third, after it became clear that there was a full-blown epidemic spreading from Wuhan to the rest of Hubei province, why did you cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China — on Jan. 23 — but not from Hubei to the rest of the world?
Fourth, what possessed your Foreign Ministry spokesman to start peddling an obviously false conspiracy theory on social media and why has he not been fired?
Fifth, where exactly are Ren Zhiqiang and Ai Fen, to name just two of the Chinese citizens who seem to have vanished since they expressed criticism of your government’s handling of COVID-19?
Finally, how many of your people has this disease really killed?

The joys of snuff

With that title, I expect for some time we'll get disappointed google searchers hitting this page; internet users are a weird lot. An old post about taxpayer-funded elective cosmetic surgery entitled "Poor women with large tattooed breasts" consistently scored the highest hits ranking of any page on the blog. So to clarify for any puzzled visitors, this post is about powdered cured tobacco.

I took a complete break from smoking about seven or eight years ago and have never craved one since. Physically. Not smoking takes no effort at all, but Oh how I regret having foregone the pleasure of smoking; I loved smoking. Really enjoyed it. If I live to 75, I'm going to start again. Before the smoking ban here this year, I loved to spend an hour or two in the local Gasthaus just for the smell of the dense clouds of cigarette smoke around the bar, a delicious fragrancing of my clothes that I would sniff nostalgically for the rest of the day. Well, Nicotine has been a good friend to me since I was 15, with me at all the big moments in life. So when I took a break from fags, I switched to snuff. Made in an old English snuff mill, a Northern one, that cures and grinds Virginia tobacco.

It's not some eccentricity for public showing-away but a connection with a lifelong physiological partnership. The Nicotine is just a fraction of that from smoking, the dopamine effect imperceptible but the connection remains. With the benefit that one can take snuff when seated on an aircraft, at a restaurant table, in a bar. It confuses the bansturbators - nobody has told them to ban snuff. And sales are so inconsequential that HM Treasury can hardly be bothered to tax it - a 25g tin costs about £2.80 and lasts about a month.

There's only one drawback. As a seasoned snuffer, my sneeze reaction is pretty well under control; one intakes snuff like sniffing a flower, not snorting coke. One of my few pleasures in life is agreeing to let coke-heads take a pinch; inevitably they suck it straight into the upper septum where it takes about a second before leaving them in tear-streaming agony, puce-faced and contorted with pain. But sometimes - when out walking, when in the supermarket - the residual snuff induces a sneeze. No problem, as I always have a snuff-kerchief to hand.

But boy. The looks of fear and horror from anyone within ten metres. A couple of times I've done that little pantomimey thing of shaking the head and waving the hand 'no', though I don't think they were convinced. 

Snuff mills with parts dating to the 18th century still grind exceeding fine in English factories