Monthly Archives: August 2020

For some time, Dr No has been moving, or perhaps driven, to a determination — he uses the word with at least two of its meanings — that the only sensible considered response to covid–19 is to treat it as just another seasonal flu like illness. He knows full well that some will be of like mind, but that many — they know who they are — will react violently, in some cases with extreme violence, to any such suggestion. Dr No is a heretic! Burning at the stake is too lenient a punishment for heresy! Let him be hung, drawn and quartered, and his eviscerated staked body be displayed as a grim reminder to those who contemplate such heinous heresy! So it behoves Dr No to explain how he came to this determination.

So incensed was Dr No on coming across a nonsense paper in the BMJ yesterday that he uncharacteristically dashed off a tweet denouncing the paper as ‘more nonsense from the milk curdler‘. The trouble with twitter — and the reason Dr No generally avoids it for primary communications — is that a tweet is limited, to 280 characters to be precise, and one image, and so almost always bars reasoned argument. If reasoned argument is akin to steady breathing, then a tweet is akin to a multiphase turbulent gas cloud, as sneezes are now known among the cognoscenti. Such esoteric language leaves one wondering whether the humble naked fart is also a multiphase turbulent gas cloud among the cognoscenti — it seems entirely possible, along with the silent but deadly multiphase turbulent gas cloud — but for today’s purposes we shall adopt the Yorshire way, and call a sneeze a sneeze, for it is the study of sneezes that is the bedrock — or rather quicksand — that underlies the nonsense paper.

If listening to Martha Kearney on the Today programme is like watching the mould grow on your breakfast yoghurt, then hearing Hatt Mancock’s hosannas for mass covid testing on an industrial scale on the same programme last week was enough to cause Dr No’s yoghurt pot to explode, with deleterious consequences for the immediate environment. Maybe, but only maybe because there are significant  unanswered conduct, consent and compulsion questions, the epidemiologist (lower case e) in Dr No can see the attraction, but the Individual (upper case I) in Dr No countered and then drowned the appeal by screaming privacy, Privacy, PRIVACY! Why? Because, while the surveillance programme might have a faint blue NHS logo tacked loosely somewhere on the threshold, the machinery inside is almost entirely privatised.

Once upon a time, in a country not so far away, a new terror seized the land. Invisible and undetected, a new respiratory virus had entered the country, and spread silently. It was wintertime, and at first no one noticed anything out of the ordinary, because in winter the people expected coughs and colds, and for the unlucky few, ‘flu and even untimely death. Then the rumours started, of a novel mutant oriental virus escaping (the conspiracy theorists went further, and said it was deliberately released, most likely by Bill Gates) into the wild, of health services in other counties collapsing, and, in time, of excess deaths at home. Behind the scenes, the ministers in the high majority low wit government started bed wetting on an industrial scale, but in public they  maintained it was business as normal.

In the same old very flogged very dead horse language, we now have yet another game changer in the fight against covid–19. Quite how a fight against a pandemic came to be a game passed Dr No by, unless it has something to do with the MP for  Newmarket, Hatt Mancock, being partial to a flutter on the horses, and the chief pongo for the time being at NHS Test and TitsUp, Dido Make-me-a-Cherry Harding, also having a bit of thing for the horses. In any event, according to a DHSC press release, millions of oven ready DIY swab-to-smartphone 90 minute covid–19 tests are to be made available over the next few months, allowing widespread community covid–19 testing on an unprecedented scale. As the modern idiom has it, what’s not to like?