Monthly Archives: January 2021

For some time, Dr No has been bothered by the fact that some people with covid continue to have positive PCR tests long after they can be considered ill and infectious. These people, the long distance shedders, will, because of the way cases are defined and counted, appear as cases, even when clearly they are not cases. They will themselves suffer the loneliness of imposed but pointless self-isolation, but they will also inflate the apparent size of any covid wave, and in so doing aggravate alarm and panic, despite the fact that aggravation is unfounded, because they are not cases, nor are they infectious. In short, every covid wave is inflated, and the question for today is: by how much does the way we count covid cases inflate our estimate of the number of true cases?

Is the number of covid deaths inflated? Almost certainly, yes. Does this matter? Of course it does. Apart from being an affront to science, it creates and perpetuates a disproportionate sense of fear about covid, and that in turns drives pathological responses to covid, from national lockdowns to individual hysteria. ‘The bigger the fear,’ observed one of the diarists in the recent compelling BBC history series Berlin 1945, ‘the more ridiculous the excuse.’ It is the fear that puts the pop in the fuel of the Milk Curdler’s blow lamp, it is the fear that powers Dylan’s Idiot Wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb, the curtains in your room, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.