Monthly Archives: October 2021

Dr No was going to call this post Habeas Virus, a stab at applying the legal principle of Habeus Corpus — roughly, bring me the body, or the accused must be brought before the court, though that is not a literal translation — to say that we need to see SARS-CoV-2, the virus accused of causing covid–19, before the court of scientific enquiry, if we are to determine its guilt. The trouble is, Google translate has habeus virus mean ‘have virus’, which conjures up Have Virus — Will Replicate, which won’t do at all. Other translations suggest ‘you have the stench’, which might work on some levels, but not on others. It is all too ambiguous. Instead, Dr No went with Schrödinger’s Virus, aiming to suggest an experiment in which you have a box said to contain pure, isolated SARS-CoV-2, but until you open the box, there is no way of telling not so much whether the virus is dead or alive, as whether it even exists. When you do open the box, you find Macavity’s not there!         

“And when you reach the scene of crime — Macavity’s not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air —
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!”— T. S. Eliot, “Macavity: The Mystery Cat”, Old Possum’s Book of Practical CatsPerhaps the greatest problem facing modern science isn’t the corrupting influence of power and money, but an even deeper one of incomprehensibility. Dr No has touched before on how increasing super-specialisation means that increasingly scientists from one discipline are unable to make sense of another discipline, because the language and theory in each discipline have become so dense as to be impenetrable to all but initiates in that discipline. It is as if science has become a broad church spreading its wings over a vast array of cults and sects, each one swearing allegiance to the Greater God of Science, but each with its own rules and creeds, an impenetrable vista of numberless caverns of knowledge meaningless to man.

With the barrage of political and mainstream media talk of rising covid cases, new scariants and the urgency of vaccinating all, and then some — soon there will be talk of syringe drivers, pumping in covid vaccine in 24/7 — and not to mention Tuesday’s nodding through, not so much on a song and a prayer as on a laugh and a wink, by the blind horses in Westminter, of another six month extension of the Coronavirus Act, there can be little doubt that government is limbering up to implement Plan B. No doubt there is already a Plan C in draft, and so on, to pile Pelion on Ossa, forever and ever, world without end. But how are we really faring with covid these days?

Byzantine formulas unfathomable by man, stretching out beyond five miles of fetid ground, and down to a sunless sea — all very well, but sometimes the simpler analysis better does our pleasure guarantee. The human brain is smarter at spotting a trend in a chart than in a table, and the chart at the top of this post tracks the weekly all cause mortality over the summer, expressed as a percentage difference compared to the average mortality over 2015 to 2019 for the same week, with an added trend line, using ONS data. Anything above the 0% line is excess mortality, and we can see at a glance things are not going well. In fact, we shall all likely be dead pretty soon, if the trend in recent weeks continues. What on earth is going on?