Covid-19

‘I’m from Newmarket,’ said the man from Cheshire. What the man from Cheshire meant, of course, was that he was the honourable member for West Suffolk. Quite how being the MP for a constituency that was home to a renown racecourse came to explain the SoS for Health’s decision to ‘back both horses’ — that is, back both the failed NHSX and proprietary Apple/Google covid–19 contact tracing apps — escaped Dr No. But this was another episode of Hancock’s Half Hour, where anything goes. The very same episode, co-starring Test and Trace supremo and Bake-Off hopeful Baroness Dido Harding, and broadcast live in lieu of Thursday’s Downing Street covid–19 briefing, contained an enigmatic pledge to ‘put the cherry on Dido’s cake’. For a brief moment Dr No was magically transported back to the infamy of an Up Pompeii! aside, until he crashed back to June 2020 and the realisation that he was instead witnessing yet another official litany of covid-19 failings delivered in tractor production is up packaging.

No doubt Solitaire would have read it in the cards. There are at least three occasions when it has seemed that the unofficial British Establishment response to the covid–19 epidemic has been Live and Let Die. The first was the consideration given to herd immunity, to be gained by letting the epidemic rip through the country. Proponents of herd immunity eschewed back of the envelope sums in favour of numerology and modelling, but others did the sums, noting that if around two thirds of the population got infected, then, even with a low infection fatality rate of say 0.1%, then getting on for half a million people would die — so, better drop that one fast. The second occasion was the abandonment of care homes, and then, to pile Pelion upon Ossa, to seed the care homes with SARS-CoV-2 carried by dumped hospital bed-blocking patients. The third, and still very current, occasion was and is the disproportionate numbers of covid-19 deaths among BAME people in general, and NHS staff in particular.

The Big Question about covid–19, of immense historical and future importance, is whether hard lockdowns work. No one of sound mind can be in any doubt that soft, or voluntary, lockdown makes sense. Hard, or legally enforced, lockdown, with its far more stringent measures, is entirely another matter, chiefly because it comes at a very significant cost. These costs are not only highly significant, they are also wide-ranging, and include social, ethical, economic and health costs. Put bluntly, because of these costs, hard lockdown can only ever be justified if it can be shown that its benefits, measured in deaths deferred, because that is all it can ever achieve, outweigh its inevitable and catastrophic harms.

At the risk of banging on like a Duracell bunny, Dr No returns once more to covid–19 testing. He does so because BloJo’s goons have told him that test–track–trace, or whatever the current iteration of the tricolon is, is the only way out of lockdown. WHO have a similar, but even less imaginative, version, test–test–test. So high are the hopes for testing that it has become the new TOWIE for covid–19, TOWIT. Hancock regularly uses his half hour to plug TOWIT and from time to time spin the government’s meteoric rise in the number of tests carried out. And yet, the testing dance is also the dance of Damocles beneath the sword. If the test fails, the thread breaks, and the sword plunges down to impale the dancing minister below.

Shall I compare thee to a turnip? Dr No has been dreaming up Odes to Nick Robinson ever since the interviewer with a voice like a squeaking balloon and a brain full of compressed air interviewed the former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption. Sumpers was in arm chair mode (very Sumpers, very Sanderson), while Robinson gadded about like a hot rabbit in the May sunshine. Eschewing evidence in favour of philosophy, and substance in favour of trivia, Robinson repeatedly filled the pregnant minute with sixty seconds of broken arrows. Oh how one longed for an old guard interviewer! Robin Day, or David Frost perhaps, or better still Ludovic Kennedy. Ludo, a leading advocate of ‘cut the crap’, would have got straight to the point. Is the contrarian, libertarian former judge correct in his view that hard lockdown is a colossal blunder?

In the 1961 Walt Disney film 101 Dalmatians, Cruella de Vil locks down 99 dalmatian pups (the 101 includes the parents of the original litter). In a roundabout way, this got Dr No wondering if there might be 101 lockdown damnations. There surely are, but after fifty items, Dr No felt the point was sufficiently made. Already the mother of all dossiers of despair, reining in another fifty items risked permanent damage to Dr No’s sense and sensibilities.

Back in the 1980s, John Naughton, The Listener’s TV critic at the time cracked Norwegian after hearing a recording in English being played backwards and forwards. Norwegian, he realised in an instant, is merely English spoken backwards. On forwards, clear English could be heard, but in reverse, the machine delivered perfect Norwegian. Recalling Naughton’s discovery 35 years later, Dr No realised that must also mean that English is merely Norwegian spoken backwards, and that this might be the way to get at the contents of a promising covid–19 report published in Norwegian by Norway’s official Public Health Institute. Alas, the Folkehelseinstituttet report spoken backwards doesn’t come out as English, but on another level it is ‘English spoken backwards’, insofar as it’s main conclusion is the reverse of English lockdown dogma. The Norwegians, after due analysis, have all but concluded that the science, to date (and that is an important caveat), does not back hard lockdowns.

Martha Kearney, the Today presenter distinguished by an intellect flatter than a flood plain, tried this morning to get her teeth into the Dominic Cummings childcare affair. The result was painful, like listening to a toothless hag chewing a margarine sandwich. The general drift so far as one could be discerned was towards one rule for the government and its advisors, another for the rest of us, messages undermined, etc. As time wore on, the interview slowed down; sounds interspersed with Kearney trademark pauses, like a washing machine on the wool cycle. Outside the window, the grass was growing faster in the May sunshine than the interview on the radio was proceeding, as it drifted away through time and space, like a distant barely perceptible meteor. Back on earth, the Today programme as usual completely missed the point. This story isn’t about the PM and his advisor and resignations, it is about SAGE, and credibility.

There is a new virus abroad as dangerous as SARS-CoV-2. It has already invaded all aspects of out lives, sparing no one. It gains access to its victims by posing as a force for good, but once inside it erodes the victim’s moral fibre, destroying resolve and resilience. Patients present with the stay safe syndrome, a constellation of symptoms and signs that includes an irrational fear of other human beings, associated with involuntary flinching when in close proximity to others, compulsive 24/7 face mask wearing, and the diagnostic stay home behaviours. All communications, both verbal and written, begin and end with characteristic exhortations to ‘stay safe’. It is in short the novel stay safe virus, believed to have originated in Whitehall, and first isolated and identified in the Westminster village, from where it disseminated first by mainstream media, and then social media. So insidious is the virus that it can freely mutate. Only last week Dr No received an email that opened with “I hope you are doing safe”, confirming the novel virus had mutated from adjective to noun. It can only be a matter of time before it mutates into a verb.

Naturally enough, the UK and devolved governments, and for that matter others who should know better, have attributed the recent declines in daily covid–19 new cases and deaths to the hard lockdown measures put in place in March. This is one of the oldest logical fallacies of them all, the post hoc fallacy. This says that because B followed A, it follows that A caused B. We might just as well say the clocks changed to BST on the 29th March, and soon after that covid started to decline, ergo moving to BST got covid under control. Such divinations are more at home on the ouija board  than in the realm of natural science.