The Passing of Prince Phillip

 

Thoughts on Prince Phillip by Terry Field

The announcement of the death of HRH the Prince Philip is, for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, a more significant event than even the total televisual coverage of the death suggests. Instability threatens the State once again. Britain is returning to its condition of searching for both relevance opportunity and place following the surprise of leaving the European Union.  This tears the countries away from the settled condition they previously enjoyed with explosive political results.  This is in contrast to the reinforcing effect of war against the Axis powers, when in such circumstances, security for society relied on the reinforcement of social structures that have endured and buried into the social memories of modern time. 

Such may not be so important for societies formed in times of almost living memory, or perhaps in times when the structures that made them were formed by the light of Enlightenment rationality. In Britain's constituent ancient cultures, when unknowable futures generated fear and concern, the people instinctively gathered a little more tightly around the safety of immovable and revered hierarchy. 

Since this is core to British self-awareness, and perhaps to social stability, the quality of the Head of State and Consort becomes of immense importance. 

In the long years of my life, my country has altered from functioning largely as a monoculture in its home islands, but with a vision of life that stretched with familiarity across an Empire of such integrated scale and aspirational zeal not seen since the Rome of the Antonines.  It is now a society in terms of both race and culture that fully replicates the magnificence of the variety found within the confines of the Empire, but a bit 'in miniature' and compressed onto a tiny land mass. In all this, and with all that such re-formation brought, the subjects still perceived his or her place as securely set within the gaze of the continuing Queen and Consort. 

For me, and for many, remote by virtue of my insignificance from the Ikons of the State, this fixity defined an element of my being. Just as I am forced to be a Christian since I was shown Christ as a child, and however I may consider atheism, I am unable to abandon the religious persona I was offered to love when very young and unformed.  So the citizen is forced to face the quality of the Queen and Philip with revered respect, knowing their value and cultural immensity, quite irrespective of whether one may or may not have chosen to prefer republican ideals. No citizen of any republic will be able to understand this.

The media reflects this today, with kind comments even in radical publications.

Thus, for Britain, in like manner for Japan, the people form themselves by reference to the undying rock of the continuing hereditary monarchy, now shorn of its status touched directly by God. 

Philip is the first of the two great national parents to die. His death happens after such a long time that none can recall Britain without him. When the Queen passes, then a new and perhaps more fragile monarchy will need to act as the support and guide to a state so relatively tiny, vulnerable and dependent upon a single great ally in the west, itself an aggressively republican society. 

In this new, stripped down condition, shorn of the romantic indulgence of association with an immense past, that  searching-back for a circumstance that reflects the new 'now' will be unavoidable. As Elizabeth became the inheritor of Gloriana, our first Elizabeth, so Charles will become a King in circumstances more like that experienced by George the Third, after the loss of American colonies, or even Henry the Seventh, then with European powers far greater in wealth and resources than England could afford. 

Philip and Elizabeth are the couple connected directly to  Empire and to war. That reinforced concrete crumbles with his, and finally with her death, when that occurs, long may it be deferred. 

Afterwards, respect will be more conditional. To survive such, and to more probably guarantee continuity, there will need to be, in my view, in Britain, a closer replication of the Japanese relationship with the nation. KIndly, unspeaking, remote, where the people see the Royal Family as the incarnation of the life of the nation, and where all political activity happens at a functional level. Political and social tensions need to be very far removed from, and not touching, the family Ikon, that continues irrespective of the conditions seen in the state. That means the informality introduced by Philip may not be able to continue.

His life allowed us to feel close to the monarchy, to pretend all was not lost. With their passing, the true extent of the reduced and transformed state will be clear and  obvious. That spells danger. 

If one is poor but part of a tightly formed national family, survival may be less uncomfortable.

Now a personal word. As an old retired Englishman, living abroad, with most family now dead, I am unusually saddened by the loss of another figure of agreeable and kindly familiarity.

The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.   Rest in Peace. 

Economics, Ecology, Climate and Confusion

 By Terry Field

With the change in regime in Washington, a dam has broken concerning climate change. The scientific and eco-marketing community have become a little more emboldened, and there is more assertion in public concerning a reality that may overtake human and non-human life. In addition, there is a new dawning awareness by some in the chatterati that not only are these accelerating climate changes becoming ever-more difficult to cope with, but that there may be an unavoidable end point that is incompatible with advanced much remaining mammalian and other advanced life on earth. Quite clearly, were such to be experienced, would exclude any future for human life in any sort of scale at all.

I heard Secretary Kerry suggest that there may not be time to do anything meaningful. Such public utterance from the near – top of government of the United States is unprecedented. He is clearly listening to the real, not the politically moderated science coming out of the UN IPCC information washing-machine.

The realities have been well reported by serious science for well over twenty years, and in the last decade, a sea of ever-more alarming data and conclusions has emerged from the universities and institutes of the world.

The sum of the research is portentous, dreadful. A few of the realities can be described in the following, but there is much more, and none of it even slightly good:

1. Some of the many positive feed backs that accelerate and intensify the changes are triggered now and cannot be reversed.

2 Some feed-back loops have not been fully triggered, and if they are then very rapid severe climate change will entirely destroy human civilisation, by way of starvation and crop failure on a global scale, along with any form of order and much advanced life as the planet becomes rapidly desert with far less vegetation coverage.

3 Species collapse accelerates as species interdependence condemns total loss of large groups if mutually supporting species of even small numbers are removed from the system.

4 There is very little ‘biomass’ left that is not agriculture. There is very little mammalian life left now when compared to 100 years ago, and of that, what is left is in large measure domesticated for human farming usage. Genetic variation is greatly reduced, nearly everywhere.

5. It is probable that, for much of the effect, there is a 50 year lag between greenhouse gas emissions and the effect felt in atmosphere. Not 10 years as the IPCC suggests. 

6. The September arctic will be ice free in 2-3 years, not in 70 years from now as per the IPCC. This adds 25-30 years of COP2 emissions in its effect on climate change.

7.  Methane release is rapidly accelerating, may pause and cause super rapid heating. NOT modelled by the IPCC.

8. It is not enough even to entirely cease CO2 output to avoid catastrophic decline in livable condition across the planet. CO2 needs to be abstracted, in vast quantities, from atmosphere.

9.   As of today, we are 1.56 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures defined properly as 1750, and as it WAS before the IPCC cynically moved the date to a pre-industrial of 1900! Since when was 1900 pre-industrial?!? El Nino alone will make that + 1.85 in three or so years. SO much for the nonsense coming from the UN climate politics department UN of saying that below 1.5 C is the objective for 2100. Marketing liars do not change physical reality.

10. None of the above is yet known in general human society. Populations simply have no idea, or where there is some dim knowledge, are taught it is nonsense, or behave to pretend continuity is possible. The nine points above are the tip of the informational iceberg, all of which reinforces the central message. The hydrocarbon mass-human population society is not viable as it is, and one way or other will be greatly reduced in total scale, or functionally removed, and in relatively short order.

I cannot be bothered to discuss if this general ‘scene’ is ‘true’, and anyone who wants to do so must find another ear to listen to them. For me, the issues are simple. IF, and that is now not at all certain, this horror can be diminished to allow us to live reduced lives with reduced numbers, what must be done? Not what can be done in conventional terms, not what do we feel like doing, not what our third-rate, ecologically illiterate left / right political divisions can imagine our doing. Simply, what MUST be done to survive at all.

That is easy to state. Here are some of the bullet points. Execution details are irrelevant here; they are for the groups able to plan and perform.

- Cease all military production and activity. In every country. Immediately. Transfer the effort and the resources to carbon capture and storage. Carbon dioxide and methane needs to be removed from atmosphere. That vast industrial enterprise needs to be commenced NOW. Today. At the time of writing. ALL nations need to disarm rapidly totally permanently. That 7,000 year old cycle of self-abuse needs to end NOW. All essentially ‘tribal’ foreign policy matters tending to disagreement need to be dealt with, and ALL societies need to remove conflicting claims on all matters that generate disagreement. That is a luxury that will rapidly kill us all if we do not stop NOW and re-direct our fast-diminishing available resources.

 - Offer science and the best scientists the globe can provide control of event planning, needed resource allocation and direction of action. To do this all political systems will have to surrender dangerous bigotries of politically blinkered people, found in every parochial society in every country on earth, be they ‘right wing, left wing, ‘greens’, Greenpeace, and all other flavours of local bigotry born of ignorance. Even with this, to achieve anything concerning mitigating climate catastrophe, the clear objectives need to be agreed. If it is to re-establish and maintain, for instance, CO2 levels at 280 ppm, then ALL nation states of significance on earth must explicitly state their agreement with this. They should also agree a time frame. Which in present circumstances needs to be decades not hundreds of years. No objective, no agreement, no directing science, no success. The result. Mass death in a few decades. Or earlier.

Details are not for here. The actions needed will themselves remove the possibility of democratic social order, will directly result in enormous numbers of human dead, but that is now unavoidable. It is the lesser of the two evils. The intention should be simply to allow the human and other equally important species to survive in a world we recognise. All governments will need to direct and control societies as they quickly diminish in numbers in dreadful circumstances. To pretend otherwise, to suggest all can be done in steady-state human populations is simply to lie. To self-delude.

Where are we now? How big the gap?

IN all societies there is the assertion slight changes can ‘do the trick’. That is a simple lie.

Slight change condemns our living offspring to early death. Starvation, war, collapse, cannibalistic societies, mass slaughter all will roll across the globe in a totally uncontrolled, unmanageable way if the present ideas of current politicians prevail. An illustration. Biden has Kerry saying it may be too late to act. That same administration, however, spends, today, 2 trillion dollars making Americans able to buy MORE, to survive in immense comfort BETTER, to BEAT COVID (John Wayne like), to RECOVER PROSPERITY.

That is a knife in the guts of even denting climate change. Since these aided Americans will spend and not save their Bidenloot, the effect on the climate is Worse than giving 2 trillions to 10 multi billionaires, since they would simply save, reserve, park the asset, and not consume more goods directly.  After all, how many yachts, aircraft and private islands does a fellow need? Once they are acquired, the palate becomes jaded. The idea that social equality and the removal of global poverty reduces the risk of severe climate change is a nice conceit, but in reality, is it fantasy. Adding low-level primitive consumer power to five or more billion previously marginal-living people does nothing to preserve any part of the biosphere. Overlaying political and social preferences on climate physics is a bizarre form of self-delusion. Despite the chorus of cries to the contrary.

That most readers will laugh at these last few sentences should cause them to pause, to think and to reflect. Their laughter simply confirms that local political deeply held preferences, relevant to steady state societies in comfortable unthreatened times. That is far from the case now. Social preferences are a deep impediment to rational thinking when it comes to thinking about climate problem.

As for the Biden stimulus, well, in terms only of climate change and confronting it, it really is entertainment for people who live their lives without reflection.

And what is nice Mr Biden also doing?  He is also creating hypersonic missiles, vast space war systems, vast naval weapons platforms, millions of battlefield drones, robot-soldiers, the list goes on and on. It is all simply more of the same. SO stopping the military machines today? What chance? You can work that one out.

I hear central bank governors saying an ‘electrified world’ is the answer. People will be consuming 1/8^th the carbon of their ancestors.

Maybe fifty years ago I would have worked. Now? Well, they are amusing, and should perhaps be on the stage. Where will the gigantic tonnage of burnt energy needed to construct such a vast universal electrified world in all continents go as it is burned? Into the atmosphere! Into the seas!  Complete fantasy, pretending physics does not exist.  Mr. Carney (then Bank of England governor) said this and did not deny his probable move from Bank governor to politician. So he invents a palatable fanciful scenario that may also propel his career. Yet this is the best our hopeless ‘leadership’ can manage!

Even with his obviously political positioning, this ex-global banker is ahead of nearly ALL others now in power! AT least he began with a narrative that there is a dire problem. He just flunked everything after that.

The choices will be simple. Change and reduce our scale, our numbers, our total damage to the earth before catastrophe is clearly here. That means doing it now. Not tomorrow. Or wait, then watch the wave of horror overtake us with, then, no prospect of affecting the outcome. 

From what I know, I think we are well beyond the point where we can slow the change to a decertified, hot-state world. A world that will remain like that for hundreds of thousands of years. Where the cycle of the ice ages is removed and deferred. Where desertification is the face of the earth save for thin bands of reduced vegetation in the two tropics, and at the poles.

Unfortunately, now, every single politician possessed of real power spends ALL his or her time working to actively avoid anything that must be done, indeed what HAS to be done in order to give us and all other life a slightly greater chance of surviving and reproducing into the future.

 

I end, therefore, with a repetition. To slow or stop this global mass death of plants, insects, mammals, and other life, we need to see our numbers and our economic activity rapidly plummet. By billions of people. Yet at the time we add one billion mouths every 15 years. We try to reverse course, our effort should be to create technology for sucking vast quantities of greenhouse gas from atmosphere. Democracy, floating on the final century of excess, is done. It cannot begin to survive what is to come, even in the next quarter of a century, nor should it. Details of how to try to save complex life are for the best, the brightest, and future autocratic brutal coercive governments single function is to support the scientists and engineers  and to protect them as they battle against probability to try to succeed. Just as the brute power of Napoleon entrenched the feeble French revolution, so brute power is needed now to facilitate the heroes of the day – scientists – engineers, as they are finally allowed to do what MUST be done.

Or our grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren will die in unimaginable horror.

 

Terry, France, Ventose, 2021

 

A Note from France

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular correspondent from Florida and France, now in Normandy tending his spring garden and planting strawberries and vegetables, has been musing since a hurried flight in March from the USA, catching one of the last international flights available. His comments challenge the consensus of health professionals but make for interesting reading. - GNH

The Covit-19 Issue

by Terry Field

 Covid 19 is NOT what we all were told it was. Accepting this will be the challenge.

Where did the initial perception of Covid 19 come from?
  
Below, Terry in his magnificent vegetable garden during a summer in Normandy.

The operative point in this story is the G7 discussions a couple of months ago. There, the governments were presented with two sets of projections, one from the CDC and the other from a London based university.  Both suggested an apocalyptic death rate, with accompanying COPD for many survivors that would partially disable a good proportion of the population, perhaps permanently.

The governments hit the panic button.  The British government, a little later than the rest, was forced to fit in with the consensus.
Given what they were told would happen based on the then projections, that was understandable.

Other policy options were employed in panic mode.

Hospital ITUs were converted to dead with Covid 19. Theatre wards were converted. General hospitals and teaching hospitals were used for Covid as well as a reduced load of other treatments.
A gigantic wave of mass deaths was anticipated.
  
How to test if the virus is there - test only for the living virus infecting the host.

Then only one form of test was available, a test of the presence of the virus infecting the host and the only one employed - the test for the disease. This test was so rationed it was for most part only used used on the sick. A tiny subset of the total population. 

None else were tested. Except for Germany, where more were tested, but until the sero positive test was employed, health professional could only look at those carrying the live virus.

The data gathered was composed of two elements, one rational – the numbers of dead, the other a pointless statistic to use as a denominator.  The latter used as a denominator produced the impression of a horrifying death rate, and the hysteria engendered by the initial models became the backdrop to reinforce this observation. 

Absurd and wrong. But now believed.

It is important to understand that, in all this, the nature of the disease itself was not known, and there was not a memory of the old 'isolation hospitals' we had always employed for communicable diseases with no effective treatment.

The TB isolation hospitals, always remote and isolated, never part of the general hospital, were long forgotten.

In the place of the rapid creation of isolation centres of treatment, with discrete teams of clinicians who never interacted with other patients, the Covid patients were in in general blended into the general hospital centres. 

Cross infections amplified the death rates since the old, the frail and the very ill are disproportionately represented by their presence in the general and teaching hospitals.  Obviously, the disease is more dangerous for some of them.

The  exposure of patients in hospitals suffering from non-Covi-19 maladies led to the inadvertent spreading of the virus within the general hospital and teaching hospital setting.

Two regions in Italy approached the treatment of their Covid-19 infected patients very differently, and the different consequences of the different approaches are stark.

In Lombardy, the numbers of deaths have been very large indeed. AN Italian epicenter of suffering and death, where, in some little villages an entire generation of older people have died. There, the noble intention was to offer the best possible treatment to Covid patients, offering rapid treatment in a hospital setting. The good intentions in Lombardy produced a perverse and dreadful result. Large numbers of medical staff were infected in the hospitals, many died, and in addition, significant numbers of non-Covid patients within the hospitals contracted the virus. 

In marked contrast, in the Veneto, (which itself created the concept of the quarantine in the Middle Ages, keeping ships offshore for 40 days to prevent the plague entering the city) , the approach was very different, keeping the Covid patients separate from the hospitals, often treated at home.

Because of this approach, the lack of a similar concentration of treatment of infectious disease and also diseased and cross-infected patients, prevented a similar density of disease transmission, and the number of deaths were sharply less.

Lock Down – Shelter in Place.


Right, Terry shelters for a time in his
French wine cellar, no doubt checking on his calvadous supply.


The policy prescription of lock down was intended to slow down the rate of transmission of disease, whilst clinicians got to grips with understanding the virus, tested possible treatments from re-purposed drugs, and whilst capacity to treat the disease was ‘ramped up’ in the countries affected. 

The imperative that galvanized governments was the modeling projections that suggested there would be a particular very high level of morbidity and mortality should there be no lock down, and a very significantly lower death rate could be expected if lock down was enforced.

Until the last week or thereabouts, there has been no estimation of the total level of penetration of the viral disease into the general population . It was assumed the penetration was still light, and lock down, or shelter-in-place would avoid a widespread infection spread, thus avoiding the hospitals from being overwhelmed.
  
So what data did the British government access concerning the spread of the virus? 

The only testing available was the test of the presence of the virus, and that from tiny numbers of available tests.

Because of this, the estimation of infection by testing could only identify some of the infected- the ill who were selected to have the rare tests used upon them. In consequence, the data simply counted some of the sufficiently ill to warrant testing.  There were few tests to discover the currently infected and asymptomatic, and no capacity to identify the numbers of the population where the virus had infected, but the infected person had beaten the virus, the virus was no longer present, sero-positive status in the previously infected person was present, and the condition of the infected person, when infected, had been either symptomatic or asymptomatic.

In other words that data from tested ill was useful for medical treatment purposes, but of no value and very misleading indeed as any sort of estimate of total infection in the body of the population.
The testing of the ill was an extremely bad indicator of the reality of the infection however, and that is coming to light now.

Yet that figure has been used as the denominator to calculate the estimates of mortality rates; and of course such a tiny denominator suggested to so many that the mortality rate is much greater than influenza, and warrants this extreme interruption in business and the immense debt now being incurred to support the population no longer working. This inadequate, incorrect and highly misleading mortality calculation supported the initial horrifying model projection calculations; the terror appeared to be reinforced, as has been the approach of total lock down.

But all this has now been shown to be an illusion. The projections of death rates have not been experienced in reality. The numbers simply do not begin to correspond to the numbers as projected. This is not in any way to diminish the dreadful reality for the people and their families so affected. But the projections, and the reality are entirely different.

So why? Because so few were infected and the lock down worked?

Well that could have been an explanation, but illuminating new data – this time of actual total infected persons and post infected persons in the populations puts to such a possibility. The University of Stanford department of epidemiology, in the person of Dr. Ioannidis has conducted an investigation in Santa Clara to see not what only the live infected ill numbers were, but what the total infection in the population had been, including the recovered with no virus remaining and antibodies present, and where the people so infected had been ill, or entirely asymptomatic.

Thus the full picture in population infection was identified for the first time.  What was the result of this data? The data shows a total infectivity 100 times the level of the tested-for-the-live-virus-and-ill. 

So: 100th of the mortality rate previously estimated!

From which Dr Ioannidis identifies that the virus is, for the whole population carrying a mortality rate and risk similar or less than influenza. Only for specific require small population subgroups is the Covid-19 virus a significant risk of severe illness and death. He is quite clear that the real risk bears no relationship to the risks suggested in the models that propelled the governments to their present restrictions and controls.

I repeat, an overall mortality rate no higher than the flu.

To repeat, since this is vital to understand, he identifies that the disease is safe for the vast majority of the total population, who have and if not yet infected then will have the disease completely symptomatically, as the virus enters the body and is killed by the immune response.

This data has been supported by very similar methodology, now used in Germany, where in the area described as the ‘German Wuhan’, the total infection penetration of the population there is a massive 15%.

Dr. Ioannidis of Stanford University is clear from this data that mortality and morbidity risk is only significant for specific groups, including old people over 65 and those with serious pre-existing conditions.

It is dangerous for them, but not for the generality of the populations of the world.

 The virus, it was originally suggested, would attack the immunocompromised, yet the experience suggests the picture is more complex, It is not certain that it attacks the immunocompromised, since many deaths seem to be coming from a cytokine storm, where the immune system attacks the lungs and organs, causes blood to clot all over the body, and precipitate strokes and heart attacks.

This is not the action of the virus itself. Accordingly it is not yet certain that the immunocompromised are at significantly enhanced risk. Similarly, asthmatics, originally stated to be in particular danger, are shown not now to be statistically significantly in danger from Covid 19.

In sum, the original expectations of the scale and nature of the virus are not born out by experience. 

A disturbing number of doctors nurses and other medical staff  have died and been infected, but again, the specific method of treating a concentration of the virus infected in small areas may be the cause by drenching the medical staff in virus, where, in additon to sometimes inadequate PPE, their immune systems are overwhelmed.

Treating patients with a highly contagious disease for which, if the patient is made very ill here is no effective treatment in the midst of general hospitals, taking over ITUs, taking over hospital theatre facilities and not using remote infectious disease centres for such treatment has greatly added to the death rate.

Sending recovering covid patients to retirement homes is a policy beyond the imagination for any rational responsible plan. The deaths in retirement homes have been scarring for all. They should have the highest possible protection. That policy did not offer such. 

The reality of policy failure, even where instituted with the best of intentions, but born of a lack of understanding.

The Stanford work identifies the need to be run by data. But now we are run by terror.

Terror caused by three things:

1 The absurd science fiction projections of mass death and disabling illness. This is now described by Stanford epidemiologists as being 'science fiction'.

2 The absurd denominator of tested people positive with the live disease AT THE POINT OF TESTING producing a ridiculous mortality rate to support the original, absurd projections.

3 The incapacity of governments to alter course after an initial, truly disastrous set of policy decisions have been adopted, thus continuing to drive the economies of the west into collapse.

The consequences of the comprehensive policy failures:

- the lock down, 
- the concentration of disease in the body of the general hospital system,
- the acceptance and continued support of wrong data,
-  and now the refusal to respond to the new sero positive data of TOTAL infection history in the population, where the disease has appeared, been killed by immune responses. 

In China it now appears that the virus has 'been and gone' and where asymptomatic experience is the reality for the overwhelming majority.

The refusal to respond to this new situation is ruinous, as the lock down continues on a false premise.

The Chinese were not successful in suppressing it, it is suggested by qualified people, but it ripped through the population so quickly it had peaked before any idea of lock down happened, and then the disease collapsed naturally. As pandemics do. They were not cleverer the the rest; they just caught the curve when it was about to collapse anyway.

The distorting effect of time preconceptions and false expectations.

The virus replicates at lightening speed compared to flu and most other experience. The result is a rapid appearance of large numbers of the ill, and the dying, in hospitals.

This is part of the illusion. We instinctively expect that rate to continue as it would for flu, but flu infects over a long period. This, left to itself, flies through the population very quickly, then collapses. Thus the appearance of large numbers of the sick only makes any sense if the level of infection in the general population is understood. It was not. Now it is becoming so.

In Santa Clara, Germany ,and now in China via the work of Scandinavian epidemiologists using proper testing with resultant data, the depth of the infection that has produced the cases of the ill is becoming known. 

The reality is that this disease is present throughout the populations, in very large numbers, and the death rates that we see are in fact comparable to or perhaps less than seasonal flu. The truncation of the effect in time is what gives the false impression of something far worse, but that is all it is, a subjective impression.

Why this matters.

From the beginning until now, all are terrified, locked down and see TV images of the dying in ITUs everywhere. That reinforces the illusion of high total-population death rates and massive personal risk.

The reality, shown by Ioannidis of Stanford, and now also by others in Germany and China, shows something very different, and for nearly everyone save the very old and frail, is a disease that is, quite simply, not dangerous.

The learning curve of the disease suggests some treatments may be effective, but the policy choices taken, even for the best of reasons , are inappropriate, and now are pointlessly disastrous to the economy. They impoverish the tax base, cause huge suffering and death from the non or inadequate treatment of all those suffering from other diseases whose treatment is stopped, and/ or who are cross infected with Covid 19 in general hospitals and die where a policy of isolation hospital treatment would have save them.

The lock down also has another, very dangerous effect.

This disease is proceeding through the population, infecting all these working in the general economy, maybe slower because of social distancing, a sensible policy, but when the economy is released from lock down, it will accelerate, and, for nearly everyone, infect them and be defeated by their immune systems.

Since the death rate expectations are fantasy projections, there is NO justification for the lock downs.

None. The co-morbidities of such as kidney disease and the need for dialysis made difficult given the spike in demand and the inadequate supply of dialysis machines for these Covid patients is no justification for lock down.  It is an argument for building many dialysis machines now, or trans-shipping them from areas where they are in surplus. Nothing more.

This disease has been grossly mis-characterised, initially by modelers, from which panic decisions were taken, then by the inadequacy of data, limited only to the tested 'live'-infected.

The failure to isolate recovering patients and sending them to convalesce in retirement homes has in all probability had the result of introducing the disease, in a number of occasions, into the concentration of the most vulnerable patients, many of whom have died.

This disease has been comprehensively misunderstood, and the infection rate in the community, until the last few days, not tracked.  

We have only now begun to see, by the use of appropriate testing of whole populations the extend to the infection. Now we can see it is not at all what we feared.

The politicians in Britain and elsewhere do not yet see this. Why?

Well if I had advised government of 'science fiction' projections 
(Dr Ioannidis of Stanford's description, not mine), and if I had even an inkling of the reality were I to have to sharpness of mind to read the Santa Clara data and now the German data, I would very probably keep my head down!

Now the question will be raised – so where are the vast numbers of the dead; are we to believe it was simply the lock down that stopped it????? The answer to that will come when the economy is opened up.

And if I were a politician and I had comprehensively smashed the economy, and I now knew it was based on science fiction projections, and it was actually done for no good reason, and the reality shows the death rate for the infection levels is modest, I would have the biggest political problem I could begin to imagine. As they now have.

So here we are – populations utterly terrified for not sufficient good reason, paralyzed to continue with ruinous and absurd policies, and no sign of even building isolation hospitals for infectious disease, as our wise ancestors did. The TB hospitals only closed after Streptomycin was discovered and used. 

The problem now is acute – if the mortality rate did not justify the full lock down, then releasing its grip on the population will inevitably see a rise in the daily death rate after a short period. That death rate will not be sufficient to justify the lock down since the other ‘side of the coin; will be the high level of asymptomatic infection in the general population, but relatives and media will scream that government policy has resulted in increased deaths. As an illustration of the political problem, and the inability to modify policy, today this was the statement of the British Prime Minister:

‘In a surprise statement outside 10 Downing Street - his first public appearance in weeks - the PM said we are now 'wrestling' Covid-19 to the ground but ending restrictions now would cause 'a new wave of death'.

Policy should be driven by data, as Dr Ioannidis has rightly stated. I sense Johnson may know some of the data by now, but he is not driven by it. Indeed he refers to death, not data. No surrender to the terror yet.

Johnson refers to ‘a wave’ of death. Well, there is a ‘wave‘ of death from flu. From driving vehicles, from male suicide, from a any number of things, and such is accepted as the framework of risky life and death. The new data for Covid 1119 suggests it should join that group of background realities that stalk us particularly in old age,  but does not overwhelm us as was originally feared. Ioannidis is, in my view, correct in suggesting that we should do the same with Covid, whilst seeking effective treatments and appropriate isolation of the very vulnerable. 

As does Lord Sumption, looking at our ‘terror of death’ as the driver of irrational behavior.

There is a ‘wave’ of death from not treating old people with antivirals in winter. We choose not to because it is unaffordable. And yet is destroying the totality of the economy ‘affordable’???

With the unimaginable death rates that social and economic collapse across the world would bring in its wake????

He is representing the emotional response. The one that drove the original policy fueled by terror and horrific projections.
Johnson is a populist who appeals to emotion, not reason. 
The west has indulged in an orgy of inappropriate emotion concerning ‘rights’ and candy-floss attitudes to the realities of human life for well over fifty years. Johnson is milking it today. That will have to end, but he is in a hole and he refuses to stop digging.

This will not end without economic impoverishment if he and others continue like this.

Time for sanity, truth, policy born of good data, and a rapid dumping the manufactured terror and hysteria. IN other words real leadership. - Terry Field

An Opinion on Covet-19 Challenges

by Glenn N. Holliman

Terry Field, our deep thinker, has migrated from Florida back to Normandy, France where he has found the country under a stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus.  The governor of Florida belated issued a stay-at-home order for his state today, April 2, 2020.  With the world greatly changed in just a month, Terry has been mulling over the world's response to the pandemic and shares some insights. 

He wrote these comments a few days ago before the British government issued a draconian stay-at-home order and before President Trump faced the possibility of 100,000 premature deaths in America. - GNH

The Paradox of Containment

by Terry Field (above with wife, Fina, about to skip the light fantastic before social distancing)

Lord Sumption suggested today that what we are seeing is mass hysteria. Actions taken by governments at the behest of terrified populations are now willing to surrender their freedoms for protection by the highest authority they know of. He has a point. A powerful point. And one which has subterranean depths of the soul that also deserves to be brought into the light.

The head of a respected French institute concerning itself with epidemiology suggested that there is a hidden reality to the pandemic. She identifies the mathematics of the pandemic simply; the doubling rate and the time from initial breakout and global spread. 

She suggests that the disease, as identified by auto-diagnosis – those self isolating because they consider that they are possessed of some symptoms, and those sent to hospital, and some to intensive care  - to be but a tiny fraction of the entire population of the infected.

 She suggests that, prior to lockdown, the numbers infected to be at least three million in France, and similar or more across the European countries. The rate of infection doubles in three days, perhaps slowed by the draconian measures. But her point is a simple one. 

This disease is deeply in the general population, the vast majority unaware or hardly touched in terms of conscious illness or lack of normal ease.

From this she suggests the rate of morbidity and mortality is far lower than the reported - tested, infected, treated, recovering and dying ‘stories’ suggests it to be.

From this one must confront the reality of our responses; why we demand them, what satisfies us in the responses, and what does not? 

Further, what deep seated inheritances of the mind cause us to think, act and demand as we do?

The threat of invisible pestilence is deep in us. From an origin story of Jews, the killing of the first born of the Egyptians in Egypt, and the protection of the Jews by a blood-sign on their doors, cuts deep both in terms of terror, and in terms of deliverance.

Nothing produces a sense of fear more than an invisible ‘pathogen’. I sense it every time I go to buy food. Where is it? Does it blow on the wind? I touch a piece of metal    - am I now to die? 

My fear is the same fear known by all our ancestors, be it the terror of being caught, ripped apart and eaten by a beast when we left our caves or little huts tens of thousands of years ago, and very similar to the horrors of the black death, the viral pandemics of the seventh century that ripped the old surviving Roman civilisations apart across the Mediterranean, ushering in the whirlwind if Islam.

 Our long, conditioning history is one of frequent terror; of the deepest insecurities, of the hope for release, and the beneficial ‘discovery’ of what we hoped for  – and many of us still hope – a Creator of all things which still ‘cares’ for our frail souls, during our lives and beyond our own deaths.

Thus context and primal responses condition what happens now.

The British Cost-Benefit Analysis

Britain is an unusual country, in that there is an administrative ‘folk memory’ of the then dispassionate government of a billion people across the globe, in the period of empire. That period  is still in quite recent history (and some remaining real memory), and the dispassionate initial conclusion was that the virus could not be stopped,  

British ministers took the view that it would rapidly infect almost the entire population, and that no exiting infrastructure could hope to contain it.   

The ministers considered that no existing infrastructure, even enhanced by what would be quite marginal emergency measures could hope to contain it, and the losses of the very old and the very ill would be experienced in large numbers and would be unavoidable as the policy was 'rolled out'.

There is a unique, malign, British context to all this. 

Britain has a National Health Service governed by NICE ( national Institute of Care Excellence) designed specifically to ration supply. The system is by design inadequate as to finance capacity and adequacy of clinical staff even in 'normal' times. 

This model is unique in the world.

Because of this, rationing is explicit and is explicitly formed into protocols determining treatment options and levels.

A form of cost benefit analysis is applied to 'justify' a limited level of spending per capita, and that spend declines radically as the person subject to the spend control ages. The 'price' of an aged  life in the British rationing system is routinely explicitly devalued by the National Institute for Care Excellence, the body that among other things determines the 'shape' of care in England, and the pattern of 'rationing' also. That powerful entity values, in the cost benefit analysis, an old life as worth half a full younger ‘well’  life.  For example, the latter has a drug price ceiling of pds 30,000 in its ‘cost-benefit’ calculation justifying the cut off point for treatment of that patient group. An older life has a year-value of pds 15,000 as its cut off point.

Because of this, the approach by government to the virus had a built-in relative disinterest in sustaining the lives of older people   

Thus the initial decision, as Sweden has taken and is now prosecuting, to continue normal life with social distancing.

The global reaction to this? Horror.

The response was that this was callous and brutal. It must not happen. Why? Fear of the reality of death visiting those who would die shortly anyway? An altruistic sudden love of the old? No. It was what it has always been in all of modern history, the sense of the protection of all gathering together in common, not differentiated or individually exposed to any peril.

At no point in our know memories has there been a decision to gather together all the ill and to push the old outside the lager to be eaten by beasts – for we all know one day we will be old, and were we to do that, the beasts would one day eat us as well. 

But this is a western view. Not in China, where the old have routinely been consigned to death houses when the family abandons the unequal challenge of caring for their frailty. Similar in Africa. There, even the strong young males, in excess numbers, were ritually and very respectfully slaughtered after they achieved the honour of manhood in some societies. That may indeed still happen in some places, but of course it is not advertised abroad.

The point here is a simple one. The civilised advanced would has tried not to consider groups of people as possessed of different value. In the post war period that has been the American approach that has driven us in England, thus the analytical coldness of the ‘let it rip’ initial approach was condemned by the G7 and many in Britian including, at the time, the writer here. The G7, who forced Britian by draconian threats, made the country adopt what it now does.

The consequences we see now of the suspension of economic life by describing what is happening as the containment of a biological crisis are not yet clear, but already many will die because, for example,  their dialysis is interrupted, their cancer treatment is delayed or cancelled, their treatment for a myrid of other diseases where prompt attention is needed stopped, or if one lives on the streets then death is far closer than before. So much of the fabric of sustained life is now ripped away.

And why? To save someone we do not know? And in what numbers? Nobody knows.

The data so far gathered is junk; simply worthless. Testing is as rare as can be in most settings. Only Germany tests in quantity. Infection rates? No epidemiologist gets close to agreeing. All use models presently suffering from ‘garbage in, garbage out’

Testing the hundreds of millions for antibodies to see the true scale of this pandemic? Unavailable and likely to remain so. Some, key workers, will be tested. But the vast hordes constituting the ‘sink’ of infection and recovered? No. Of course not.

 So what is the social reality here? Well it seems to me to be close to the experience of the faithful who bought indulgences from the Roman church before Luther and the subsequent counter-reformation cleaned up the money – induced hysteria across the peoples of Europe. Irrational actions, based on no good information,

We are terrified, hang the concern for the old out as a shield to force governments to protect us each and every one. We fear as they feared the devil, witches, the black death, the invading armies of Persia.

All is terror. Governments in the West do what they are bidden.

Save for one man. A man we all, if we are educated, dislike with a real intensity. And that man is called Trump.

What does he say?

He says the cure is worse than the disease; he is forced to go along with the CDC, but he does not believe it. Why not?

Because he is immune from the concerns I have described above. His very lack of ‘empathy’, of any sense of personal vulnerability, of real concern for the social condition, and his dispassionate reference always to money as the final arbiter of all human actions – the thing so many hate him for – perversely allows him to free himself from the neuroses that I have described above. He is a juvenile egomaniac, perhaps a psychopath, and entirely disconnected from the ancient fears.

Thus he would act differently, allow the condition of society to continue as was with minor adjustments, and see the virus do its work quickly.

He, through dissociated egomania, may have come, by completely different mental pathways, to the same conclusion the patrician English administration came to, and the conclusion social democratic Sweden is operating today.

The death rate as a percentage of the total numbers infected and recovered from this virus may be vastly less than the rubbish statistics of recorded illness and deaths suggest. The French epidemiologist sounds to me as though she has it right.

I believe I had the disease from 8^th February in Sarasota. I had all the symptoms and was very ill for the whole of February and much of March. How did I get it? I attended an audio fair in Tampa on the 8^th of the month – people flew in from all over – and there were hordes squashed into 60 hotel bedrooms listening to audio. I have circulated amongst friends. Many will probably have been infected. No sign of malaise, save for one, ill for a week then slowly recovering. There were no tests. Doctors knew nothing, and could do nothing, even if I presented myself at a hospital Nothing could or would have been done.

 I self-isolated to some degree, largely because I was so comatose I could do none other, but there was no such protocol then. My point being that only four weeks later did two - just two people – become slightly ill in two counties north of Sarasota County. Well that is plainly ludicrous. The data that exists is valueless at present, and will be so until antibody-testing is done in a large statistically significant population randomly designed. Not even on the horizon now.

From this, stripping away the ancient driving neuroses, Trump, Sweden, the original British approach may be far less damaging, in all fully measurable senses, than the approach now being taken. Flattening the curve begs the question – how will the old be protected when any form of normality returns? No answer seem forthcoming. Japan, today, suggest there is no answer there.

Pandemics, as they do their work, often weaken as the most virulent elements kill fast, cannot replicate as the less virulent variants can, and thus the mechanism eases as it must. Lock down may prevent that from happening.

All this describes a human condition where we are far closer – psychologically - to the man looking at the landscape in the fourteenth century where corpses littered the landscape and the living could not bury the dead – than we could have previously imagined that we were.

And my terror of the virus lurking on every piece of plastic, cardboard, human being or sole-of-my shoe is a sign of lunacy that will smash our wealth for fifty years to come, if there is ever to be a full recovery.