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 8th 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 8th 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.
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