On Perspective

1. The chart shows the trajectory of reported COVID19 cases - with the number of cases on one axis and the time taken to reach that point on the other. As Brad Long puts it, the US of A is indeed number one! The  background to their abysmal lack of preparedness and the prospects are analysed in one of a series on the pandemic which The Atlantic magazine is making available free on its  site

2. Another quote for my readers, from one of the thoughtful articles in the most recent magazine I’ve taken out a subscription for - “The Point”

Any fashion, ideology, set of priorities, worldview or hobby that you acquired prior to March 2020, and that may have by then started to seem to you cumbersome, dull, inauthentic, a drag: you are no longer beholden to it. You can cast it off entirely and no one will care; likely, no one will notice.

Were you doing something out of mere habit, conceiving your life in a way that seemed false to you? You can stop doing that now.

We have little idea what the world is going to look like when we get through to the other side of this, but it is already perfectly clear that the “discourses” of our society, such as they had developed up to about March 8 or 9, 2020, in all their frivolity and distractiveness, have been decisively curtailed, like the CO2 emissions from the closed factories and the vacated highways.

Our human exceptionalism has been, over these past centuries, the blunt and unwieldy pitchfork with which we sought to drive nature out. But it will always find its way back. At just this moment, when we had almost taken to using the secondary and recent sense of “viral” as if it were the primary and original one, a real virus came roaring back into history.

We created a small phenomenal world for ourselves, with our memes and streams and conference calls.

And now—the unfathomable irony—that phenomenal world is turning out to be the last desperate repair of the human, within a vastly greater and truer natural world that the human had nearly, but not quite, succeeded in screening out.

3. Dr Campbell’s update of today is here – and also a short video he put up recently about the precautionary measures you need to take when you go outside.

 4. And the other regular blogger whose posts I go to at the start of every day for the situation in the UK – Dr Richard North who wrote earlier this week

“The public health system in this country is so far degraded that it no longer had the resources or the capability to deal with an epidemic on the scale we are now experiencing.
Thus, with the most effective means of control – testing, quarantining, tracing - having been abandoned, we have a prime minister imposing draconian limits on our liberties in an attempt to control………”

………what Dr Campbell, quite correctly, consistently designates as the “invisible enemy” – invisible only because the government has chosen not to enforce testing and tracing 

5. And, finally, a comment on the casual UK government approach…and how it can be improved