what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Sunday, March 15, 2020

Coronavirus - who to Believe?

We’re all flooded with information about Coronavirus – most of it partial, speculative or imaginative, serving to feed our fantasies. We should try to shut out everything and focus instead on what reasonably authoritative sources are telling us about the spread and treatment of the virus – at both the collective and individual levels…
I grant you that, in these times of fake news, it is not easy to identify “reasonably authoritative sources”!  
But we can surely rely on the World Health Organisation - which I found to be a highly cost-effective organisation when I helped the Head of its European Public Health division for six or so months in 1991. Certainly I find its 5 page Guidance Note a model of clear advice for governments.
But of course that’s not where we immediately head when we want advice – we go to our favourite newspaper and to people we trust – and we will generally take the advice we want to hear….That’s certainly what I did – going to “The Guardian” which, of course, would and does take anything British or US governments say with a huge pinch of salt….

One of the Guardian articles dealt with the question of handwashing – but not as well as a blogger who happens to have been an environmental health inspector and gave more detailed advice from his experience of a variety of outbreaks including swine-fever and foot-and-mouth.
It was the same blog which alerted me earlier this week to just how much of an outlier the British Government continues to be not just on Brexit but also on Coronavirus – with it choosing to delay the introduction of the drastic steps which Italy and Spain (and other governments) have already introduced. 
But public pressure has forced the British government to place restrictions on sporting events – although schools remain open. Even Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have closed their schools and universities…       

The method in the madness are some theories called “herd immunity” and “Nudge theory” which argue that it is not realistic to expect people to change their behaviour dramatically and that, if the virus is let rip in the population, immunity will be acquired.....(!!!)
A variety of people have challenged this, with a former Director of Child Health at WHO emphasising that -

“The key principle from WHO is intensive surveillance,” he told the Guardian. “You test the population like crazy, find out where the cases are, immediately quarantine them and do contact tracing and get them out of the community. This deals with family clusters. That’s the key bedrock of getting this under control.”

The Brits are supposed to be pragmatic – but here is yet another example it appears where theory is driving us, literally, to perdition. As is often the case, my friend Boffy has an important contrary view for which I am deeply grateful....This post of mine was drafted with a strong sense that I was venturing into, for me, uncharted waters....I had tried to get a response from one of my daughters, a Scottish medic, but she is in Norway on a cross-skiing venture!! And the only other medic in my family is currently awaiting a hip operation…….

But I still don't understand the failure to test those who are displaying flu-like symptoms and who could be contaminating others......Nor frontline doctors - no wonder one of them is reported as saying -
  
The point of not testing you is to spread the infection, deliberately. That is the crazy gamble of this “herd immunity” guess. And who better to spread the disease than the people dealing with acute cases. There is no other logic to not testing people. 

An Update I’m incorporating into the post are the daily youtube videos which an English doctor is uploading about the situation. His calm measured tones and the simplicity of the presentational material give an object lesson in how to convey clear and trustworthy messages…. The comparison with the politicised messages from government leaders is striking 
Dr John Campbell has apparently been running this excellent teaching resource for some time. Another example of the difference which one effective individual can make!!

Some Italians managed to gives us musical cheer from their self-isolating balconies – also here and here
And the redoubtable Tobias Jones – who has been entertaining us all from his base of the last few decades in Parma gives us a superb description of what it’s like to be in lockdown in the country

Sources

2 comments:

  1. I'm waiting to hear a logical reason for closing schools. Children appear to be immune to the virus, so who is being protected by such an action? You could argue it the teachers, and ancillary staff. But, then we know that 80% of the population suffer either no symptoms or only minor symptoms. Of the rest, those at risk are well defined - over 60 and/or suffering some kind of underlying illness. Those amongst school staff could simply be put on sick leave, their places taken by younger healthier supply teachers and so on.

    In the meantime closing down schools means that the parents also have to stay at home to look after them. Some of those parents will be health and social care workers. That means not only those requiring treatment for the virus, but also the tens of thousands more who require emergency and other life saving treatment do not get it, so that mortality rates rise. Other parents will work in other vital industries, so that alongside the social distancing policy, the policy of telling anyone with a sniffle, or who wants a couple of weeks off on the basis that they might be infected, to stay away from work would bring large parts of the economy to a standstill. An obvious case is electricity supply. If a sufficient number of electricity supply workers are away from work, then electricity supply shuts off. If even that applies to a few large generators that will happen in Britain due to the operation of the grid. It won't be Chinese hackers bringing about that dislocation, but the advice of the government!

    A couple of days without electricity throughout the economy will bring about many more deaths than COVID19, which we should remember, in Britain remains at only 20, or about the number deaths per week from road accidents. Its still way below the 17,000 deaths from flu in 2018, and way, way below the 80,000 deaths per year from smoking related diseases.

    ReplyDelete
  2. many thanks for that Boffy. I was very aware that I was venturing into territory which is not naturally mine - and that I had done little research.....

    ReplyDelete