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
Showing posts with label Coronavirus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coronavirus. Show all posts

Saturday, March 21, 2020

A voice in the wilderness

Earlier in the week I praised an English doctor for the calm, graphical way he explained the current pandemic.
Today I want to draw your attention to a German doctor who has been calmly suggesting that governments have been panicked into extreme measures by their failure to understand the specifics of statistical measurement and reporting.
My first reaction was that the guy was a right-wing denialist – like Brazil’s right-wing President Bolsonaro - but his style seems a bit too professional for that – and indeed, when I checked on Wikipedia, it was to discover that he is not only mainstream SDP but is currently the Deputy-Head of the German Delegation to the Council of Europe
Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is a lung specialist (pulmonologist) and starts his presentation (subtitled in English) by explaining there are 100 types of virus - which are constantly changing. He quotes research from Glasgow which looked at some ten viruses in which Coronavirus was always present – although only some 7-15% of viruses he says are of the Coronavirus strain.
Wutan, he points out, is China’s largest laboratory for the testing for viruses and has, therefore, a large number of medical researchers who found this strain on about 50 people they were testing. This was duly put into the global data base and picked up in Berlin who did a test and passed the results to WHO for some sort of certification…..

At this point the explanation got a bit cryptic and seemed to suggest a contrast between how the WHO handles validation requests from pharmaceutical companies, on the one hand, and research institutes on the other. Basically Wodarg seems to argue that WHO registered the new strain very easily….without actually knowing how dangerous the new strain was….That requires epidemiological data going back some years – whether for the general population, for those presenting with symptoms let alone for those in hospitals or in critical care. The percentage of those with the virus will start at about 8% but move up to almost 100% for those critically ill…   

I think he says Germany would normally expect 2-3,000 deaths a year from flu and this should be borne in mind in all the current focus on the death rate  
He faults the virologists for creating something sensational – which first impressed the Chinese authorities…...and then got picked up by the global media

Wodarg’s arguments – available on his blog - have caused quite a storm in Germany apparently – although I have not been able to check that discussion out so far. I am a sceptic by nature and very much enjoy books such as those of Ben Goldacre
If he is correct, of course this would massively boost the cause of the “Denialists” – which must be a thought worrying some experts….
One thing does, however, puzzle me – why Wodarg does not simply argue that we should be keeping the number of deaths in perspective. In other words be deducting from the gross number presented in the news reports the 0.1% of deaths expected from flu… 
Instead he seems to be denying there is an issue

The doctor does, however, seem one of these “outsiders” I have discussed quite recently in these posts with one foot in the medical camp and another in the political. 
People who straddle different worlds are able to resist groupthink – and it is significant that, at the end of the youtube presentation, he quotes from my favourite fairy story – “The Emperor who had no clothes”.

Update; Germany is apparently experiencing a low and flattening death rate at 0.3% (compared to both Italy's 9% and UK's 4.6%) according to this article - although Monday we were being told that some regional authorities were being slow in returning their statistics! 
But the UK seems still to be farting about as two blogs from opposite ends of the political spectrum indicate first from Boffy and today on Richard North’s site  
And this article shows how much of an outlier the UK has become


The pic is the last painting done by Egon Schiele a few days before he and his wife succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1918. He was 28

Monday, March 9, 2020

Links I liked

I’m now sold on the idea of a weekly ”Links I liked” feature for the blog. It allows me to use the folder in which I keep the hyperlinks of material which has caught my eye over the year - and select those which warrant further – if brief – study. And the links which are used can easily be found subsequently by me in the "search" facility which is the blog’s most valuable feature..... 

Like everyone else, I have a morbid fascination for the latest development on Coronavirus; and, as a retired person, have the luxury of being able to take the precautions even further than we are advised . So I not only frequently wash my hands, I gargle with salt water; swallow ears of garlic and Vitamin D (for immunity) and avoid public places and touching...
As far as the wider discussions are concerned, I can only follow Oscar Wilde’s dictum that ”I always pass on good advice....it’s the only thing to do with it!”  
- The inimitable Scottish Review carried a typically solid analysis;
- Michael Roberts looked at the economic implications; and then, prolific blogger that he is, followed up the very next day with an analysis of whether the obvious Keynesian solution will work this time around……  
no less a figure than Branko Milanovic has some interesting thoughts

I’ve been having (unresolved) problems accessing The New Yorker site to which I took out a temporary 6 dollar subscription – but I was able to read and download a couple of articles from an interesting series they’re currently running on the Future of Democracy – one on Politics without politicians; and this one On the Right to Listen
I've long admired The New Yorker for the sheer quality of its writing and the 6 dollar offer appealed to my Scottish nature! I'm not sure if I'm attracted to the 99 dollar annual sub - and it will be interesting to see how easily I will be able to cancel (given the problems I've had accessing)

The LSE Review of Books regularly feeds me with commentary on interesting books and, in view of eralier comments of mine about rationing non-fiction books, I particularly appreciated this intro to a recent review of a book about populism

Sometimes, it feels like populism has become its own non-fiction genre, like true crime or travel writing. Publishers have issued several primers on the topic in recent years, from Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s entry in the Very Short Introduction series, to Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism? and John Judis’s The Populist Explosion. Some works try to examine the electoral aspects of transnational populism, like Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism, while others examine populism as a style or manner of campaigning, like Benjamin Moffitt’s The Global Rise of Populism

In such an atmosphere of intense examination, wide-ranging research and prolific explanations, each new work on populism emerges to an immediate question – does this book tell us anything we didn’t already know? Does it offer a new angle, a new perspective, a new conception on the problem? And, given how mutable the term ‘populism’ is, does the book even describe the correct subject?

I wish I had some way of sending it to the author of a 500 page book called EuroTragedy – a drama in Nine Acts which has a 25 page intro and a 75 page bib but absolutely no attempt at an explanation of why he burdens us with yet another history (I know of at least half a dozen books on the same topic). I stumbled on the book because of this article the author has just written for Spiked

The TransNational Institute (TNI) is a body I admire and has released a very useful short paper Seven Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

The TLS is doing an interesting series called Footnotes to Plato ”appraising the works and reputations of great thinkers”. Ever since University I’ve recognised the importance of Hannah Arendt -  particularly the care she took to parse the Latin and other words for the deeper meaning they contained. But I don’t pretend I understood very much. One sentence in the current TLS article is typical of her  

Self-interest, Arendt frequently argued, is a misnomer, since ”inter est” refers to the common world that lies between individuals, not inside them.

A very good example of what the writer in an earlier post had emphasised as the benefits which can come from looking at words carefully

The Communards are one of the few groups I remember from the 1980s (Queen was my favourite) and I was fascinated by this article about one of its members who has subsequently  become a clergyman (!) and public figure – to the extent of fronting several television programmes including one called The Great Painting Challenge which led me to this delightful presentation by a painter

The Guardian is currently marking the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union with  a brilliant series called This is Europe -