The Pandemic as a Warning Shot

The last post ended with a suggestion that how we behave in a crisis is a mark of our character and that all of us should feel under a moral microscope in times of crisis. A post last autumn had made the point that

Nobody seems to want to talk any more about “character” – perhaps it has shades of “self-discipline” and “self-control” when the spirit of the age continues to encourage the self to flourish?So it took some courage for David Brooks to produce in 2015 a book entitled “The Road to Character” consisting of profiles of 8 people whose life demonstrates “character” including Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Johnson (!), George Marshall (of Marshall Fund fame), St Augustine (!), the american woman behind Roosevelt’s New Deal (Francis Perkins), the charity worker behind “The Catholic Worker” (Dorothy Day) and George Eliot, the British writer.

I idly googled the Ngram user for "character" to discover that useage of the word "character" has fallen in the past decade to almost zero!
No wonder that I followed up that post by wondering whether our social DNA was changing

Some months back I referred to a vimeo encouraging us to use lockdown to conduct more meaningful conversations . It invited us to consider the following questions -
- what we found the most difficult thing about the lockdown?
- how we reacted to it eg fears and hopes?
- what we were ”bringing” to the experience? eg characteristics/strengths
- which of a range of ”spheres” (work, family, friends, personal development, health, finances, wider community) we actually spent time on?

This was part of what was called the Adventus Initiative  which went on to consider, coming out of Covid19,
- what sort of changes (if any) we might we want to make in our priorities?
- for example in the time we devote to each of those spheres?
- what our first action would be?
In many ways, however, this reflects the privileged world which global warming should have us questioning - with both Extinction Rebellion  and Bill McKibben upping the ante

The Canadian blogger Dave Pollard has a great post today which imagines that we are almost at the end of the 21st century - with "civilisation" as we know it today having completely broken down and our lives lived in small communities - generally in primitive form of wars with one another. His "retrospective" covers 11 points - and I have selected the last three to give you a sense of his argument

9 We have had our share of crises, of course. The Great Earthquakes devastated America’s west-coast cities, though by then the big cities were already starting to be depopulated. We’ve had six pandemics that killed about 400 million people between them, though that number is highly imprecise, since the most recent ones, after the production of vaccines ceased in the third decade of the Long Depression, were uncontrolled and our information systems could no longer gather much reliable data on their impact. The latest one was extremely virulent, but since long-distance travel has pretty much ceased, its effects were severe but localized. We figure it’s likely to be like that going forward. The loss of the great forests to fire and insects has caused a whole cascade of ecological crises, as has the death of the oceans that preceded it. That has caused the hot deserts of the tropics and the cold deserts of the boreal areas to expand enormously, and they’re largely uninhabitable now, as are the semi-arid areas of western North America, central and east Asia, and southern Europe that have grown unbearably hot and have long ago run out of water.

10 And water, always our most precious resource, is now probably the biggest factor driving our population down and our continuing migrations to areas where it is still available. It was the cause of the last great wars, in the northern parts of North America and Europe, and across Asia. When the Long Depression eliminated the capacity to create and maintain pipelines to transport water long distances, those wars ended in a whimper. But with the Long Migration, even that water is in danger of running out, especially as the climate collapse worsens.

11 You might be surprised to learn that, despite not having man-made pharmaceuticals, vaccines, or hospitals, our life expectancy is about the same as it was in 2020. We apparently eat much more nutritious food than people did then — less of it, almost entirely plants, and no processed food — and we of necessity exercise more, as we live without most of the electrically-powered equipment that made lives in 2020 dangerously physically inactive. And I’m not sure why, but we seem less obsessed about dying than people back then were. Maybe it’s because we see it when it happens, whereas in 2020 it was always hidden, in institutions, behind closed doors.

The pandemic tells us, surely, that the sort of modern life we had taken so easily for granted is now over....Some aspects of normality may return - but our easy reliance on air travel, mass tourism and imports will surely reduce significantly. 
If we are to be able properly to anticipate and prepare for our new future, we will all need a strong shot of imagination ...

Resource on global warming
What is wrong with us?
Facing Extinction

Who's having a good Covid19 War?

Covid19 certainly "separates the wheat from the chaff" - it didn't take long, for example, for us to identify the "good" leaders (both political and professional) whose judgements we felt we could trust - for example Ahern and Merkel and the Far-East leaders mentioned in Pankaj Mishra's article in the last post. The 1990s saw an interest in something called "good governance" - which tended to degenerate into a rather mechanistic list of desiderata unable, for example, to throw any light on the odd fact that  two of the countries with the highest Covid19 death rates (US and UK) are also the countries which
- have adversarial,”first past the post”, electoral systems;
- pride themselves on their ”exceptionalism”;
- gave us neoliberalism;
-  have a transactional approach to business which insists on paring costs down to a bare minimum – regardless, as Paul Collier argued recently, of the damage this does to social resilience.

Covid19 offers an opportunity to rethink what became a rather sterile academic debate about what was a pretty vague concept ("good governance") and to craft instead useful guides to the far more important topic of good government
There are, for example, thousands of books about leadership  but not so many about political leadership. It's certainly worth trying to identify what Merkel and Ahern have - which distinguishes them from Trump. Johnson and Bolsonaro - eg calmness under pressure; a search for a diversity of opinions; a refusal to be rushed into decisions; integrity; and effective story-telling are vastly underestimated features of the good leader

Fukuyama is one of many commentators who have identified the issue of Trust as a defining one for government systems in the future.

The crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity and, above all, trust in government.
All political systems need to delegate discretionary authority to executive branches during times of crisis. No set of preexisting laws or rules can ever anticipate all of the novel and rapidly changing situations that countries will face. The capacity of people at the top, and their judgment, determine whether outcomes are good or bad.

And in making that delegation of authority to the executive, trust is the single most important commodity that will determine the fate of a society. In a democracy no less than in a dictatorship, citizens have to believe that the executive knows what it is doing.
It is a popular misconception that liberal democracies necessarily have weak governments because they have to respect popular choice and legal procedure. All modern governments have developed a powerful executive branch, because no society can survive without one. They need a strong, effective, modern state that can concentrate and deploy power when necessary to protect the community, keep public order, and provide essential public services. A democracy delegates emergency powers to its executive to deal with fast-moving threats.

But willingness to delegate power and its effective use depend on one thing above all, which is trust that the executive will use those powers wisely and effectively. And this is where the U.S. has a big problem right now.

Trust is built on two foundations.
- citizens must believe that their government has the expertise, technical knowledge, capacity, and impartiality to make the best available judgments. Capacity simply has to do with the government having an adequate number of people with the right training and skills to carry out the tasks they are assigned, from local firemen, policemen, and health workers to the government executives making higher-level decisions about issues such as quarantines and bailouts.
- The second foundation is trust in the top end of the hierarchy, which means, in the U.S. system, the president. Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt enjoyed high levels of trust during their respective crises. As wartime presidents, this trio succeeded in symbolizing, in their own persons, the national struggle. George W. Bush did initially after September 11, but as his invasion of Iraq soured, citizens began questioning the delegations of authority they had made to him via legislation like the Patriot Act. The United States today faces a crisis of political trust. Trump’s base—the 35–40 percent of the population that will support him no matter what—has been fed a diet of conspiracy stories for the past four years concerning the “deep state,” and taught to distrust expertise that does not actively support the president.

And even the world of political science has woken up to the importance of Trust - with the UK's Economic and  Social Research Council funding a programme on the subject which has so far released such papers as
- "Trust, Mistrust and Distrust"
- "Lesson-Drawing from New Zealand"
- "Nudges against pandemics - on the Swedish experience" ( by Swedish political scientist J Pierre)
For a more critical view of the Swedish left's response see here

But it's all of us who should feel under a moral microscope in times of crisis - not just our leaders. How we behave in a crisis is a mark of our character - which often finds expression in our choice of career. I was intrigued by a recent post which suggested that certain character deficiencies of economists had been exposed during the Covid Crisis

Update;

I missed this always-interesting Matt Flinders' article on The Politics of Covid19 - trust, blame and understanding 
The interesting UK Alternative journal commissioned and published this interesting report on how Plymouth activists have responded to the pandemic

We need to talk about ....the state

Governments have long been an easy target for public anger - whether defined as the particular collection of personalities who form a particular political regime OR as the administrative systems which provide our public services. But underlying attitudes to the state  tend to ebb and flow....25 years ago "the State"  was very much out of favour - with the low point being probably the 1997 World Bank annual development report "The State in a changing world" which reflected the neo-liberal critique of the very concept of state provision which had become the default mode.

The new millennium saw the beginnings of a realisation that the pendulum had swung too far toward business and deregulation; and that the state did have important functions to manage The global financial crash of 2008 should have brought us to our senses - but didn't.
It is rather Covid 19  which has brought the whole issue of the role and performance of government back into public debate

Last month Pankaj Mishra had a superb long article in LRB about what the performance of different states on Covid 19 tells us.
And an article in the forthcoming issue of the Political Quarterly - "Covid 19 and the blunders of our governments" - by Gerry Stokes et al is an early example of the sort of academic treatment we can look forward to in the near future (be warned - this may be behind a paywall - but an annual sub for the best UK political journal is under 20 pounds!) The article sets the UK government's performance in the pandemic in the wider context of the political science literature of the past 25 years on "policy blunders" and makes some recommendations which, I have to say, I found very weak.
But first, Mishra

The escalating warning signs – that absolute cultural power provincialises, if not corrupts, by deepening ignorance about both foreign countries and political and economic realities at home – can no longer be avoided as the US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods.
Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ground for the pandemic’. Profit-maximising individuals and businesses, it turns out, can’t be trusted to create a just and efficient healthcare system, or to extend social security to those who need it most. 

East Asian states have displayed far superior decision-making and policy implementation. Some (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) have elected leaders; two (China, Vietnam) are single-party dictatorships that call themselves communist.
They share the assumption that genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests, and is best realised through long-term government planning and policy. They also believe that only an educated and socially responsible elite can maintain social, economic and political order. The legitimacy of this ruling class derives not so much from routine elections as from its ability to ensure social cohesion and collective well-being. Its success in alleviating suffering during the pandemic suggests that the idealised view of democracy and free markets prized since the Cold War will not survive much longer.

Few narratives are more edifying, as economies tank and mass unemployment looms, than the account of the ‘social state’ that emerged in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. In "Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age" (1998), Daniel Rodgers showed that many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries returned from stays in Germany with ideas that would inform the New Deal.

‘The state must take the matter into its own hands,’ Bismarck announced in the 1880s as he introduced insurance programmes for accident, sickness, disability and old age. German liberals, a tiny but influential minority, made the usual objections: Bismarck was opening the door to communism, imposing a ‘centralised state bureaucracy’, a ‘state insurance juggernaut’ and a ‘system of state pension’ for idlers and parasites. German socialists saw that their Machiavellian persecutor was determined to drive a wedge between them and the working class. Nevertheless, Bismarck’s social insurance system wasn’t only retained and expanded in Germany as it moved through two world wars, several economic catastrophes and Nazi rule; it also became a model for much of the world. 

Japan was Germany’s most assiduous pupil, and the Japanese, in turn, inspired China’s first generation of modern leaders, many of whom spent years in Tokyo and Osaka. Despite the defeat and devastation of the Second World War and the US occupation, Japan has continued to influence East Asia’s other late-developing nation-states: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam.
What made Germany such a compelling prototype for Japan? It is that Germany was a classic ‘late developer’ – the archetype of all nation-states in Asia and Africa. It unified only in 1871 and began to industrialise nearly a hundred years after Britain. Its leaders had to cope with the simultaneous challenges of rapid mechanisation and urbanisation, the disappearance of traditional livelihoods, the growth of trusts and cartels as well as trade unions, and an intensifying demand, articulated by a vibrant socialist movement, for political participation.

Fascinating stuff - which owes not a little to Francis Fukuyama's brilliant 2 volume study of "The Origins of Political Order - and Decay"
Regular readers will know that I am trying to complete a book with the title "Is Admin Reform really all that sexy?"  I last blogged about my efforts at the beginning of the year  This is clearly the signal to get back to work!

Critical Masses, Emperors and freebies

The last post ended with a question - picked up by my fellow-blogger Boffy whose reply (posted as a comment on my blog) deserves a spotlight –

It wasn't a conspiracy that led to Salem, and so on. Popular delusions and mass panics have their own dynamic….. Once a critical mass is achieved no one dare say the Emperor has no clothes, as Wobarg says (at the end of the video link)

In the past, I have written about the work of Milgram and others who showed how the natural human desire to conform - natural because it developed as a herd response so as to survive on the ancient grasslands - leads people to simply accept the current meme, no matter how insane. Its why people would accept and go along with the holocaust, or as Milgram showed why they would be prepared to administer fatal electric shocks to other human beings and animals, so long as an authority figure said it was okay for them to do so!

No leading scientist is going to stand out against the crowd in current conditions, because they would be crucified for doing so, and that applies equally to politicians who have been pressed into all channelling into the same course of action, which itself makes it all the more difficult for anyone to reject.

My guess is that, just as with 2008, there will in a couple of years time be plenty, however, who will write important articles in Medical Science and Statistical Journals saying how they were sceptical all along about what was really happening, and had in their own quiet way raised questions, and that if they had only had the grants they had previously asked for to conduct their epistemological studies they could have shown why what by then will be seen to have been a wholly avoidable crisis - both health crisis and economic and financial crisis - was indeed avoidable.

The point is well taken – I’m not a conspiracy theorist either. Actually Boffy’s reply starts on a note of appreciation for the “extensive, rational and supportive” nature of my last post - which had taken the trouble to copy and paste his 5 previous posts on Covid19 and then try to capture their essence. Clearly he has been the subject of some abuse for daring to challenge the prevailing wisdom on the subject.   

I would like to think that “Extensive, rational and supportive” captures the spirit of my blog. Particularly these days, tone matters – so does common decency and treating others with respect. Twitter has inflicted great harm on our discourse.

On a separate matter, Journals are offering some great bargains and freebies these days.

A week or so ago I took advantage of an offer from the famous FAZ newspaper for daily access during the next couple of months for only a dollar a month

World Literature Today showcases the all-too-often unappreciated work of translators and has just come out with a special offer of only 2 dollars a month - and the last 3 years’ archives

The New Yorker is on offer with the same deal and the entire archives - although my PC is having problems which didn’t allow it to take advantage of the offer. But I can access its special coverage of Covid19 which it’s making available free of charge

I had already mentioned that the UK Prospect mag has free access for the next month to its entire 25 year archive

And today I was notified by Bergahn Journals that all of their journals will be free for the entire duration of the shutdown. I’m on their mailing list because of the interest I had expressed in German politics and society and I see now that several other titles are of interest eg

Contributions to the history of concepts

Democratic theory – an interdisciplinary journal

French politics an society

Journal of social protest

Journeys – the international journal of travel and travel-writing

Finally, Dr Campbell’s Friday video starts with a short video clip of a tearful Spanish doctor’s reaction to ventilators for older patients being switched off to emphasise the importance of the over 65s self-isolating

Addendum

I’ve just been reading Chris Grey’s weekly Brexit Blog – which makes a link between “denialists” and

what is reported to have been the PM adviser Dominic Cummings’ initial response to coronavirus and his (and others’) ‘disruptor’ view of Brexit. Both seem to grow out of an idea that any shock to ‘the system’ is to be regarded as desirable simply for being a shock. Adverse consequences are just so much collateral damage to be ignored if not, indeed, welcomed.

That’s not quite the same as the ‘disaster capitalism’ idea, in which massive shocks such as this pandemic represent an opportunity for economic and political exploitation - it’s more a kind of adolescent infatuation with instability as ‘exciting’.

And it links to the wearisomely predictable ‘contrarianism’ of the peculiar, yet peculiarly influential, leftist-libertarian Spiked Online sect who have lashed out against the coronavirus restrictions and who, of course, tend to be ardent Brexiters. One might speculate on the affinities between such an infatuation and the psychology of the “misfits and weirdos” who are Cummings’ preferred hires.

Tim Martin is one of the relatively small number of leading business people who vocally supported Brexit, who has made simplistic pronouncements about the coronavirus crisis. It links no doubt with the deep-rooted English aversion to intellectuals, who make things complex when they need not be, and also to a perhaps related machismo so that Martin is “happy to take his chances” with catching the virus.

The same attitude is evident in the comments of Paul Bullen, former UKIP leader on Cambridgeshire County Council and Brexit Party candidate. He thinks “the majority don’t care” about coronavirus and wants to just “get back to normal”. It might be called a ‘hand washing is for sissies’ mentality (which could have important consequences for coronavirus spread (£) given the higher infection and mortality rates amongst men). Another variant on the same theme is, like Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, to condemn alarm about the virus as “scaremongering” just as she (and countless others) dismissed warnings about Brexit as ‘Project Fear’ (£).

I hold Chris Grey in very high respect but actually clicked the Spiked Online article and found it an eminently sensible piece - as is the Peter Hitchen’s extended analysis in the Daily Mail mentioned by one of the discussants of that piece.

Clearly accusations of exaggeration cut both ways….I don’t think it helps one bit in these times to label a journal a “wearisomely predictable… peculiar…. sect” 

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

Links which appealed in Ploiesti

Another Monday! Doesn’t time go fast when you are enjoying yourself! 
I start not so much with a link as a complaint….

1. I was appalled last night to discover that one of the most popular Romanian television stations – ProTV – had chosen to show us at 10pm last night a gruesome film about a virus wiping out America (the rest of the world isn’t mentioned). The film stars Will Smith as a lone virologist still working in his home lab to find an antidote for testing on the zombies into which humans have (d)evolved. 
Totally inappropriate film at this moment - with the only uplifting element being the final scene's arrival at a barricaded  (Vermont) border of the vital antidote phial.
Needless to say, I watched it to the bitter end!!

The Politico website tells me that Holywood has in fact been churning out such films for quite some time – eg Outbreak (1995); and Contagion (2011). I’ve only seen one such film – Perfect Sense (2011) - which had an added poignancy for me, being filmed in Glasgow and starring my compatriot Ewan McGregor…..

2. It isn’t often we get freebies but, for the next month, the kind people at the UK Prospect magazine will let us have free access to the entire 25-year archives of the journal and have selected a few highlights to whet our appetite. 
I have occasionally bought “Prospect” and did include it in the list of journals I devised some three years ago – “rather too smooth” was my terse comment, by which I meant that it was a bit glossy and mainstream for my tastes…

But the taste I’ve had so far may change that view. It’s certainly very fine writing, starting with a brilliant Ivan Krastev essay from 2009 which looks back with Krastev’s usual insights at 20 years’ experience of countries like Bulgaria and Czechia; and continues with an essay from Fukuyama on Identity

3. A few weeks back, the Guardian started a very worthwhile initiative on strengthening its European coverage "This is Europe" which, so far, has given rich pickings

4. I’m always captivated by intellectual history – a curious topic I grant you but its attempt to explore how linguistic barriers allow distinctive ways of thinking and dialogue to develop seems to get to the heart of understanding a country. I’ve made the point here several times that Perry Anderson is one of the few people with the linguistic skills to be able to offer comparative thoughts on the matter in the English language.

An article in the New York Review of Books alerted me to the Reading the China Dream website which has been publishing English translations of key articles in a lively dialogue which the Chinese intelligentsia has been carrying out in recent times eg this one. For more on this see this post last year about the geography of thinking       

5. I listened this morning to the reassuring tones of Dr John Campbell in his most recent report - although this article indicated the scale of the opportunities which the British government has missed by its dithering. The economic historian Adam Tooze has an explanation for this odd policy -

Faced with all of this, the stupidity lies in not recognising promptly that we must act, that we must shut down, that even the most essential individual activity of the market age, public shopping, has mutated into a crime against society.

Economics is shaping the crisis. It is the relentless expansion of the Chinese economy and the resulting mix of modern urban life with traditional food customs that creates the viral incubators. It is globalised transportation systems that speed up transmission. It is calculations of cost that define the number of intensive-care beds and the stockpiles of ventilators. It is the commercial logic of drug development that defines the range of vaccines we have ready and waiting; obscure coronaviruses don’t get the same attention as erectile dysfunction.

And once the virus began to spread, it was the UK’s attachment to business as usual that induced fatal delay. Shutting down comes at a price. No one wants to do it. But then it turns out, in the face of the terrifying predictions of sickness and death, there really is no alternative.

Romania has this week technically been under emergency powers…...with the authorities particularly sensitive to the return of hundreds of thousands of Romanians from work in Italy (officially 1.2 million Romanians were working there – mainly casual and manual work). Only some 60,000 are officially quarantined since many chose to come via the Ukraine to conceal their status

On Friday I had a dawdle around the centre of Ploiesti – a city 60 km north of Bucharest which used to be Romania’s centre of oil production and which has been my home for the past 5 weeks. This a very short drone video of the city centre

The pedestrian and car flow were then not significantly reduced. All shops seemed open - the markets certainly. The only differences in the last few days are that the supermarket cashiers and shelf-packers are all wearing masks and gloves and that we wait at the cashdesk a metre and a half apart.

I might say that the supermarkets remain well-stocked - with no sign of the panic bulk-buying which has disfigured the UK. I visited Lidl late Saturday afternoon and it was quiet and well-stocked

My chemist does, however. have a limit of 3 customers only within the shop - with credit card only transactions. For the past few years Romania has had washable banknotes and I had that morning actually washed all the cash I had (a lot since for the past month I’ve been in for the long haul).

I'm one of these bolshie types who object strongly to the way we're being forced into a cashless system......In Romania such a policy, of course, would require the older generation to die off - which, of course, may happen faster than we all thought.

6. And I thought this was an important article to pinpoint the blame we must take for letting human civilisation encroach on the animal and natural world

Other eye-witness reports from those in lockdown

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/the-existential-inconvenience-of-coronavirus

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/coronavirus-spain-us/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/milan-coronavirus-italy-tim-parks-essay/

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/03/19/pandemic-journal/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/london-life-lockdown-coronavirus-social-distancing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/23/europe-views-uk-coronavirus-plan-disbelief

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/were-clearing-the-decks-a-gp-on-watching-the-coronavirus-pandemic-unfold