Lockdown sceptics should support this lockdown

Editorial Comment: THE Spectator ran an article on the 6th, January by Alistair Haimes, who had until then been a enthusiastic lockdown sceptic, which called on others to support the current government Lockdown. As a consequence of this both Will Jones on the LOCKDOWN SCEPTIC WEBSITE and Les May on the NV Blog have responded with their views on posts displayed below on the NV Blog.

*************************************************

Scepticism is supposed to be the bedrock of science. But where scepticism shades into cynicism it can be as blind to changing events as the unexamined credence it claims to displace. Scientific belief should be based on informed supposition which is then rigorously tested against the evidence — that is the basis of the scientific method. There should be no shame in changing opinions and assumptions when facts change. We start with assumptions, test them against the evidence (which itself changes) and then use that conclusion to repeat the process, ad infinitum. So if conclusions don’t change when facts change, something might have gone awry.

As an example: your view on the merits of the current winter lockdown versus the Halloween lockdown. First: do you think a lockdown is prima facie defensible? To some people, ‘no!’; to far more people, ‘normally no, but it depends’. Whatever initial view you put into your decision hopper, now try to bend that assumption around the first input of information: the healthcare system either (a) clearly has capacity left, apparently running at below average levels for the time of year, as it was in October; or (b) might credibly need to triage fairly basic healthcare within, say, three weeks as seems to be the case now, or so we are told. Whether we are in (a) or (b) should change your opinion; if it doesn’t, you might be doing this wrong.

Now, add in the game-changer of approved, effective vaccines. Your opinion should be different before and after the approval of the vaccines (2 December for Pfizer, 30 December for Oxford). Put simply, it is perfectly justifiable to be against open-ended restrictions in a world with no vaccine, but to think a brief period of restriction while vaccines are rolled out is sensible, and personally I know many lockdown sceptics whose views pivoted on the day the first vaccine was approved.

Finally, consider the pace of the epidemic. Have cases apparently stabilised, as at end of October, or has there been an out-of-leftfield development like the Kentish variant, which experts believe might be at least 50 per cent more transmissible with no obvious sign of deceleration? Whatever the state of your opinion on lockdown so far, this development should alter it at least somewhat.

You might be stridently, philosophically, against lockdowns whatever the consequences, or you might be a dour socialist zealot who instinctively thinks that the cilice should always be tightened in a crisis; but for everyone in-between, allowing opinion to change with evidence like this is likely an excellent idea. Where opinion becomes rigid it can also become brittle, and often doesn’t age well.

Personally (not that it matters given I’m just a punter rather than in government) I have unashamedly been sceptical of the government’s use of interventions throughout the epidemic, though I’m closer to the moderate than the fundamentalist wing. I thought that the March 2020 lockdown was sensible and inevitable while disease parameters and treatment protocols were clarified and healthcare capacity was built, but believe it dragged on far too long, inflicting incredible social, economic and collateral health damage when the first wave of Covid was obviously waning with the seasons. It appeared the government was allowing opinion-polls to lead it down a path of ever more severe restriction rather than examining realistic targeted alternatives that could tide us over sustainably until a vaccine arrived (which I admit came miles faster than I’d imagined possible), and hadn’t stopped to gauge the damage done along the way.

You can of course understand the bind. There is a crisis, the government needs to do something, lockdown is something it can do, so it does lockdown. It might well be the only lever to pull initially, but that doesn’t mean the lever should stay pulled. Who knows, it may even be the best answer in the medium-term, but it is hard to believe that scrutinising every cost and alternative along the way wasn’t a very worthwhile exercise even so.

For lockdown two, like many others, I thought that the case in November was not well argued, was farcically presented with scary out-of-date death charts and poorly administered (creating the boom Halloween weekend by leaking plans on the Friday night was absolutely unforgiveable).

Every intervention, after all, has a beginning and an end, and the degree of social mixing from the ‘one last shindig’ at the beginning to the ‘thank God that’s over’ effect at the end may conceivably outweigh the temporary reduction in R — such ‘forcing events’ cause discrete social circles to overlap which otherwise wouldn’t intersect.

But in the event, the key moment in autumn (possibly during lockdown) wasn’t underground kids parties or news presenters’ knees-ups, it was the emergence of the Kentish variant. Some have hypothesised that the variant emerged from the way we treat Covid sufferers. Hospitals with chronically ill patients create living petri dishes for mutation (it is worth remembering that a quarter of all infections are still presumed hospital acquired). Add in treatments like convalescent plasma (blood extract containing antibodies­) and there are then all the pressures needed to evolve a mutant strain. We will, like good scientists, have to await more data.

Lockdown three, I’m sorry to say (and I can hear the howls from sceptics as I write this), is justifiable, practically and ethically. Given the rollout of the vaccine, the emergence of the new variant and the plausible risk of the healthcare system falling over, there is probably now no realistic alternative. Whatever one’s objections to the first two lockdowns, on both cost-benefit and libertarian grounds, it is at least a defensible position to acknowledge the merit of a brief lockdown during a maximum-speed vaccination campaign to minimise morbidity and mortality along the way.

The calculation is entirely different now from that of the previous two lockdowns. Given the vaccine, the variant and the healthcare situation, the current restriction can be supported (regretfully) without cognitive dissonance by those who opposed the previous lockdowns vehemently and vocally. It is either bad logic, bad faith or fundamentalism to argue otherwise.

This is a position that will make no friends. The zero-Covid Sanhedrin (whose ship sailed long ago in a connected Europe) and the libertarian sceptics (very few of whom are actually anti-vaxx by the way) will both find reasons why this nuanced view is outrageous.

The big, big difference this time is this: an opening in a rock without an exit is a cave — but if you can see an exit, it’s a tunnel. The previous two lockdowns were caves. It was dark and nasty, possibly involving bats, and we had no idea how we were going to get out except back into the same world we’d entered from. But this time really is different: we’re going not into a cave but into a tunnel, there is a credible exit strategy that we can see and believe in, and we’re scheduled to emerge in about 100 days (give-or-take) into a country where almost all the most vulnerable will have been vaccinated and where lockdown is not just lifted but dismantled, hopefully never to be seen again, and good riddance.

*******************************************************

Long, Long Covid 19? by Les May

SCOTLAND’s Sunday Post newspaper reports that Health Boards in Scotland have placed on-line advertisements in an attempt to recruit staff to act as contact tracers during the present pandemic. The contracts being offered are of eighteen months duration. This suggests that there is a growing recognition that Covid 19 is going to be with us until at least 2022 and possibly far longer. *************************************************

An Indirect Route of getting Covid-19 by Les May

AT intervals throughout the day Sky News (Channel 233) broadcasts a short information piece dealing with the key points in protecting ourselves against becoming infected with the Covid 19 causing virus. One of these is a reminder that the virus can remain infectious for a period if it contaminates hard surfaces, including metal surfaces. In her daily briefing a couple of days ago the Scottish First Minister, Nichola Sturgeon, reminded people to avoid touching hard surfaces when in the hospitality venues which have been allowed to remain open.

Unlike in the case of close contact between individuals which can result in direct transmission of the infection, the path of transmission from an infected person to a previously uninfected individual via a hard surface, is indirect. In both cases it involves the infected person ejecting minute virus laden droplets of mucus from the nose or of spittle from the mouth, by sneezing, coughing, singing, or even speaking excitedly or loudly. The largest of these rapidly fall to the ground and are unlikely to travel more than two metres. Smaller particles fall more slowly, persist in the air much longer and may be carried further by air currents caused by body movements.

If these minute droplets are inhaled they are likely to come in contact with the mucus membranes of the nose and throat; they can also drift into the eyes of bystanders. Each route provides a means for the virus to enter the body and initiate and infection.

Droplets which otherwise would fall to the ground can be intercepted by hard surfaces; supermarket trolley handles, door surfaces and handles, tables and chairs, milk bottles and metal cans… the list of things with hard surfaces which have the potential to hold infectious virus particles is endless. In the worst cases virus particles can remain viable and able to reproduce within the human body, for up to three days.

Anyone who comes in contact with a surface carrying virus particles is in danger of picking them up on their hands. Touching their face with a virus contaminated hand can result in a Covid 19 infection becoming established in the body, even though they have not spent any significant time in close contact with an infected person. No ‘App’, nor ‘Track and Trace’ can alert us to the fact that an infected person shed virus particles onto a surface which we later came into contact with. The ONLY defence against this is to avoid touching our face and either wash our hands regularly with soap and water, or apply a sanitiser gel containing at least 60% alcohol, every time we have touched a surface in locations outside our own home.

The importance of this indirect method of passing on the infection has been overshadowed by the problems of getting the ‘App’ to work at all and ‘Track and Trace’ to work effectively. We need to reinstate it.

Do I practice what I preach? Yes I do! Before any bottle or can is allowed into the house it is sprayed with dilute bleach (one part bleach plus ten to twenty parts water) and left for a few minutes before being rinsed with water. Anything else is quarantined for three days. If anyone other than my wife or myself touches a door handle, door knocker, mail flap, bell push is is wiped over with soapy water or alcohol. In the case of our waste bins on collection day before they are brought back into the garden the handles and flap of each of each bin is sprayed with dilute bleach.

Pedantic? Yes! But I make my own rules about what I think will keep my wife and myself safe. That way there’s no confusion about what is and what is not ‘allowed’.

*******************************************************

The Fat Lady Still Isn’t Singing

  by Les May

IN the period between 2* July and 12 August there were 30,041 new infections reported by the government. The average number of infections per day was 733. If the number of new infections was more or less stable we would expect there to be an equal number of days with above the average number of infections in the first half of this period and in the second half of this period. In fact there were just three days with above the average number of infections in the first half 3 July to 22 July. In the second half 24 July to 12 August there were 17 days. The middle day of the period, 23 July, there were above the average number of new infections. The total number of Covid19 deaths in this period was 2395. This figure is almost 8% of the number of new infections reported.*

If the average number of new infections remained at 733 per day, by Christmas we can expect there to be about 96,000 new infections reported in total which may translate into another 7,200 deaths.

The figures above are predicated on an unchanging rate of new infection. But if one compares new infections figures between the first (3 to 22 July) and the second half (24 July to 12 August) it is clear that the average daily rate has changed from 631 to 833. In other words the daily number of new Covid19 infections is rising again.

It is the rate at which the numbers are rising which is important not the actual numbers. So long as the rate of change is in the so called ‘linear phase’ this can be classed as (very) unfortunate; if it enters the so called ‘exponential phase’ this will be a disaster because we will have a rerun of what we experienced in late March and April, and we can kiss goodbye to Christmas.

If we are going to learn to live with the virus and not just watch others die with the virus we need to change what we are doing and become more proactive. Getting rid of the virus, before it gets rid of us, isn’t ‘Boris’s problem’, it’s our problem too.

Doing whatever is necessary to halt Covid19 infections would have another beneficial effect. The methods which are effective in reducing the likelihood of becoming infected against Covid19 are the ones which are effective in reducing the likelihood of becoming infected with Influenza. And we may just need them.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/2019-2020/cdc-prepare-swhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_fluine-flu.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

*My choice of start date was not arbitrary, it was the first day of the government’s updated method of reporting new infections and close to the day on which most meeting places were reopened.

*******************************

Samuel Pepys on the Pox.

Is this what we have to look forward to tomorrow?

 

https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10158655600301383&id=784721382&set=a.10150629665531383&source=48

 

*********************** 

Contact Tracing: Shoe Leather or Apps?

by Les May

IF WE are going to eliminate the virus which causes Covid 19 the only way to do it is to break the chain of transmission from one person to another. One effective way of doing this is to interview every infected person to find out who they have been in contact with, trace all the people named, contact them and determine if they are showing signs of infection. If they are, they too must be interviewed to determine their contacts, and so on. If they are not showing signs of infection they would be advised to ‘self isolate’, a.k.a. ‘go into quarantine’, and monitored daily. If they show symptoms during this period the business of contact tracing must start all over again.

The process of investigating identified cases and tracing contacts is well shown on the website of the US Center for Disease Control website, but the basic procedure is applicable to any public health system.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/php/contact-tracing-CDC-role-and-approach.pdf

A more detailed explanation is given at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_tracing#Steps_in_contact_tracing

This is what I call the ‘shoe leather’ approach to contact tracing. It has both advantages and disadvantages. Its major advantages are that it is ‘low tech’, a pencil and notebook is all that is needed, proactive in the sense that it is a public health initiative and does not rely on the infected person to initiate it, and it is infinitely adaptable, because the contact tracer can prompt the interviewee if necessary.

Its disadvantages are, it requires trained people to carry out the interviews, hence it is expensive and difficult to implement if the number of infections is high, it is relatively slow, the infected person may not remember all their contacts or fail to mention, for example, that they stood at a bus stop with other people.

It is in order to mitigate these disadvantages that technological solutions to the problem of contact tracing have been proposed. These necessarily involve smartphones. At which point one disadvantage of this approach becomes apparent, not everyone owns, or want to own, a smartphone. Nor would every smartphone owner want to allow it to be used in this way. This is not fatal to the enterprise; it only requires that about 60-70% of a population can or will allow this.

One of the things which may make people reluctant to allow their smartphone to be used for contact tracing is a concern for their personal privacy. There are however a number of points which people who have these concerns might like to consider. ‘Shoe leather’ contact tracing also carries risks to personal privacy, remember the pencil and notebook. Owning and carrying a smartphone poses even greater privacy risks. Users may not switch off, or know how to switch off, the GPS location facility on their phone. Even if they do, smartphones regularly ‘ping’ nearby mobile phone masts.  Both these can be used to obtain location data for a mobile phone owner.   Both may be misused for surveillance of individuals, but locations are too crude for contact tracing.

So called contact tracing ‘apps’ make use of Bluetooth hardware which is available on most smartphones.  This signal is of much lower power which restricts the detection range to other smartphones in the immediate vicinity, hence the term ‘proximity tracing’.

Proximity tracing applications send to, and collect from, other smartphones in the vicinity very short ‘nonsense’ messages which act as an identifier of the phone. These are changed frequently to prevent tracking by a third party.  This exchange only happens if the phones, and hence their owners, are sufficiently close, say less than 2 metres, for a sufficient length of time.  This assessment is carried out by the ‘app’, not the phone owner, and the identifier of the nearby phone is then logged. It is in measuring the strength of the Bluetooth signal and hence estimating the distance between phones and their owners, that ‘apps’ seem to run into trouble.

At this point all the logged data is on the user’s phone.  To be useful in alerting other smartphone users that they have been close enough, for long enough, to an infected individual to be considered a contact, some means must be found for bringing all logged identifiers together and alerting potential contacts. It is at this point that the potential for surveillance comes into play again.

The extreme surveillance by the state in China is well known, but other countries have implemented systems where there is a high risk of exposure to surveillance. The TraceTogether application used in Singapore requires users to share their contacts information with the authority which keeps a database that links identifiers to contact information. When a user tests positive, their phone sends all the identifiers it has logged over the past two weeks. The authority looks up the identifiers in its database, and contacts by phone or e-mail the people who may have been exposed to infection. This places a lot of information in the hands of the government.

For the potential for misuse of centralised information see:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/knesset-debates-extending-shin-bet-coronavirus-surveillance-626942

For the potential misuse in some other countries see;

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/challenge-proximity-apps-covid-19-contact-tracing

Apple and Google’s proposal is a more decentralised system which uses a database accessible to the public.  When a user tests positive, they can upload their private identifiers to that public database.  The database can be hosted by a health authority or on a peer-to-peer network; as long as everyone can access it, the contact tracing system functions effectively.  Peer to peer networks do not have a centralised server.  All users are equally privileged.

How the decentralised system works is here:

https://www.blog.google/documents/57/Overview_of_COVID-19_Contact_Tracing_Using_BLE.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

If I used a smartphone I would probably find this system acceptable from the privacy point of view if the code were ‘open source’ which would allow thousands of pairs of eyes all over the world to check it for potential privacy violations.

So far as I can ascertain the system which was proposed initially would be used in the UK was in the second rank so far as privacy is concerned; better than many, but still leaving something to be desired.  Now it seems to have been dropped altogether in favour of one using the applications interface (appi) proposed by Apple and Google, but will it be ‘open source’?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/06/30/track-trace-app-uk-google-apple-when-download/

The downside of relying on technology to alert us to something that has already happened to us is that we will be lulled into a false sense of security about our present behaviour.  Rather like the man who fell off the Empire State Building and as he passed each window shouted “So far so good”.  Meeting as few people outside our own household and keeping at least two metres away from those we do meet is still the best way of reducing transmission and eliminating the virus. 

************************** 

Locked Onto Influenza Revisited

by Les May

Today Jeremy Hunt admitted that in the UK, as well as in much of Europe and the USA, the response to Covid19 had been based on how an Influenza pandemic would be dealt with. This would explain why testing was largely abandoned on or about 8 March.

Because the progress of Influenza epidemics is well understood, after initial testing to identify the Influenza strain which is circulating in the general population, it is usually abandoned with no deleterious effects. It may be restarted after the first peak of infections has passed if a second peak seems to be coming, in order to identify whether it is a different strain.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2020/04/locked-onto-influenza.html

**********************

Faking The News

by Les May

I HAVE no great enthusiasm for China as a country or its politicians. Perhaps it is its history and culture which make me feel that some of its leader think of we Westerners as barbarians or perhaps they are truly racist in outlook. But this suspicion does not lead me to accept without good evidence that China failed to alert the rest of the world to the dangers of the SARS-Cov-2 virus which arose in the country and hence is responsible for what is happening to us.

It is instructive to look at the delay between a country becoming aware of the presence of the virus and imposing a ‘lockdown’. But first let’s clear up the story about the doctor being ‘silenced’ when he revealed the story.

‘Dr Li raised the alarm about novel coronavirus on 30 December when he sent a message to his medical school alumni group warning them to wear protective clothing.

Dr Li told them seven patients from a local seafood market had been diagnosed with a SARS-like illness and were quarantined in hospital.
A screenshot of the message went viral on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, and he and seven others were accused of "rumour-mongering" by Wuhan police who tried to silence him.’

https://news.sky.com/story/chinese-doctor-li-wenliang-who-was-punished-for-early-coronavirus-warning-dies-of-disease-11927777

But that does not mean that no action was being taken in China. This what the European Centre of Disease Control (ECDC) has to say:

On 31 December 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission in Wuhan City, Hubei province, China, reported a cluster of 27 pneumonia cases (including seven severe cases) of unknown aetiology, with a common reported link to Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a wholesale fish and live animal market.

The market was closed down on 1 January 2020. According to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, samples from the market tested positive for novel coronavirus. Cases showed symptoms such as fever, dry cough, dyspnoea; radiological findings showed bilateral lung infiltrates.
On 9 January 2020, the China CDC reported that a novel coronavirus (later named SARS-CoV-2, (the virus causing COVID-19) had been detected as the causative agent for 15 of the 59 cases of pneumonia. On 10 January 2020, the first novel coronavirus genome sequence was made publicly available.
On 23 January 2020, Wuhan City was locked down – with all travel in and out of Wuhan prohibited – and movement inside the city was restricted

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/novel-coronavirus/event-background-2019

This suggests that the time between the first cases of Covid 19 being identified in China and a ‘lockdown’ being imposed was 23 days.

So what happened in the USA and Western Europe? These figures for the delay in imposing a ‘lockdown’ include also the cumulative number of deaths in the country at the time it was imposed. In the case of Germany and the USA, which each have a federal system, I have used the first date when it appears to have been imposed in the country.

Austria 22 days, 3 deaths; Netherlands 28 days, 276 deaths; Italy 37 days, 366 deaths; Spain 44 days, 294 deaths; France 51 days, 175 deaths; UK 51 days, 379 deaths; Germany 52 days, 31 deaths; USA 60 days, 522 deaths.

NB These figures were compiled for several sources which do not always agree with each other.

How well do these figures for Western Europe compare with China moving from first cases to lockdown? We still have a lot to learn about the origins and early spread of this virus. If western leaders made mistakes in their response to this pandemic it is they who are responsible for what is happening not China.

***************************************************

Locked Onto Influenza?

by Les May

SPARROW Hawks and birds which hunt like them seem to have the ability to lock onto a specific target and however much it weaves and dives remain doggedly on its tail.  Did something similar happen in January and February when the response to the potential for a Covid-19 pandemic was being thrashed out in the UK?  Was there a fixation on the type of response which has worked in the past with respect to Influenza epidemics.  Essentially that amounts to ‘you can’t stop Influenza, so rely on mitigating the harm it causes’.  Did the UK government’s advisers ‘lock on’ to an Influenza response strategy and fail to consider possible alternatives?

There are two important differences between Covid-19 and Influenza.  Covid-19 has a higher death rate and a longer incubation period than Influenza.  The first means it is even more dangerous, the second that there is a longer window in which to test, trace and track potential sufferers.

I am prompted to ask these questions because New Zealand, which followed a different strategy after abandoning mitigation, now believes that it has largely eliminated community transmission of the virus and is in the process of easing its ‘lockdown’ measures.  Of course New Zealand has a much smaller population than the UK, but if we standardise the infection rate in terms of cases per million of the population we find that for New Zealand the numbers are about 300 per million and for the UK they are about 2,300 per million.

The strategy followed by New Zealand was ‘containment as a stepping stone to elimination’.

The steps needed to make such a strategy work were discussed in a paper published in the New Zealand Medical Journal on 3 April 2020.  Some of the requirements for making elimination work which were presented in that paper are:

‘Elimination is a well-recognised strategy for infectious disease control, and New Zealand can draw on public health experience of eliminating a range of human and animal infectious diseases.  In particular there are lessons to be learned from the measles and rubella elimination strategy, albeit with the difference that we do not yet have an effective vaccine for COVID-19.  Past experience has taught us that there are three factors that are critical to elimination success: 1) high-performing epidemiological and laboratory surveillance systems; 2) an effective and equitable public health system that can ensure uniformly high delivery of interventions to all populations, including marginalised groups (in this instance intervention is focused on diagnosis, isolation of cases and quarantine of contacts rather than vaccine); and 3) the ability to sustain the national programme and update strategies to address emerging issues.

The essential elements of an elimination strategy for COVID-19 are likely to include:

1. Border controls with high-quality quarantine of incoming travellers;

2. Rapid case detection identified by widespread testing, followed by rapid case isolation, with swift contact tracing and quarantine for contacts;

3. Intensive hygiene promotion (cough etiquette and hand washing) and provision of hand hygiene facilities in public settings;

4. Intensive physical distancing, currently implemented as a lockdown (level 4 alert) that includes school and workplace closure, movement and travel restrictions, and stringent measures to reduce contact in public spaces, with potential to relax these measures if elimination is working;

5. A well-coordinated communication strategy to inform the public about control measures and about what to do if they become unwell, and to reinforce important health promotion messages.’ (my emphasis)

https://www.nzma.org.nz/journal-articles/new-zealands-elimination-strategy-for-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-what-is-required-to-make-it-work

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/120784539/man-for-this-moment--epidemiologist-michael-baker

I have repeatedly suggested that we should watch carefully what is happening in China and not get too ‘hung up’ on the accuracy of the figures it publishes.  This is what the authors of the paper have to say:

‘The strongest evidence that containment, on the path to elimination, works comes from the remarkable success of China in reversing a large pandemic.  Of particular relevance to New Zealand are the examples of smaller Asian jurisdictions, notably Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.’

In the UK the stable door was left wide open and the horse has well and truly bolted. We have had 20,000+ deaths so far and to get out of ‘lockdown’ we are going to have to have in place the measures which might have eliminated some of this pain if they had been applied earlier, detection identified by widespread testing, case isolation, contact tracing and quarantine for contacts. Questions need to be asked of someone.

********************************** 

Test, Isolate, Track and Trace

by Les May

THAT’s the strategy to eliminate the SARS-CoV-2 recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO).  Professor Christophe Fraser, of Oxford University’s Big Data Institute has said “Our mathematical modelling suggests that traditional public health contact tracing methods are too slow to keep up with this virus.”  A team of medical researchers at Oxford University are currently exploring the feasibility of a coronavirus mobile app for instant contact tracing.  However it has been suggested that this approach will only work effectively if at least 60 percent of people use the ‘app’.

There does not seem much evidence that the government adopted the WHO strategy with any degree of seriousness during the so called ‘containment phase’ of the Covid19 pandemic in the UK and some people might think this is a cheapskate approach instead of making a serious effort to implement the tried and tested ‘traditional’ approach which has been used in tackling such diseases as Ebola.

Such an ‘app’ would give the Government access to health and location data and might be considered too intrusive and represent an unprecedented level of surveillance.

However there are two points which may make some users less uneasy about the privacy implications.  The first is that so far as I am aware the technology will be based on Bluetooth equipped phones communicating with each other and Bluetooth has a very limited range, typically 5 to 10 metres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth

The other which I think is more significant is that the computer code which will enable devices to communicate with each other will be ‘open source’.  What this means is that the eyes of thousands of programmers anywhere in the world will be able to examine the code to ensure that there are no ‘backdoors’ which security agencies can exploit to conduct covert surveillance.  I have been using an open source operating system and open source software for nine years.  That means I don’t have to endure the horror that is Windows 10 and I the additional pleasure of not contributing to Microsoft’s profits.

******************************** 

The Chains Around Some Brains

by Les May

Editor:  Here Les May, who was ahead of many of us
in dealing with this pandemic, addresses the problem
of the political idée fixe or apriori methodogy of thought.
Or what I have elsewhere called a 'cookbook mentality'.  
The writings of Charles Chahalambous, editor of the 
Labour Internationalist, are merely an aspect of this approach.
See the earlier post:

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2020/04 › on-certainty-in-coronavirus

. 

*********** 

IN writing this I make no attempt to defend capitalism as a form of social and economic relationship.  My concern is to question the assumptions behind the assertion ‘the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population’.  If we are going to take any lessons from what we are reluctantly experiencing now, I would like them to be the right ones.

Historically we experienced at least one outbreak of disease that can be said to qualify as a pandemic.  That is the so called ‘Black Death’ which swept through Europe in 1348 to 1349 and is thought to have killed some 30 to 60% of the population.  Even with the limited transport of that time the disease spread at about 10-15 miles per day, which is the sort of distance an individual might walk in a day.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/could_the_black_death_actually

Two other more recent outbreaks of disease are relevant here.  Between September 1665 and November 1666 disease, usually assumed to be plague but possibly an Ebola like haemorrhagic virus, killed 260 people in the village of Eyam.  It did not spread to neighbouring villages because the villagers ‘self isolated’ and it eventually died out.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223184-000-did-bubonic-plague-really-cause-the-black-death/

The second relevant pandemic is the so called ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-19.  This spread rapidly across America along the routes of the railway system.  I would argue that the thing which facilitated the spread of the SARS CoV-2 virus to produce a pandemic is the frequency of the movement of individuals between and within countries.  People move to and from work, for leisure activities, for holidays, to visit family and to facilitate national and international trade.  None of these is unique to the capitalist economic and social system.

That there is frequently a tension between the interests of ‘big business’ and the well being of people is not disputed, but at the moment, at least in most of the industrialised developed economies, that is being resolved bt governments in favour of keeping people safe from infection by this virus.

In the UK we are in our present situation because of specific choices made by our politicians and to blame ‘the capitalist system’ simply shifts the blame for the outcomes we are seeing away from them and onto some abstraction of reality which has itself evolved into something very different from what it was in the 19^th century.

The Black Death started the long decline of feudalism as labour was suddenly in short supply and a wage economy came into being; ‘market forces’ at work one might say.   I doubt that our world after the Covid19 pandemic passes will be the same as the world we knew before.   We have a choice. We can reach into our ‘goody bag’ of ever ready solutions and wait for some vaguely defined ‘historical force’ to sweep away the present order and forge a ‘New Jerusalem’.  Or we can ask what lessons should be learned from our present experiences and then set about putting things right. 

*************************************