COVID-19: 'SCIENCE ON TRIAL' ?

THIAGO CARVALHO* in this weekend's Financial Times asks: 'So what have we learned about the limits of science? First, we were reminded that spectacular successes are built on a foundation of decades of basic research. Even the novel, first-in-class vaccines are at the end of a long road. It was slow-going to get to warp speed. We learned that there are no shortcuts to deciphering how a new virus makes us sick (and kills us) and that there is no ignoring the importance of human diversity for cracking this code. Diabetes, obesity, hypertension - we are still finding our way through a comorbidity labyrinth. Most of all, we have learned an old lesson again: science is the art of the soluable. No amount of resorces and personnel, no Manhattan Project, can ensure that science will solve a problem in the absence of a well-stocked toolbox and a solid, painstaking built theoretical framework.'

He reminds us: 'South Korea recorded its first Covid-19 case on January 20. Eleven days later, Spain confirmed its first infection: a German tourist in the Canary Islands. Spain and South Korea have similar populations of about 50m people. As of ublication of this piece, South Korea has had 879 deaths, while Spain reports over 50,000. The west missed its moment.'

* The writer is an immunologist at the Champalimaud Foundation, Lisbon.

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The Covid 19 Vaccine Has Pros and Cons.

by Les May

THE new vaccine developed to provide protection against the SARS Cov2 virus which causes the disease which we know as Covid 19, has one huge advantage; it does not contain any attenuated or killed virus particles. Potentially this makes it an even safer candidate for extensive use.

The four letters mRNA stand for messenger RiboNucleicAcid. Viruses whether they infect, bacteria, fungi, plants or animals, are essentially strings of instructions, (messages) which tell infected cells what to produce and how it should assemble the components. An mRNA vaccine works by copying just a small part of these instructions. It’s the bit which instructs the cell how to produce just the molecules (antigens) found on the surface of the virus which the immune system of our body recognises. The immune system then produces antibodies which can lock onto the antigen on the surface of any virus particles if the individual becomes infected.

Because the synthesis of the mRNA is essentially a chemical process done in the laboratory there is no possibility of virus particles being introduced into the vaccine. But there’s some bad new as well.

The molecules of mRNA are not stable at higher temperatures and in this case ‘higher temperatures’ are still very much colder than your average deep freeze. After manufacture the vaccine must be kept at about minus 80 degrees Celsius at all times, otherwise it will degrade and become non-functional.

This is not a problem for laboratories and hospitals, but it is for local surgeries and pharmacies, both of which have been suggested as locations where the vaccine could be administered.

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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.

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Charles Charalambous & his response to NV.

  by Brian Bamford

CHARLES CHARALAMBOUS, Editor of Labour Internationalist, questions my treatment of the argument set out in his editorial:  '“Thinning out the herd”: austerity kills'.  He is responding to my posted critique 'ON CERTAINTY' IN THE Coronavirus'.

He asks:  'what do you (Northern Voices) think of the basic argument set out in the statement?'
He says:  'the argument is based on a Marxist perspective over three pages, and the statement draws definite conclusions, which Labour Internationalist endorses.'

He confirms:  'We cannot (nor would we want to) predict the medical impact of Covid-19, but what we can say is that 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, and that those wrong priorities will probably continue to result in deaths which could have been avoided.'

He further asks:  'Do you disagree with the argument that the deliberate underfunding of the NHS over many years, designed to encourage the creeping privatisation of various components of the NHS and the promotion of a healthcare "market" that involves profits and shareholder dividends, is a major reason for the NHS's lack of resources and capacity to respond to the virus's impact in a timely and appropriate way?'

What is wrong with this form of reasoning?

We have got to distinguish between the effects caused by government policies  from other effects outside their control.  The political scientists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, have demonstrated 'Democracy for Realists (2016)' that often shows voters punish politicians for outcomes that are clearly not under their control, including natural events such as shark attacks, droughts and floods.  To these we might, I suppose, add pandemics such as the current Coronavirus.

Mr. Chahalambous wisely qualifies his position by saying he can't predict the 'medical impact of Covid-19' none-the-less he says the 'evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system'.

The Origins of the virus

What we do know is one doctor in China tried to warn the world in December, and he, too, is now a statistic after dying from the virus in January.
 
A sad and disturbing part of this epidemic is the story of Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, which is the epicenter of COVID-19.
Dr. Li found seven confirmed cases of respiratory disease and coronavirus infection in his hospital in late December 2019.

He messaged his medical school classmates in WeChat, the Chinese social network, on Dec. 30, 2019. His WeChat post was shared in multiple internet platforms and gained wide attention.

We also know that the local authorities in Wuhan reprimanded Dr. Li for making false comments on the internet. He was then forced to sign a letter of admonition and promised not to repeat the transgression.

After the admonition, Dr. Li went back to work in Wuhan Central Hospital where he examined a patient, who was a storekeeper at Huanan Seafood Market with glaucoma and fever.  Sadly, he became infected with coronavirus, which eventually took his life.

That was the initial sequence of events that led to the medical development of the virus throughout the world.  The virus is presumed to have an animal origin with animal-to-human transfer at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China.  The infection became human-to-human and is now a global pandemic.

It suggests that in a strict hierarchical system such as in China that the local authorities in Wuhan sought to do what they thought would please their bosses in Beijing, and thus their first reaction was to clamp down on the whistle-blower Dr. Li.  Consequently the underlings misread the situation.

Cookbook Explanations & Remedies 

Whenever I engage with a tract based on a Marxist perspective such as Mr. CHARALAMBOUS offers here from the Fourth International, I feel as if I'm reading a book on French Provincial Cookery.    I feel that something's being cooked-up for me that comes from some rigid recipe from a tired cook, who can't be bothered to think outside the ideological box.

I'm not saying Mr. CHARALAMBOUS hasn't thought through his analysis.  Indeed not, as he has a closely considered position, and he is modest enough to admit that he can't predict the 'medical impact of Covid-19', but he insists the 'evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system'.  Nor would I say that our government was well prepared for a pandemic such as Covid-19.  Clearly it wasn't.  Especially when compared with Germany that was so much better prepared to tackle the virus and has checked more than 350,000 people in the past week alone, the Robert Koch Institute public health group said Tuesday in a report.  Germany also benefits from other health-care advantages, including one of the continent’s highest rates of hospital beds in relation to population size.


Germany has a powerful weapon in the battle to contain Covid-19: a wealth of private laboratories that are helping it test more than 50,000 people a day.
The country had already tested about 920,000 people through late March and checked more than 350,000 people in the past week alone, the Robert Koch Institute public health group said Tuesday in a report.  That may still understate the country’s total effort, since not all the laboratories that have done assays have yet submitted numbers for last week.

Germany’s widespread testing -- still not as comprehensive as many there would like -- has enabled better tracking of the coronavirus’s spread than in many other European nations. The country benefits from other health-care advantages, including one of the continent’s highest rates of hospital beds in relation to population size.

The fact is as Wittgenstein wrote:   'It is hard to tell someone who is shortsighted how to get to a place.  Because you can't say “Look at that church tower ten miles away over there and go in that direction".'

We should all by now be coming to realise that in the current crisis we are all shortsighted!

Claims & Predictions

What we at Northern Voices hold to, as I tried to explain when I wrote my post 'ON CERTAINTY' in the Cronavirus', is that maybe 'Uncertainty, the twin of certainty, cannot be banished from human affairs..'

Yet, Mr. CHARALAMBOUS writes:

'what we can say is that 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, and that those wrong priorities will probably continue to result in deaths which could have been avoided.  So, the alternative to capitalist barbarism is socialism, which starts with defending the interests of the working class against the interests of the capitalists.'

He insists:  'the argument is based on a Marxist perspective over three pages, and the statement draws definite conclusions'

But which version of the Marxist perspective is he and his followers employing here?  Most thinkers these days realise that the social sciences can't prophesy future historical developments with any degree of accuracy because of the many variables involved in human affairs and the unintended consequences of human actions.  A pandemic had been predicted; five years ago, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates gave a TED Talk had been warning that the world was not ready to take one on - but no one could prophesy that it would come from a wet market in Wuhan and how it would then develop.

Karl Popper* has written:  'It should be mentioned.... that Karl Marx himself was one of the first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences of these unintended consequences.'  And he writes that '[i]n his more mature utterances, he [Marx] says that we are all caught in the net of the social system.  Popper adds:  'The capitalist is not as not the demoniac conspirator, but a man who is forced by circumstances to act as he does; he is no more responsible for the state of affairs than the proletarian.' 

This sociological view of Marx has been disregarded by Marxists and Popper claims it has been replaced by a 'perhaps for propaganda reasons, perhaps because people did not understand it - and a Vulgar Marxist Conspiracy Theory  has replaced it.'

 Conspiracy Theories

Charles Charalambous in his editorial “Thinning out the herd” writes:   The UK government 'chose a strategy based on the theory of “herd immunity”, which means survival of the fittest: let the virus work its way through the population, who will gradually build up immunity, and if hundreds of thousands of older and weaker citizens die, well tough luck.'

He said:  '[the] initial response to the crisis (for at least one month) was to ignore the views of epidemiologists and immunologists around the world who were calling for urgent practical measures to limitand confront Covid-19.'

This is not true because on March 27th, Tim Harford wrote in his column in the FT:  

'When I read about a new disease-modelling study from the University of Oxford, I desperately wanted to believe.  It is the most prominent exploration of the “tip-of-the-iceberg hypothesis”, which suggests that the majority of coronavirus infections are so mild as to have passed unrecorded by the authorities and perhaps even un­noticed by the people infected.  If true, many of us — perhaps most of us in Europe — have already had the virus and probably developed some degree of immunity.'

Clearly Charles Charalambous had seemingly overlooked the Oxford University model when he wrote that the Johnson government chose to 'ignore the views of epidemiologists and immunologists'.  Clearly initially the government chose to follow the 'tip-of-the-iceberg' Oxford study rather than the grimmer Imperial College study which has now been adopted of a current 'lock down'.
This then leads to a kind of conspiracy theory based on a kind of catastrophic gradualism that allows in a form euthanasia in which is an attitude of "let it thin out the herd" and so, for him, it ultimately proves 'the bankruptcy of the capitalist system: let the older and weaker citizens die, which ultimately will lighten the burden on the NHS and the pensions system.'
Karl Popper does not assert that conspiracies never happen, but he does say 'they are not very frequent, and they do not change the character of social life.'  If Charles Charalambousis is asserting that people with a taste for eating pangolins or bats in a wet market in Wuhan, China is evidence of a capitalist conspiracy, then I think the Labour Internationalist are scrapping the bottom of the barrel.

*  Conjecture and Refutations:  The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) by Karl Popper

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Understanding The Data

by Les May

If the image does not load automatically click this link to see it.*

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/CoViD-19_GB.svg

DURING the daily updates of the new cases and deaths due to Covid19 infection the speaker usually makes reference to one or more charts. To the best of my knowledge the only person from the media who has drawn attention to the fact that the charts are drawn with a ‘log scale’. Here the word ‘log’ is shorthand for the word ‘logarithmic’. What this means is that each division on the vertical (left hand side) shows equal ratios. So 100 is ten times more than 10, 1,000 is ten times more than 100, 10,000 is ten times more than 1,000, so these show as the same size division on the scale.

This has two advantages. The first is that small numbers of cases at the start of the UK pandemic and large numbers as we have now and in the foreseeable future can be shown on the same scale. More importantly when cases (or deaths) are plotted on a log scale the slope of the line can be used to calculate the rate of increase, or to put it another way, the number of days it takes for the number of cases (or deaths) to double. The steeper the line the shorter the time for the number to double.

In the chart the figures for cases and deaths are plotted with a thicker line; blue for cases, orange for deaths. The same colours have been shown to plot the thin lines which show the slope early in the pandemic and more recently.

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* What is clear is that up to 17 March the daily rate of increase in the number of cases was greater than it has been in the period 27 March to 6 April and the rate of increase in the number of deaths was lower in the period 20 March to 6 April than it was before 20 March.

This is good news but the thick blue line will have to become more or less horizontal before we will know if the ‘lockdown’ and ‘social distancing’ measures have been effective.

The image which appears at the head of this article is the situation as it was on 5 April. Clicking on the image loads a larger version of that image. To get the most up to date image of the data click on the link below the image. Today 8 April this has been updated to show the number of confirmed cases and deaths up to Tuesday 7 April.

As you will see from the new image the slope of the curves in recent days has begun to decrease which is further good news. It is a hint, but only a hint, that the so called ‘lockdown’ and the social distancing are starting to have the desired effect of reducing the infection rate.

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THE SCIENTIST: Modelers Struggle to Predict-

the Future of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Disease experts have largely focused on how we got to where we are now with coronavirus infections.  Improved data collection and sharing can enhance projections of what’s to come.

David Adam Mar 12, 2020

THE cumulative sum of confirmed cases and deaths reported worldwide since the start of the outbreak in late December through March 12.  Cases jumped in mid-February when Chinese authorities changed their criteria for recording COVID-19 cases.

SOURCE: ECDC

While politicians and the public obsess about how and when the coronavirus pandemic will peak, the scientists able to make such projections are struggling to get a grip on what’s happening right now.  “Sorry, not doing any interviews at the moment so that we can fully focus on our local and regional response,” one leading US epidemiologist wrote in an email when contacted by The Scientist.

Like any other models, the projections of how the outbreak will unfold, how many people will become infected, and how many will die, are only as reliable as the scientific information they rest on.  And most modelers’ efforts so far have focused on improving these data, rather than making premature predictions.
“Most of the work that modelers have done recently or in the first part of the epidemic hasn’t really been coming up with models and predictions, which is I think how most people think of it,” says John Edmunds, who works in the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.  “Most of the work has really been around characterizing the epidemiology, trying to estimate key parameters. I don’t really class that as modeling but it tends to be the modelers that do it.”

We can slow it down by canceling all these events, which we completely should do.  But it’s still going to spread to most places.

—Maciej Boni, Penn State University

These variables include key numbers such as the disease incubation period, how quickly the virus spreads through the population, and, perhaps most contentiously, the case-fatality ratio. This sounds simple: it’s the proportion of infected people who die. But working it out is much trickier than it looks. “The non-specialists do this all the time and they always get it wrong,” Edmunds says. “If you just divide the total numbers of deaths by the total numbers of cases, you’re going to get the wrong answer.”

Earlier this month, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, dismayed disease modelers when he said COVID-19 (the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus) had killed 3.4 percent of reported cases, and that this was more severe than seasonal flu, which has a death rate of around 0.1 percent.  Such a simple calculation does not account for the two to three weeks it usually takes someone who catches the virus to die, for example. And it assumes that reported cases are an accurate reflection of how many people are infected, when the true number will be much higher and the true mortality rate much lower.

Edmunds calls this kind of work “outbreak analytics” rather than true modeling, and he says the results of various specialist groups around the world are starting to converge on COVID-19’s true case-fatality ratio, which seems to be about 1 percent.

Once such numbers are pinned down, then modelers can move onto what’s called “situational awareness,” Edmunds explains.  Much of that work looks backward, asking how many cases there might have been in a specific location a few weeks ago and using that information to work out how it could have spread since.

Deaths are the most useful data points for these analyses.  For example, if modelers assume a case-fatality ratio of 1 percent, and that it usually takes 15 days for an infected person to die, then they know a death reported today in a specific region means that 100 people were likely infected there 15 days ago. Add in the time it takes cases to double—Edmunds says it seems to take five days—then modelers can estimate that over those 15 days the number of cases swelled to 800.  So, for every death in a region, that means about 800 others are already infected, most of whom will not have been identified.  This pattern was verified in Italy, Edmunds says, which as of today has reported 12,462 cases and 827 deaths.  When officials tested people living near where someone had died from the disease, in many cases they found hundreds of others were already carrying the virus.

Maciej Boni, a biologist at Penn State University who has studied the spread of influenza in the tropics, says this high number of undetected cases means the spread of the virus can’t be tracked from the numbers of confirmed infections. “At this point, the spread is a moot point,” says Boni.  “We can slow it down by canceling all these events, which we completely should do. But it’s still going to spread to most places.”

Left unchecked, infectious outbreaks typically plateau and then start to decline when the disease runs out of available hosts.  But it’s almost impossible to make any sensible projection right now about when that will be, Boni says, or about how many people will ultimately be affected.  Modelers can try, but to do so they need much better information, such as how many people infected show natural immunity.

Most of these forward-looking “scenario planning” models currently assume everyone on the planet is susceptible, Edmunds says.  Only better surveillance and data, in particular, from serum tests that would indicate whether people have been exposed to the virus whether or not they developed symptoms, will make those calculations more realistic. “At the moment, we’ve got no data to tie that model down. But as the epidemic proceeds and everytime more data comes out, like every day or every week, we refit the model and then we redo our projections.”

To build better models, some disease experts argue that the world needs to improve the way such data are handled and made available. In an editorial published this week in Science Translational Medicine, Scott Layne, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Public Health, and his colleagues propose a new data bank be created in which researchers can share results on, for example, how much virus is shed by infected people and when that starts.

“We’re all in the process of collecting that information. What this effort would do is, as that data comes in, it would point to it and help to organize it,” Layne tells The Scientist.

Backed by better information, models could help determine policies to control spread, he adds.  “If those models do have any validity, then you can perturb them or pressure test them against various sorts of interventions, whether it’s making people move less or cutting down contact by a certain percentage.”
According to Reuters, Chinese officials say the restrictions on travel they put in place have pushed the epidemic to peak in China.  Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese government’s senior medical adviser, claimed at a press conference this week that if other nations follow China’s lead, then the pandemic could be tamed within months.  “My advice is calling for all countries to follow WHO instructions and intervene on a national scale,” he says. “If all countries could get mobilized, it could be over by June.”

David Adam is a UK-based freelance journalist. Email him at davidneiladam@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @davidneiladam.

We Have A Cunning Plan

by Les May

THE sister of a friend of mine is notorious for her habit of putting things off until the last possible moment.  If reminded of something she has to do she inclined to reply that she will do it ‘When she gets round to it’.   Having heard this once too often, for her next birthday he bought her a circular ceramic plate inscribed with the word ‘Tuitt’ in large letters.   She didn’t take the hint!

I was reminded of my now deceased friend this morning whilst listening to an interview with Matt Hancock the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.  The government it seems has a plan to deal with the UK outbreak of Corvid19 and they will implement it, ‘when they get round to it’.  At present the UK has 5000 ventilators, a piece of equipment likely to be needed by about 1 in 20 of people who show symptoms of Corvid19.  Tomorrow he is going to contact manufacturers to urge them to construct more. He will tell them, ‘The NHS will buy all that you make’.  You might have felt more reassured by this if he had said it three weeks ago.

No wonder a senior government source recently found it necessary to say, ‘the perception that ministers are reluctant to make difficult and costly decisions to battle the virus is wrong’.  Oh really?  Then why are people who think they have the symptoms of Covid19 and being told to self isolate not being tested?  Testing and tracking recent contacts is the way to limit the spread of the virus.

Thankfully Hancock did say that aiming for herd immunity by allowing the SARS2 virus to infect 60% or so of the population is no longer part of the government strategy. The fact that it got so far as to be publicly discussed by medical professionals alarmed at the prospect does not give confidence that the overall strategy of Johnson’s government is well thought out.

‘The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact of Covid19 is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity, but at a much delayed speed so that those who suffer the most acute symptoms are able to receive the medical support they need, and such that the health service is not overwhelmed and crushed by the sheer number of cases it has to treat at any one time.’  Robert Peston 12 March 2020.

Hancock made much of the government’s strategy for protecting ‘the vulnerable and elderly’.  Any impact that this might have had in suggesting that there really was a well co-ordinated strategy was diminished by the fact that the news had been allowed to emerge last night from a journalist.

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-14/elderly-to-be-quarantined-for-four-months-in-wartime-style-mobilisation-to-combat-coronavirus/

The effect of drip feeding us bits of information about ‘the plan’ merely makes the government look shambolic and secretive. My impression of Hancock’s performance this morning is that he has been promoted to one level above his competence.   We need clear information both about the government’s overall strategy and the scientific evidence upon which it is relying in making its political decisions.

Telling a significant proportion of the population they must stay indoors for three to four months for their own protection is a big ask. It is far more likely to be accepted if we are given clear information about why it is necessary and what it actually means in practice. I find it difficult to believe that I would be putting myself at significant risk if I took a stroll around the park each day and avoided being close to anyone. I think I would be more at risk in accepting a food container into my house without first wiping it over with dilute bleach and then washing my hands.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the Falklands war will recall the nightly TV briefings put out by the Ministry of Defence and read by Ian McDonald. His matter-of-fact delivery on the latest developments gave the bulletins an air of authority, something which was entirely lacking in Hancock’s answers. I’m not sure that anyone in the present government is sufficiently trusted by the public to take on the role of keeping us informed.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2019/04/09/ian-mcdonald-lugubrious-mod-press-spokesman-falklands-war-became/

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We Are Following The Science! Oh Really?

by Les May

DURING the Apollo 8 mission to the moon one of the crew, Jim Lovell, pressed the wrong button on the flight computer.  That cleared the memory which held the data about the exact position and orientation of the command module.  As a result the flight computer ‘thought’  it was still on the launch pad so instead of the nose pointing forward along the flight path, it pointed more or less at right angles.  Using the astro-sextant to make sightings on various stars the crew were able to give the computer enough data to allow it to figure out the orientation of the module.

Getting back to Earth safely wasn’t magic or good luck, it followed from the fact that the physics of space flight is an exact science obeying the laws of motion formulated by Sir Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century.   Knowing the mass, velocity and the forces acting on an object we can predict exactly where it will be at any time in the future.

Like ecology, economics, politics and sociology, epidemiology is not an exact science. It uses the tools of science to analyse its data, presents its findings in numerical form and runs computer simulations, but unlike physics, it is not an exact science. Its predictions are ‘educated guesses’ based upon the collective experiences of it’s practitioners.  Those experiences come from investigating past outbreaks of some pestilence.  The educated guesses are in the form of ‘this is what happened last time with a similar disease’.

The UK government could truthfully say it was being ‘led by the science’ so long as we were in the ‘containment phase’ of dealing with the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the name of the virus which causes the disease COVID-19.  Containment worked with the original outbreak of the first human transmissable SARS virus which was eventually brought under control in July 2003, following a policy of isolating people suspected of carrying it and screening all passengers travelling by air from affected countries for signs of the infection.  It has also worked with outbreaks of Ebola, so it is a tried and tested method.  That phase is passed. From now on the decisions are political ones.

As I understand the situation the government is assuming that about 60% to 70% of the UK population will become infected with SARS-CoV-2 and suffer from COVID-19, and that those that recover will resist further infection so the virus will die out, an assumption based upon the concept of ‘herd immunity’.

Now lets put some figures to this. The present population of the UK is about 60 millions. If we take the conservative estimate of a 60% infection rate that means that some 36 million people will be infected.  According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) the crude mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of reported cases) is between 3-4%, (the Chinese experience suggests 3.9%), but the infection mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of infections) will be lower.  Assuming that it is in the regions of 1% that suggests 360,000 deaths can be expected in the the UK in the space of a few months.

What I find remarkable is that the UK government seems so complacent about the spread of the virus. Compare this with the situation in China where there have so far been 82,000 cases reported and 3,200 deaths in a population of 1.4 billion people. (Figures correct at 13 March 2020)

Just because the UK government has decided that the spread of the virus can no longer be contained does not mean that we as individuals have to fall in with this view.  Older people in particular can to a large extent avoid placing themselves in a position where they might become infected, by avoiding meeting groups of people in confined spaces. This isn’t ‘panic’ it is rational behaviour.

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200313-sitrep-53-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=adb3f72_2

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

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The Working Class & Leftist Delusion

 by Andrew Wallace

LEFTISM gets itself into bogged down into certain delusional mythologies, one of which concerns the romanticisation of the working work, the heroic proletarian toilers and tillers of the earth,  preordained by Marxist gospel to act as the historical revolutionary agent to overthrow capitalism.  Marx had been pretty disparaging about peasants and 'rural idiocy', instead he and his fellow 19th century socialists felt that a newly emergent class of industrial labourers would shape up as the critical agents of modernity.

Alas some 140 years after Marx's death the working classes across the globe remain as distant from this pre-ordained enterprise as they ever were.  Indeed it seems quite the converse; the working class as hitherto constituted has played a most passive if indeed not reactionary role.

Leftist pretensions to scientific rigour can no longer disguise the romantic fallacy and cognitive bias of 'The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed'. As Bertrand Russell tartly observed 'Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come."

David Selbourne has dissected this fallacious intellectual cul-de-sac as:

'prodigies of useless intellectual labour, whose largely metaphysical character is determined  by the metaphysical nature of the problems to which they seek a solution At the lowest political level, however masked by intellectual sophistication, they can descend to disappointed abuse of the working class for having failed to live up to middle-class socialist expectation. Theories, as we have seen, of 'consumerism', of the 'deferential' working class, of the 'long catalepsy' of the British working-class movement, of a class consciousness 'subordinate' in its very 'texture' to the 'hegemony of the bourgeois', all have silently inscribed within them the figure of a politically defective proletarian who is the obverse of the archetypally active class hero of socialist romance, first cousin to Dyden's noble savage.'

A truth which can still barely be alighted upon in progressive circles, 'socialism' is a not a product of the working class worldview, instead it is a quixotic interloper of sorts, a radical import of déclassé intellectuals who had reason to take issue with the corrosive workings and hardships of industrial capitalism. The wage labourers of course bore the brunt of the exploitative economics that coerced them to work in the most degrading of conditions and had active interests in agitating for improvements in their lot. However 'labourism' isn't 'socialism', whereby the former is to be realised in seeking redress to particular grievances and privations rather than the latter politically undefined and radical goal of usurping the settlement of the day.  Conservatism presented itself in the passivity of the general population and the consequent isolation and containment of dangerous radicals and agitators who threatened to bring anarchy to social order.

Marxism has had the unenviable task of confronting this conspicuous turd in a swimming pool with a battery of impressive rationalisations. Chief amongst these is the infamous idea of false consciousness which has been taken as an unfortunate slur on character in the same way ignorance as a descriptor is taken as an insult even though a concise definition isn't morally pejorative.

Marxists have also proved adept at accounting for a multitude of countervailing tendencies that militate against economic immiseration, such as the co-opting of 'bourgeois' sociology's 'embourgeoisment thesis' of middle class expansion, thereby muddying the waters of class conflict via a bought off 'aristocracy of labour'.

Leftist intellectuals then have erred in projecting a radical telos onto the working class arena, ignoring the utilitarian and individualistic basis to labour politics and the voluntarist and anti-statist ethos that marked these communities. They have also been oblivious to the deep structural incorporation of working class material resources into the capitalist system through mortgage and hire purchase.

However other sociologists have attempted to sidestep the theoretical travails of working class conservatism and the 'deviant' class voter by pointing out the not unsurprising reality of hegemony by way of the deep state ancien regime of a living museum pageantry (monarchy, parliament, church, armed forces, public schools, civil service, BBC) which naturally defaults us all to the dominant culture. Ironically this confinement to functionalist observation and impotent commentary rather nullifies Marx's famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach which implored for more action and less philosophical windbaggery!

It's the culture, stupid

The class voting sociology (Marxism ‘lite’) of the post war years is now having to contend with the other belated but uncontroversial driver of voting behaviour - culture!  As analysists are now recognising, voters are motivated by cultural issues which may not easily be subsumed within an economic paradigm and furthermore may actually be oppositional to the traditional material class interests.  Bourdieu's ideas on social and cultural capital have helped to redress the balance by giving due prominence to education and the cognitive repertoire that help to constitute social class in the modern era.

Many left revisionists had already discerned that traditional class based politics were becoming problematic with declining working class vote share from the 1960s onwards alongside a new counter cultural zeitgeist. With deindustrialisation poised to pulp much of manufacturing and decimate organised labour, Hobsbawm and Gorz wrote in unflinching terms of the likely recalibration of socialist politics. Gorz talked of moving away from class politics in favour of the 'new social movements'. This turn to identity and culture politics followed in the wake of disenchantment with the 'backward' working class. However such doubling down on the new politics exacerbated the cultural and intellectual chasm between the liberal campus radicals and the more socially conservative blue collar workers, leading to a further breakdown of the previous broad based social alliances between the classes.

Working class Hobbesian attitudes to the Welfare State

Fern Brady writing for The Guardian was taken aback by the distinctive authoritarian attitudes towards benefit claimants, particularly the unemployed and disabled.  Those without obvious physical markers of disability were often the target of an inglorious brutalism unveiled in her interviewees who amply demonstrated

(an) 'internalised...Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality, wanting benefits for themselves but resenting anyone else getting a handout...it went in a circle, anger constantly directed at other victims of the coalition government's Welfare Reform  Act instead of the politicians and policymakers responsible.'

Houtman et al drawing on Bourdieu’s work discerned the recourse to a 'deserving/undeserving' criteria in relationship to limited social capital and associated authoritarian attitudes which also were marked by penalising attitudes for 'out-groups' and fringe communities.

So ought we really to be surprised at this abundance of working class authoritarianism?  Again Selbourne is illuminative on precisely this point:

‘...any form of illiberalism in the human-as worker can come to be discounted or recycled as an aberration from the norm of a supposedly instinctive or class, predilection for progressive, fraternal and democratic solutions to social and economic problems. That history does not reveal the latter unequivocally, to put it mildly, is inconvenient. Indeed, illiberalism is as much an ideological choice of direction as any other and more explicable, in conditions of insecurity or fear of unemployment, than many’

In critically disabusing leftism of its ludicrous 'salt of the earth' workerism, it is not my intention to deny the very real and toxic nature of capitalism and I continue to desire even if without much hope that a saner politics emerge to reign in the excesses of our times.  However we need to face up to the increasing intellectual bankruptcy of the left.  We are now very much at the whims of the political right who continue to exploit the post liberal environment in their canny take on working class sensitivities.  'White van conservatism' and Boris's new 'Workers' Party' are set to run the show into the distant future.

I have drawn on the following essays/books/articles during the writing of this article:

• The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, (1937) Bertrand Russell
• Against Socialist Illusion (1985), David Selbourne
• http://www.leninology.co.uk/2010/10/working-class-tory-is-something-to-be.html
• Working Class Conservatives: A Theory of Political Deviance (1967), Frank Parkin
• Social Class in the 21^st Century (2015), Mike Savage
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/12/anti-welfare-rhetoric-families
• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9966722/Welfare-reform-Its-class-war-but-not-in-the-way-youd-expect.html
• Farewell to the Leftist Working Class (2008), Houtman, Achterberg & Derks
• The Forward March of Labour Halted? (1978) Eric Hobsbawm
• Farewell to the Working Class (1980), Andre Gorz
• National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (2018), Matthew Goodwin

The Problems of Consuming Less

by Les May

CLIMATE CHANGE is nothing new.  Where I am sitting now was covered by about a kilometre of ice at the height of the glacial maximum 18,000 years ago. Ultimately the Earth’s climate is controlled by the slight ‘wobble’ in the inclination of its orbit, the elliptical nature of its orbit and the way these interact with the seasons.  Together these allow the Earth to absorb sometimes more and sometimes less of the energy reaching us from the sun.  What is new is that human activity is bringing about changes in the climate on a time scale measured in tens of years not thousands.  We do this by burning so called ‘fossil’ fuels and releasing the carbon they contain back into the atmosphere as Carbon Dioxide. Although this gas is present in the atmosphere at concentrations of a few parts in 10,000 it is this gas which traps heat radiation leaving the Earths surface which would normally be lost to space.  The trapped heat radiation causes the temperature of the atmosphere to rise.  As the sea/atmosphere system act like a kind of ‘steam engine’ and putting more heat energy into it makes our weather systems more energetic, they become more extreme.

The above paragraph sets out the problem, but it also sets out the solution.  To halt climate change we need to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and if possible reduce the amount already there.

We burn fossil fuels to move things from one place to another, e.g. planes, cars, trains, buses, and to change one thing into another e.g. iron ore into cars, oil into plastic.  Changing one thing into another also includes the reclamation of recycled materials e.g. plastic bottles, aluminium drinks cans.  If we are to pump less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere these are the things we need to do less of.

In other words WE need to CONSUME LESS.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49499521

The problem is that we live in a ‘consumer society’ and we need to keep on consuming to keep that society functioning. And it’s OUR problem which we cannot shift onto anyone else.   It’s no use blaming politicians or capitalism which is really only one way of satisfying OUR demand for material goods or new experiences.

Are you willing to consume less?  Three possible scenarios are offered below.

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy

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