With few
global exceptions, governments are scratching their heads about how to unlock
the lockups into which they so keenly plunged their nations. It can now be seen
that the lockup was the easy part both to launch and also to get people to
grasp the issue and comply. One didn’t need a faculty of what-ever-ologists to
do what mothers have been saying since germs were discovered. “You can’t go and
play with your friend. He has a nasty cold.” But now that it turns out that
most of us and our friends weren’t and aren’t infected by this terrible virus, we
are eager to resume our lives. President Cyril could end the lockdown and all
its levels immediately. Most of us will choose to practice social distancing
until some unknown future time when we individually feel safer than we do now. But,
aside from the opinions that an 8-week lockdown may be quite adequate for
achieving medical objectives, there are two extremely important and urgent
reasons for terminating the State of Disaster immediately and entirely.
The first is
that the promulgated lifting of the restrictions in stages seems to hinge
around the thesis that certain jobs are more essential than others. And the
second is that politicians are thrilled with the docile compliance from their
usually harshest critics and don’t want it to stop as they have a whole lot of
other tests of central planning to run. Like for how long can the black market
in legal commodities be milked for the benefit of the cadres?
The wilful
denial of the hardship now being suffered by the poorest of our land in the
absence of those jobs currently deemed to be inessential is breath-taking. To
the owner of whatever menial or distasteful task they do to make a living, that
task could not be more essential. Ministers say that they hear people’s
complaints about hunger but just to wait while they get things organised and
issue permits to charity soup kitchens on a daily basis. Humanity and
compassion have disappeared in the race to get a share of the relief funds.
It is
outrageous that we are not allowed to know who will use what data in order to
adjust the level of lockdown. We are told how many people are and have been
infected by the novel corona virus as well as the number who have recovered
from COVID-19. There is also a count of how many have died. Reportedly, the number
of deaths caused by this virus may be inflated because of so-called
comorbidities (what a dreadful word). These data points probably form the basis
of the secret calculation. Obviously, the quality and reliability of these
totals range from modest to dubious on every geographic scale. Nevertheless, poor
data is all in a day’s work for numerical epidemiologists as they churn the numbers to produce a suite
of results including the infamous R, the value of which indicates whether the
virus is “winning” or “losing”. (Note that in polite company this R wears a
subscript of zero, but computer printers are fussy about that sort of thing, so
it is omitted here). Presumably at each value of R (or whatever it is) our
government will grudgingly crack open the lockdown a bit more. Reversals are
possible and have been mentioned for some regions which are “in the naughty
corner” when it comes to their numbers. Tut
tut.
I am
delighted to see that many respected voices are writing open letters to the Boss
who did during his televised non-speech look very harried and tired. Their
themes are identical. We have done what
you and your medical specialists asked for. We all learned a lot about
infection control and will continue to exercise sense and caution Now give us
our lives back please. And you go back to reclaiming all the money stolen by
your colleagues and mates in the last decade so you can pay for the care that
will be required by the few thousand people who won’t be able to avoid
infection.
James
Greener
Friday 15th
May 2020
