I wish I could share the optimism of many I saw out and about - and deliberately choosing to socialise in places with poor ventilation -yesterday as cool descended on a late August bank holiday, but I don't.
My concern is evidence based. Take this tweet as providing some of that evidence. Dr Deepti Gursdasani is now, with Prof Christina Pagel, one of the best commentators on Covid issues, most especially since Prof Devi Sridhar seems to have become strangely compliant with the government's line of late:
That spike in cases is not by chance: it is undoubtedly related to school reopening. It is almost inevitable that the same trend will be seen in England and Wales very soon.
I am, of course, aware that the connection between cases and hospitalisations has changed, and that double vaccination is clearly helping many avoid serious illness. I don't need to be told that. But case rates and hospitalisations are rising across all age ranges in Scotland now. And we face a case load 26 times heavier this end of August to that which we had a year ago. The result is that we do face the risk of NHS chaos this autumn, and the chance that we will avoid lockdowns again seems to be low to me.
In that case economic recovery looks very unlikely. The optimistic forecasts from the likes of the Bank of England from earlier this year look to be very far removed from reality now.
The real question is, in the midst of all this evidence that not much has really changed, what will the government do? Is furlough really going to end? Is austerity likely? And is Sunak's threat to de-fund the NHS really going to happen? All of these look like acts of recklessness right now. But that seems to be the Tory way at present. And that makes this not just a worrying, but also a dangerous time.
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The public mood regarding lockdowns has changed from what it was this time last year. Then we had no vaccines and there was a general grudging acceptance that lockdowns would probably be a necessary hardship until they were. Even though at the time case numbers were an order of magnitude smaller and there was a misplaced optimism that the worst was over. Now that we have them, the general opinion is that the risk to life is acceptably low for most of us. If any adult chooses not to be vaccinated many would even go as far as to deny them free treatment on the NHS should they become sick. The feeling is that it is their own lookout.
There are obvious counter arguments but the “we have to live with it” opinion is the prevailing one and this seems to be the Government’s view too.
Until the NHS collapses….as it is beginning to do
As it is intended to do.
I agree with you about Sridhar – very strange change of tune I noted too but I thought that I was being too cynical!! Mind you, she hinted during her last C4 News interview that effective lockdowns maybe needed with a rather rueful smile at the end.
Lockdowns? I’ll wager that there will not be any. There is no appetite for them in Government. We did a walk in Edale the other day and the place was rammed. I’m not joking – as was the Ladybower dams on Saturday where we went for bike ride.
People will keep out of each other’s way, but many were also gathering together.
You don’t exert that amount of control on the media to have more lockdowns; in my view you do it to get away with not having them.
I kid you not.
I’m worried too.
They might very well leave decisions about furloughing etc., right to the last moment. Or, just ignore it to try to convince everyone that we are open for business ‘as usual’.
So it’s not just East Anglia…..
Honestly – the trig point on Mam Tor was hidden by the amount of people congregating there (we started in Edale and walked up to the Tor – not many on that route ) – there were English folk, English Asians, Asians from abroad and lots of East Europeans too – a real world affair when we stopped and listened. Both Edale and Hope were very busy. It was all the easy to reach stiff like Mam Tor that was really busy – the more remote footpaths were less so and dominated by your traditional English rambler type.
The Nags Head at Edale was open and busy and the roads were very busy too as was the parking. We had to park in farmer’s field. The car parks had a fair number of foreign license plates too and the waitress at the Nags Head told us she’d seen a fair few Russians there on holiday.
There’s a good recent article with some emphasis on Prof Devi Sridhar out. It’s at
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/31/why-its-a-mistake-to-ask-academics-for-advice-on-how-to-manage-the-pandemic/
Interestingly my reading of the article on the daily sceptics website, under the name of which it says “Question Everything. Stay Sane. Live Free” was interrupted by a pop up asking for a donation to the site which suggests that even they don’t believe what they write.
I shall summarise the article to save you all time you would otherwise rue the loss of.
Academic says “don’t listen to academics”
The piece has taken an academic critique of academia sprinkled with Kant and Foucault (which helps to intimidate those without a doctorate) and inserted in it a lukewarm hit piece of Prof.Sridhar. It is in many respects another way of saying we don’t need experts, and given that Gove is too busy dancing up a storm in Scotland (so the internet tells me) to do it himself it gladdens me to see that someone else has taken up the banner.
I am not entirely unsympathetic to parts of the writers argument but having perused her other pieces on the conservative woman website and I sense an hidden agenda at play. Perhaps this feeling is increased by the fact that the articles, all of which concern the public health issue of covid carry Dr in the by-line and it is only at the very bottom below the articles that we see the writer is a researcher in philosophy and as such most likely a PhD ( I cannot be certain of this and offer my sincerest apologies if wrong, however a list of her publications includes titles such as ‘Avant-Garde or Pré-Jugé’ published in Contemporary Aesthetics so I am comfortable with my assumption. ) Add to this the fact that the website the article appears on is Toby Young’s lockdown sceptic page and all of a sudden I cant help agreeing with the author that academics should stay out of proffering advice on how to manage the pandemic.
As I read what I have written I wonder if I have been unfair to the writer who may be a thoughtful, sensitive and caring person troubled by the ravages laid to human society both by the Covid virus and by our reactions and responses to it rather than the sort of person who was seduced by Ayn Rand’s ideas as a teenager (the perfect age to be seduced by Randian selfishness) but failed thereafter to balance the self with the other and with society. If that is the case, if the only way she can be heard is in the d**** s****** or the c*********** w**** this points to a problem.
So much now is reduced to a binary choice. You’re with us or against us, left or right, 0 or 1. Whether its Brexit, The Environment or Covid to step out of the binary choice in any sort of public forum is to invite attack often from both sides. In conversation with other people and in some, usually fairly obscure, online spaces it is still possible to occupy the grey spaces, to be unsure, to weigh options, to ask hard questions and acknowledge that there may be no good answers. The mainstream media, most alternative media, most public organisations and the government have through an ‘unknown bewilderingly complex iterative process™’ reduced life to a series of binary choices, opposite forces pulling in opposite directions resulting in staying put.
Keep everything black and white, keep everything at about 50/50, keep things from moving to fast, keeps things under control.
When I was young I believed the arguments against proportional representation, how it would lead to a proliferation of different parties, to unworkable coalitions, eternal parliamentary sessions where no decisions could be made. I believed that first past the post made sense, that it was best. I filed this belief away ready lest it should ever be called on. I look back at myself at that time with compassion. I was a teen discovering myself as an individual for the first time in my life, I was at the time of my life when exploring and enjoying some degree of selfishness was the point. I have moved on since then but unfortunately not every belief can be removed from storage and examined every time we reach a new understanding so it was unfortunately not until my thirties that I got it, that I understood that real consensus was messy, could be compromised and unsatisying, and that it could bring about real change by breaking those tidy opposite forces and allowing movement. I was then able to consign FPTP to the embarrassing opinions of my youth file.
All this is to say that letting ourselves be corralled into two opposing pens baying at each other keeps us nice and still and occupied (all the easier to pick our pockets) whilst nothing happens. Brexit isn’t fixed, the Climate remains in crisis, and we all learn to die with covid.
Our future lies ahead of us and the answers we need to make it a viable future also exist ahead of us no matter how much they may be informed by the past. The solution to Brexit is not simply to rejoin the EU. The climate crisis is not just about reducing CO2. Life after COVID is not just about living with it, about vaccines and getting back to normal.
These two crises that are affecting the world and the one primarily the UK have thrown much into stark relief and we see failings in the global supply chain that has become so ‘efficient’ that a stiff breeze in the wrong direction can disrupt it. We see unironic tweets written on the iphone they upgrade every year about how it’s not up to us to make a change to reduce emissions because its China’s fault so they should fix it. Internationally we see COVID vaccine nationalism and nationally we see the most disadvantaged bearing the brunt of the Covid crisis, there is barely a ‘we’, there is no ‘are in this together’.
The world is broken and was before all this started. The cracks now though are too big to paper over. Our comfortable middle class lives are a lie and will not protect us from what is coming. Some of us will be lucky enough to die before we really have to face it , our children will not be so lucky no matter how many A* grades they get. Despite all of this I have an optimism, a belief that we can begin to fix things but its going to need a change, its going to need us to disturb the balance of the opposing forces, the balance of the them or us, the rejection of the binary choice.
Pardon the rant. It was not what I intended when I started this comment. I value this space and the contributions made by everyone (bar the trolls) but I have been frustrated to see so much acceptance of the binary choice in the discussions around covid and have wanted to say something about it, I guess I have now although its not come out quite as expected.
I was in Hong Kong during the sars outbreak in 2003. I am fully aware that covid is different and requires a different response but that doesn’t change the fact that I witnessed a public health approach to that crisis rather than the blatantly political approach taken by the UK government to Covid. It made it very easy to see the false choice I was being given in the opposing narratives. Lockdown vs let it rip, containment vs live with it. Despite their presentation in the public sphere these are in no way binary absolutes but just two of many possibilities yet any suggestion of other possibilities is either rejected or uncomfortably shoehorned into one or other of the accepted binary choices. Equilibrium and distraction through conflict and £37 billion sneaking out the backdoor to pay for ‘test and trace’.
Cast aside the shibboleths, question your beliefs, embrace paradox, and help shift the balance.
Maybe we can make things better…
I am not sure that the suggestion is that the choice on Covid is binary – because clearly the response is adaptive
But it does have to be appropriately adaptive and what is appropriate is the subject of much debate
That paragraph that begins “When I was young I believed the arguments against…”. And the one after. A really excellent approach to our former selves (and others’ former selves)….thank you for it.
‘Good’ you say Alan?
Hmmmm………not really. There is so much bias in this article I would not recommend it.
Sridhar’s focus was best on what should have been good lockdown process and practice when it wasn’t.
She accepted the logic of vaccination and encouraged people to get vaccinated because it was the main (if not the only emphasis) of Government management of Covid. And that is why they’re sent us all back to work isn’t it?
But she is still adamant that lockdowns have to be quick and comprehensive in order to stop break outs should they arise.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact of why this pandemic got of control.
It was precisely because Boris & Co were in denial and did not act quickly or comprehensively and why elderly people for example were cleared out of hospitals and sent back to care homes where they infected other residents, to make room in hospitals. And we know happened next.
Sridha did not advocate any of that ‘Alan’.
Are we clear?