operation 'radication

horsemouth supposes (and he should emphasise that he doesn't really know - he's not that smart and this is not his area) that the current conditions of lockdowns etc. are the way of living with the virus. reducing its harms until they are bearable as a strategy to permit time for the development of vaccines. this strategy leads to a worldwide campaign of vaccination and eradication requiring the vaccination (twice over it looks like) of 7.8 billion people plus. a vaccination programme that may need to be ongoing depending on how long it protects for. 

of course the longer the virus is in humanity (and the longer it is in various  domesticated (and wild) animal populations) the greater the chance of a mutation that renders vaccination less effective and/or the virus more potent. ideally you would want to reduce this.

operation 'radication  becomes one of industrial scale pharamaceutical manufacture, the logistics of delivery and of health workers at the end of the chain doing the vaccinations. it becomes a great world historic task uniting the entire of humanity (excepting a few uncontacted tribes perhaps). 

and as it is implemented this leads to a situation where we can interact without having to socially distance, where incrementally the death toll drops, where hospital admissions drop, where the medical situation returns to normal with a small background level of covid until eventually it can be pronounced eradicated in a particular country or region, with only low level flare ups due to its re-importation and encounter with non-vaccinated communities.

humanity (clever little monkeys that they are) are globally organised on the basis of capitalism, a worldwide system of value extraction. capitalism is not set up so that it can easily take a break in value extraction - consequently there are pressure to get back to business as usual if not the pre-covid normal that its locked down and furloughed citizens fervently wish for. but because of the pursuit of value we are almost certainly not going back to our earlier normal. 

horsemouth wishes humanity well with their operation 'radication. 

however he expects this will take years.  

so what are the alternatives to lockdown? for keeping the economy open? 

it is worthwhile emphasising at this point that the economy has been kept open. billions of people still get up and go to work, the planes keep flying, the container ships still arrive bearing goods from far away factories where the workers still go in and do their shifts so that there can be gifts underneath the christmas tree (and indeed food on the table). 

horsemouth finds the failure of test, track and trace to be very interesting and instructive. potentially this was a very strong tool with which to fight the virus but it was bungled (certainly in the UK and in the US). who would have thought (given the extent of cyber surveillance within capitalism) that it would have proved so ineffective? 

the most usual suggestion is that society be restored to its normal level of functioning but that the old (and people with pre-existing health conditions) be shielded from it. but this is difficult to achieve when many elderly people still live in multi-generational households with their families.  so if this is not possible  it is suggested that we become more sanguine about their deaths.  from the point of view of the captains of industry (and given the impossibility of the idea of death in the minds of the living, a tendency to believe in their own exceptionalism) the over 65s should be sacrificed to the imperatives of value extraction (they are not very productive anyway and the industries relying on them (care) are secondary.

horsemouth is up a copy of the origins of totalitarianism  (thank you dave and sally). you remember, he found a quote from the introduction to it in a guardian article bemoaning the brexit debate. his reading of the country doctor also continues (p.40 so far). 

ok breakfast (and a walk in the sunshine).