(which horsemouth didn't get out to see).
it's another maxwell parrish morning with the golden glow.
soon (horsemouth suspects) breakfast.
last night he watched raptus: the horrible secret of dr. hitchcock (barbara steel in colour! in a UCH cruciform building set necrophiliac medic shocker) and cronos (an early guilhermo del toro which horsemouth watched in the cinema when it came out way back in the 90ies).
horsemouth has the window open (the better to admit the fresh air). it is clouding over rapidly.
so this pandemic thing- what's horsemouth's conspiracy theory?
horsemouth will here quote the daily torygraph.
'in 2016, exercise cygnus “war gamed” a pandemic..
the official report from the exercise concluded that Britain’s “plans, policies and capability” were “not sufficient to cope” with “a severe pandemic”. however, the report was stamped “official – sensitive” and put on a shelf to rot. (it was only officially published in october 2020)...
the 2011 pandemic strategy stipulated it would “not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic… and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so”. instead, the strategy prioritised “business as usual”, anticipating healthcare rationing and 210,000 to 315,000 excess deaths over a fifteen-week period. this plan, hatched by technocrats without democratic debate, could not survive contact with public opinion...
no wonder the cygnus report was buried.'
the article from rolls royce to skoda: how the pandemic has exposed britain’s failed ‘regulatory state’ by lee jones (26/01/21), argues that the british state has been hollowed out until it is no longer capable of doing anything by itself and only of playing the regulator of services delivered by others. horsemouth likes this analysis because blame also falls on the service commissioning governments of blair and brown.
it puts paid to the kind of revisionist analysis similar to the lrb film on grenfell that it is all the fault of the tories.
it took time to shift the government off this model of the pandemic 'it's too big, hospitals will be overwhelmed, nothing can be done' to 'something can be done' and hence their critical initial delay and dicking about. (or it may just be that boris was just too busy to attend COBRA meetings).
the main benefit of it as a theory is that it also explains their inability to sort anything subsequently.
horsemouth supposes that the counter example is the super markets who, despite being profoundly just-in-time have kept going and met demand but then they are doing teh same thing they have always done, they are not required by events to do something new.
at the moment just about the only good decisions seem to have been at the MHRA and NHS to have fast tracked certification and to have bought doses of the vaccine early. but time will tell on this one - the virus could mutate round these particular vaccines, the roll out could stall, the delaying of the second jab could reduce its effectiveness. the groups that receive the first jab and the second jab could not be the most effective ones for slowing transmission (death rate - the measure horsemouth tends to use, may not be the right one given long covid).
the number of new cases is dropping (and has done since early january), the number of hospitalisations seems to be starting to drop, the death rate remains high but we should probably start to see falls here in about 2 weeks time.
and then what? well you remember last summer. a socially distanced summer in the city. new strains. the pandemic becomes endemic to particular regions, chronic rather than acute, with flare-ups and reinfections. society does not un-lock, things do not get better. capitalism (in the form of rishi sunak) comes knocking on the door searching for its lost profits.
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