why dominic cummings deserves a medal

that horsemouth - he's no epidemiologist.

'I am beginning to question some of the more authoritarian and loopy sh*t that the Govt foisted upon us frightened plebs in the early days of the pandemic..'

this is a big question. horsemouth apologises for discussing it in such a cursory fashion. what it really needs is a huge great world-scaled historical study. instead horsemouth offers you vignettes from the tragicomical world of british politics. 

horsemouth, as you know, is a big fan of 'the science', and, would that it were possible, would have more 'science' and more rational decision making. he knows this is controversial among the adornoians - he knows that rationality is essentially capitalist rationality, a rationing out of resources made scarce by the greed of the capitalists. 

he also knows that 'science' is a social activity, a social construct, and that once particular constructions are in place it is difficult to get them shifted even by strong evidence). further, 'knowledge is power' there is a biopolitics that is the discourse that melds science and politics into the social control and disciplinary structures under which we live. 

above horsemouth quotes a friend. he was interested to have an essentially similar conversation with a number of members of his extended family.

there is an argument to be had about lockdown for sure. 

and there is an argument to be had about 'the science'. 

the science was remarkably sketchy. and this was largely because the virus was 'new' and because, in general, epidemics were regarded as things against which there was no real defence. few had any idea about how best to treat it and who was affected and how easily it spread. (all this had to be learned as we went along).   

the argument that people mostly propose against the lockdown is 'let it rip' - the best argument against let it rip was (as dominic cummings noted) simply to note the doubling periods of infections and deaths and to model their doubling. the virus (to quote ELO) is a living thing - given more people having more contact  it will grow more quickly and hospitalise, disable and kill more people until such point as the depleted, understaffed and underfuded NHS collapses under the pressure (and so even more people die).

there is an interesting parallel with the post WW1 'spanish' flu (arguably a more lethal virus) - there there was no lockdown because there was a war to be fought, because there were not integrated national health systems to count the infected and the dead and because there had been a war going on that had to be fought it became obscured. it left little lasting memory and even at the time people had other problems and did not note its existence so much (other than family members dying largely at home)..

more contact with people encourages the virus to mutate more rapidly potentially increasing how transmissible it becomes and how many people it kills. there is an argument that as people are exposed to the virus they become more resistant to it and deaths and hospitalisations drop but it doesn't have to do this in a straight line. we have been lucky (so far) with COVID. 

the first lockdown was clearly necessary because not enough was known about the virus. and this is why horsemouth says dominic cummings deserves a medal because he persuaded boris and the government's health and science advisors to lockdown against their original plan  and their original plan was to let it rip.

we say 'lockdown' but horsemouth was already planning his own lockdown whatever the government did. we discuss lockdown as if 51% of workers were not still required to go into work. we posit it as ordered from on high when there were workers who shut down their factories. beyond that there was the dithering over the efficacy of facemasks, the social distancing on tube trains, the utter bumbling inefficiency of the early stages of 'work from home', the hand sanitising of the food packaging, the continued open-ness of international travel.

the UK government policy and the messaging on it was mixed and muddled and inconsistent. the policies were inconsistent (which made the science look inconsistent) because the requirements were inconsistent - keep capitalism running (and 'let it rip') or have a  lockdown (and prevent the spread of the virus). 

ultimately it was decided we had reached an acceptable level of death and the pandemic was declared over. this situation is inherently unsatisfying - we have simply learned to live with it (so what was all the fuss about?)

sorry horsemouth was just distracted by breakfast (and now he is distracted by his parents talking).

there were (of course) police over-reactions in the UK but in china there was an actual attempt to manage the virus through the surveillance state, draconian police powers and controls on movement..there was an actual lockdown (except there wasn't because people still had to go to work). and  then, after protests, there wasn't, the chinese government caved and allowed a vast wave of pent up covid to flood over the country as a kind of 'told you so/ we were right all along'. 

and then there's sweden. but swedes aren't brits, if there's a take-home message from flyfishing in utopia (about living up in olaf palme era sweden) it's that swedes are just much less social than brits (here horsemouth's argument is that they were already in lockdown anyway so it didn't need to be mandated). it's interesting here that the swedes' awareness of the spanish flu is much higher than brits (as far as horsemouth can tell from the one conversation he has had about it). 

ok once again horsemouth apologises for having dealt with the matter a little peremptorily. 

today is a bit hazy outside. no great tasks today (they have been postponed).