Z-scores are used to compare mortality pattern between different populations or between different time periods. The higher the Z- score the greater the difference between the expected number of deaths in a given period and the total number of deaths actually recorded.
The graphic shows that the UK as a whole has a higher number of excess deaths than any other European country and that England has a higher number of excess deaths than other nations in the UK.
How does this square with the relaxation of the lockdown in England?
I’m not saying that the lockdown shouldn’t be lifted – of course it should be lifted but Johnson said that he is going to be ‘led by the science’ and my criticism is that he doesn’t seem to be led by that. A science led response would question the particularities of conditions and responses that have caused England to be more strongly impacted than elsewhere. Decisions should be based on the answers to those questions and they should be implemented in a graduated way consistent with restarting the economy in a rational manner.
Johnson said that all workers who were unable to work from home should go back to work. This is impossible because it is quite obvious that people in sectors of the economy, such as hospitality, that are locked down will not be able to return. Perhaps Johnson meant construction and manufacturing, perhaps he meant other sectors too but what he said was ‘all workers who cannot work at home’. I’ve been listening to people trying to unpack what he meant all day. This is not good enough. The minimum that should be expected from a leader is clarity and that has been wholly absent.
Sorry. I don’t get this. This level of incompetence does my head in .. anyway this is a cartoonisation but not an exaggeration.
What should have been done?
A phased return to work with those identified as most essential returning soonest.
Ensuring that there is a plan for covid-19 safety and monitoring in all industries. This would include risk assessment and risk minimisation plans agreed with employers and unions.
Coordination across the UK rather than England being treated differently.
Better transport logistics – or at least show that there has been some consideration of this.
Bojo said that coming down a mountain can be more difficult than going up. Yep. That’s why we don’t run headlong down the bloody things.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” Frank Herbert, Dune
I read this novel Dune long ago, when I a teenager. The Bene Geserit quote came to mind today and I played with another app on my phone to cartoonise myself and my thought. The quotation is very relevant and perhaps Dune is very relevant too.
Noam Chomsky in this clip from a longer interview gives advice on the necessity and and possibility of maintaining resistance and of recreating social bonds in a time of social isolation.
I felt my intelligence and moral consciousness increase as I listened to this. Chris Hedges is a man of deep experience and of obvious integrity. These are my notes on this important interview.
Roger Hallam asks him how we should understand the CV crisis.
Chris sees the crisis as the first fatal blow against the structures of industrial neoliberalism and says that the US is going to be hit particularly badly because it, particularly, has destroyed the protections of society. The US doesn’t have an have an NHS and can’t contain the virus. Many people will not go for testing.
Already in the US the capitalist class is calling for a quick return to work to save the economy.
The agreed stimulus package is designed to help the capitalist few. It is designed to help the slum landlords not the tenants.
Unfettered capitalism commodifies everything. It is part of a triad, with imperialism and white supremacism, that is inherently racist; using force to appropriate cheap labour and resources. It is an expression of self interest that, unregulated, is destructive.
As the situation deteriorates Trump will incite violence and racism. The US has already been moving towards a corporate totalitarianism with militarised police and secret trials. The coronavirus crisis will accelerate this.
British society may be different but in America the trend is towards fascism; the Christian Right has given fascism a headstart there.
The coronaviris crisis is a precursor to the climate change crisis. The beginning of the end.
The system is not going to respond.
We have to create power outside of the system.
We need to rebel.
We must use our numbers to oppose corporate power. Through our numbers we have power to cripple the profits and the economy of the ruling elites.
This is our only hope, but we have to face the bleakness of no hope and accept that we may not succeed.
But even if we fail we create a community; we nurture life in a culture of death.
The ethic we return to needs to be an ethic that says ‘everyone eats or no one eats’.
We heard drumming outside and came out to look. Our neighbour was banging a saucepan and chanting thanks for the medics and other essential workers. Other doors opened to the street. We clapped together as she continued chanting. For a short while we were not isolated
This is a horrific account about what is going on in US hospitals. It exposes as an illusion the image of hi-tech efficiency that we’ve gotten from a zillion American TV doctor shows while at the same time highlighting the dedication of medical staff who are not only working under extreme pressure but are also putting their own lives at risk.
In a money driven dystopian society where access to medical care is conditional on being personally able to pay, it should not be surprising that decisions to protect workers and decisions to implement adequate safety measures are also based on monetary considerations.
Under the psychopathic logic of neoliberal capitalism the greed of the few outweighs the needs of the many.
I truly hope that it is nothing like this in the UK. I truly hope that it never comes to that here.
Those who disparage concerned with politics; who disparage those who scrutinise and call to account the psychopaths and psychopathic systems that govern our nations should now reflect on the consequences of our collective neglects.
There is plenty in this video to think about so I made some non verbatim notes as I was watching. There is some very interesting stuff here and Chomsky’s advice at the end is just what we need to be thinking about and acting on.
“The Coronavirus is serious enough but there is a much greater horror approaching approaching; we are racing to the edge of disaster far worse than anything that’s happened in human history” begins Chomsky.
There are two worse threats, nuclear war and global warming. These have to be dealt with. We will recover from Coronavirus but if we don’t deal with these other threats we’re done. The scientists running the ‘Doomsday Clock’ puts us at 100 seconds to midnight. This is the closest that its ever been. [See https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/]
We’re finished if we leave our fate to bufoons like Trump. Trump is particularly dangerous because he leads the US and the US leads the world. Europe chooses to follow the US, many other countries don’t have a choice. The US imposes sanctions against Iran that are designed to impose suffering. Europe may not like this but they follow. It is a shocking irony that it is [sanctioned] Cuba that is helping European countries fight the Coronavirus, not the US and not Germany.
Srecko Horvat notes that there are almost 2 billion people confined to their homes if they have a home. Borders are being closed in Europe and the army is on the streets. The language is that of a war aginst the virus. Horvat asks if this language and response is appropriate.
Chomsky says the language in this case has significance, that we have to move to something like wartime mobilisation. Mobilisation for World War Two greated great national debt [for the US] but greatly increased the country’s productive capacity. Coronavirus is not on that scale but it needs a similar response. A rich country can deal with this and other threats, but what about a poor country like India? In a civilised world rich countries would be helping poorer countries instead of trying to strange them. Coronavirus is serious but there are much bigger crises that endanger the [human] species. Global warming will make South Asian countries uninhabitable in a few decades.
The Coronavirus may be helpful if it makes people think about the world we have.
CV represents a colossal market failure. It’s been known for a long time that that pandemics were likely and the likely agent would be a coronavirus. Labs could have been working on developing vaccines but they didn’t because the ‘market signals’ were wrong. It was more profitable for big pharma to make body creams than to work on finding a vaccine. Neoliberal ideology blocked direct government intervention.
On December 31st China informed the WHO of the virus. China, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore acted quickly and with some success to contain the virus. Germany acted a little later but had the spare capacity, intensive care beds, to protect their population. The capacity of other nations to meet the challenge had been devastated by years of neoliberal policy. The UK response was among the worse the US response was the worst of the worse.
People now have to ask what knd of world they want to live in. The crisis may result in a more authoritarian neoliberal world or to radical reconstruction, a world that is green equal and just. It is possible that people will organise and become engaged, that they will confront the problems of nuclear war and environmental catastrophy. CV should bring us to awareness of the dysfunction of the neoliberal system.
Srecko Horvat asks Chomsky’s advice on social resistance in a time of social distance.
Chomsky say that people, especially young people glued to their cellphones, were already self isolating before the crisis. Misuse of social media has been isolating people from each other. We need to recreate social bonds, contacting people, developing organisations, deliberating and bringing people together. We have to put face to face contact on hold but can use social media to deepen bonds.
Chinese journalist Zou Yue has a commendably mature message.
“Every nation needs a new contract, signed between its politicians, businesses and the public.”
This is correct. We need a more mature approach to governance, not just to handle the Coronavirus, but also to tackle the climate crisis and the ongoing humanitarian crises of poverty, wars and global inequality generated by our current structures of politics and thought.
Ultimately our problem as a species and as individuals is not Corvid-19, Climate Change or any particular challenge, however vast, it is our ability or inability to respond to the challenges in a way that is coherent, conscious and compassionate. It is a problem that has to do with our thinking.
Albert Einstein said “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Krishnamurti said “If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.”
The problem is never simply about what is presented to us it is also about our ability to deal with what is presented to us. Corvid-19 is a global crisis that illuminates the structures of governance in different countries, the ethos that lies beneath those structures and the consequent ability of those structures to cope with crises.
The Telegraph asks ‘Why does Germany have such a low coronavirus death rate?’
We read
Germany has seen just 52 deaths from the virus so far despite recording 18,361 infections — more than anywhere except China, Italy, Iran and Spain.
That represents a fatality rate of just 0.3 per cent, compared to 7.9 per cent in Italy — raising hopes Germany might be doing something right that other countries can follow.
The disparity has even led to allegations of a German cover-up by the Italian far-Right. But experts have cautioned that Germany may simply be at an earlier stage of the pandemic, and that death rates here may soon catch up.
But also
“Intensive care beds can mean the difference between life and death for those who become seriously ill with the virus, and dire reports from northern Italy have told of doctors being forced to choose which patients get them.
Germany has 28,000 ICU beds. By contrast, the UK has just 4,000. And 25,000 of Germany’s already have the ventilators seriously ill patients need.
At the outbreak of the crisis, Germany had 29.2 intensive care beds per 100,000 people. Italy had 12.5. The UK had just 6.6.
In part, that is because of the different way healthcare is funded in Germany. Public health insurance is compulsory and collected at source alongside income tax — but it is passed directly to insurance funds and never enters government coffers, effectively firewalling health funding.”
We have to ask why we are so much less well prepared than Germany, and apparently even Italy. We have to ask a number of questions about our government and the whole structure of governance.
Tony Benn proposed five questions to ask regarding the power of government. The central question is “In whose interests do you use it [power]”
In addition to issues of prudence there are issues of morality. An article in the Independent is headlined “What coronavirus revealed about national mindsets across the world — and how Cuba came out on top”
We read
In a sign of true global solidarity, Cuba today allowed MS Braemer, a British cruise ship, to dock on its shores despite having at least five confirmed coronavirus cases on board and another 52 passengers displaying symptoms. The ship, with over 600 mainly British passengers, had no Cuban nationals on board but had requested help from both Cuba and the US.
Cuba acted without self-interest. The ship had been anchored in the Caribbean over the last five days as it frantically searched for a place to dock. Diplomats from the British Foreign Office had urged US officials to allow the ship to dock on American soil but were met with obstacles. Cuban officials instead accepted the request, stating that there must be “a shared effort to confront and stop the spread of the pandemic”. After all, these are still humans suffering, regardless of the passport they hold.
Cuba itself has only had five confirmed cases of Covid-19, and the ship docking could threaten to increase that number exponentially.
Why does the US, our ‘ally’, turn away a British Ship, while Cuba, a nation against which we follow the US in imposing economic sanctions aid that same ship?
Surely we need to question the values that inform our foreign policy, our relations with other nations, as well as our domestic policies?
“If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.”
Krishnamurti
It is not about taking a particular political position, it’s about looking at the problem with sufficient intelligence. The answer lies in our understanding of the problem and our understanding depends on the depth to which we permit ourselves to look.
