The world is seizing up, and being closed down due to a moral panic over coronavirus. Moral panics can be summed up as occurring when some very real phenomenon is focused upon, and turned into what appears to be a widespread threat to life, liberty and property, way beyond the actual threat that is posed.
"A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among many people that some evil threatens the well-being of society.] It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media"."
Health panics are a common target.
"The fear of disease (or fear of threats to public health) and spread of panic dates back many centuries and continues into the 21st century with diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Zika, and SARS."
(ibid)
There is, however, a significant difference between Ebola and Coronavirus. With the former the mortality rate for those that contract it is 90%, for the latter it is less than 1%! One scare story circulating last week was that 5 million people in Britain could die from Coronavirus, which even if everyone were to contract it would require a mortality rate of 10%, or at least ten times higher than it actually is!!!
Moral panics are often deliberately generated by vested interests either to promote some particular meme, or else to distract attention from other events. They take hold because no one wants to be seen to be at odds with the general consensus of opinion of the nature of the threat, and because large numbers of people simply absorb the general image of threat presented to them by the mass media, for whom such moral panics, and the attention they generate are meat and drink, for selling papers, and expanding audiences.
We are all prone to falling prey to such moral panics. I remember that not long after I got married, and when we were living in an upstairs flat, the news was full of the stories about the Black Panther. My brother in law was actually taken in for questioning by the police, because he was a building worker who had worked on the Bathpool Park reservoir reconstruction, which is where Leslie Whittle had been imprisoned in a one of the large drains. It was ironic, because he actually looked a lot more like the later Yorkshire Ripper than his resemblance to Nielson. Anyway, particularly as all of this was rather close to home, its not surprising that there was a sense of heightened fear and suspicion at the time.
So, when a single male tenant moved into the flat beneath us, and we heard strange noises during the night, and witnessed his erratic movements at all times of the day and night it aroused our suspicions. Of course, it was totally unfounded, and irrational. The likelihood that a murderer had just moved in beneath us was extremely unlikely, as inevitably turned out to be the case. In fact, he was a teacher at the local comprehensive, who also wrote on sports for the local newspaper.
But, there has also been all of the moral panics that led many older people to fear leaving their homes during both day and night for fear of being mugged, or set upon by young people. I remember one day being at my mother's house, when she lived in a council house on the main road, and her twitching the curtains, and being concerned at a group of young people innocently congregated on a corner on the other side of the road. "Why is there so many of them?", she asked. I pointed out that there was less than a dozen, and that when I was a teenager, there would frequently be up to 50 of us running around the streets playing Rallyo.
The racists, of course, have liked to spread the meme that the country is being "overrun" by immigrants, that the country is full up, and overcrowded, even though residential property accounts for only 1% of the land mass in Britain, which is only half what is taken up by Golf Courses! Incidentally, that fact also shows why any suggestion that new houses have to be built on flood plains for lack of other sites is so ridiculous. The same racists and hang 'em and flog 'em brigade are happy to spread the ridiculous idea that if you walk out of your front door you are almost bound to be mugged, and your mugger is likely to be an immigrant, even though the chances of that happening are about the same as that the Black Panther had just moved into the flat beneath me.
In today's world, these moral panics spread because of 24 hour news channels, and because of social media. Everybody jumps on to the bandwagon, and no one wants to be seen challenging the consensus view. And, so it is with coronavirus, or COVID 19, as it has now been given its own special name, as if to further emphasise its sinister nature. Yet, what is the truth about it. Of the thousands of people who have contracted the virus, 80% suffer no symptoms or only minor effects. In other words, it has less impact on those that contract it even than the common cold epidemics that we suffer each year, and for which there is also no effective treatment, other than ameliorating the symptoms and waiting it out. For the other 20%, the chance of actually dying from it, or suffering from life long debilitation are extremely small. In China, the latest data suggests that only around 0.7% of those that contract the virus have died from it, and many of them are people who died early on, before any treatment for it was given to them.
If we look at the situation globally, at the time of writing, 2,600 people have died from the virus, most of them in China. But, to put that in context, in 2018, 17,000 people died of flu in Britain alone. The difference between flu and corona virus is that we have vaccines against many strains of flu, and if like me you have had flu jab every year, you will have built up some resistance. But, the flu jab only gives you protection against the variants contained in the cocktail of four different strains put into the jab for that year. Come down with a different strain, and you are still susceptible, and once you have it, there are no effective treatments.
Yet, Britain did not come to a standstill in 2018 having suffered 17,000 flu deaths. The average mortality rate for flu is around 0.1% of those that contract the virus, which is much lower, relatively than for coronavirus, but the mortality rate for coronavirus is still pretty low in absolute terms, and is likely to fall, as patients are likely to be diagnosed and treated much sooner, now that its recognised.
You can see why authorities want to stop the spread of the virus, so that those that become ill from it can be minimised, but given that 80% of people suffer no or little symptoms that seems almost impossible to achieve. But, also, it begs the question, if 80% of those that contract the virus suffer no serious ill effects, let alone all of those that do not contract it, why on Earth is the global economy, and normal life being brought to a standstill because of it? There are likely to be far greater ill effects, and even deaths as a result of bringing the global economy to a standstill, by telling people who have no symptoms to self-isolate, and presumably that applies to their families too, than there would ever likely be even if it turned into a pandemic.
When a few years ago there was a panic over Ebola there was every justification in trying to prevent its spread, because its mortality rate was between 83-90%. But, that isn't true about coronavirus. Instead of closing down the global economy, it would be far better to be spending time and resources developing a vaccine. But, also, what data released today demonstrates is that you are far more likely to die from the effects of a Tory government, and its imposition of austerity over the last ten years, particularly if you are elderly and live in one of those decaying northern towns that elected Tory MP's last year, than you are from coronavirus. Indeed, you are far more likely to suffer ill-health and an earlier death as a result of Brexit, and the inability to recruit foreign health and care workers than any chance of dying from corona virus.
Perhaps that is why the Tories, and the Tory media are likely to try to get you to look over here, at coronavirus, rather than over here, at the devastating effects of ten years of austerity, and the potentially catastrophic effects to come were Britain to accidentally collapse into a No Deal Brexit, under the ramshackle government of Boris Johnson, and his collection of xenophobes, bigots, fruitcakes and loons that every day looks more and more like Farage's second eleven.
With Trump having capitulated to China in his global trade war, and so the potential for global trade to have increased, the potential also existed for a repeat of 2018, when increasing economic activity caused global interest rates to rise, which in turn caused a 20% drop in US stock markets. Trump's global trade war from 2018, slowed global economic growth, and created the opportunity for central banks to again engage in QE, so as to inflate stock markets and other asset prices. Given that the top 0.01% hold all their wealth in the form of this fictitious capital, its no wonder they began to panic in 2018, when that 20% sell-off occurred. But, with the end of that trade war, and the potential for a pick up in economic growth, they must have worried that the path of rising interest rates would again slash the value of their assets. Already, we see demands for more QE and lower official interest rates, even though its obvious that this can have no effect on the real economy, if its coupled with demands that the world and their dog, stay in doors!!!
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