Sunday 10 May 2020

A Reply To Fredtorssander

This is the last of the replies to comments on Michael Roberts' Blog that I promised to provide last week. It covers a number of issues. 

The discussion begins with my comment that many of those that have been most vociferous in arguing for economies to be closed down, in response to COVID19, are those that have also been arguing, prior to the outbreak, for borders to be closed, for globalisation to be ended, for free movement to stop, and so on. Fred says, quite rightly, that it is not many of these individuals and groups that have closed down the world economy, but global capitalism. Quite right, but I have never said anything different to that. My personal belief, expressed from the start, is that global capitalism has made a huge mistake in doing so. Its actions are not the result of some global conspiracy of uncertain purpose, but come down, instead, to global cock-up, of the power of group think, in causing irrational behaviour, of moral panic. As the well respected professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University, John Ioannidis, wrote in the middle of March that it was shaping up to be “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”

My point, however, was that, as global capitalism, and individual national capitals all fell into line – apart from some notable exceptions such as Sweden – in admiring The Emperor's New Clothes, the opportunity was taken by reactionary elements to press their own case for economic nationalism, for the closing of borders, and so on. It was used by other right-wing elements to pursue their own xenophobic agendas, blaming China or Asian people for the virus. It allowed all the associated crazies to come out with their own conspiracy theories about the virus having been created in the lab by their own particular villain of the piece, be it the CIA for some, China for others, Iran for others, and I'm sure in there will be claims that Israel was behind it all. The whole moral panic constructed around what is, in actual fact, simply a virus that has killed only about the same number of people that flu would kill, on average, were we not to have vaccines against it, that has killed only a fraction of the people who die every year from other diseases, such as smoking related illness, that has affected almost exclusively a small, and identifiable cohort of the population, who could and should have been protected against it, has enabled a whole gamut of reactionaries to pursue their agendas on the back of it. 

The truth is that the number of deaths could have been kept to a tiny fraction of what they have been if governments had followed the advice I gave at the start. A look at the data showed from the beginning that it was only around 20% of the population that was at serious risk from the virus. That 20% comprised people who were elderly, or else who had other illnesses that compromised their immune system. The data is clear. The average age of people dying from COVID19 is 81. 53% of those dying are aged over 80, with a further 39% being over 60. So, 92% of all deaths are people over 60. Of the remaining 8%, 7% had known underlying health issues, meaning only 1% of deaths are people not in these categories, and if we examine that 1% in more detail, it will almost certainly be found that they too had some other contributing factor. 

To have slashed the number of deaths from COVID19, one simple measure was required. It was to isolate those in this 20% category from any potential contact with the virus. In fact, early on, I gave an analogy of people who suffer with serious nut allergies. If you have a serious nut allergy, then you might die from contact with nuts. The number of people with such allergies are a minority. We don't ban nuts, instead we enable people with such an allergy to be isolated from them.

What was also known, from what happened in Italy, was that the greatest threat to life came from the virus having become ingrained in its health and social care system. Not surprising, because, by definition, those in these establishments are a concentration of that 20%. Yet, for example, the British government said early on that people in Care Homes should be safe from the virus, precisely because they were already “locked down”, isolated from the general public, in these institutions. It reflected the fact that their whole emphasis had been on a misguided concern to prevent the spread of a generally innocuous virus amongst the general public, rather than trying to prevent those actually at serious risk from it being in contact with it. It was like a government spending all its time shutting down production of nuts and nut products, and telling people to avoid them in case they had a reaction to them, whilst failing to actually identify people with such an allergy, and keep them away from the nuts in their cupboards! 

What was worse, is that there was no immediate prospect of being able to protect those actually at risk from the virus, in the same way we protect people in those groups from the flu. Every year, anyone in an at risk group can get a free flu jab. Indeed, anyone can get a flu jab at little cost. But, there was no prospect of a COVID19 vaccine being available for around 18 months. That meant that everyone in the at risk group would be susceptible so long as the virus was at large. Being able to isolate 20% of the population, which in Britain amounts to around 13 million, becomes progressively more difficult the longer such isolation has to be maintained. But, this is where the misguided focus on trying to prevent the spread of the virus amongst the 80% of the population not at serious risk from it, was doubly damaging. 

Coronavirus is one of the viruses responsible for the common cold, which is just a generic term for the symptoms caused by these viruses. As with the common cold, the vast majority of people infected do not suffer any serious consequences. Around 80% of people infected with COVID19 – which is just one strain of coronavirus – either do not know they have it (they are asymptomatic) or else have only very mild symptoms. However, just as with the common cold, some people can be badly affected by it. As a child, I suffered badly with bronchial asthma. When I was 13, I contracted a cold, and it affected my chest, a prolonged bout of asthma causing all of my bronchi to become inflamed. Eventually, that resulted in me contracting pneumonia from which I almost died. 

Vaccination works by deliberately infecting people with a weakened dose of a particular virus, so that the body's own immune system produces antibodies that are able to kill the virus. Once these antibodies exist, if you come into contact with the virus again, the body produces sufficient antibodies to kill the virus, before it can make you ill. That means that, for any particular type of virus, it can never infect a sufficient number of hosts so as to be able to spread. It then dies out. That is exactly what was required in relation to COVID19, so that the period of time that the people in the at risk 20% needed to be kept in isolation so as not to be at risk from it, was minimised. However, in order to achieve that, given that no vaccine was likely for 18 months, it was necessary to create a process of natural vaccination, or what scientists call “herd immunity”. That is that the healthy members of the population, the people who comprise the 80% of the population not at risk from it, needed to become infected, so that their bodies would produce the antibodies required to kill the virus, and prevent it from spreading. 

In fact, this is how the idea of vaccination was developed by Jenner in the first place. Jenner noted that milk maids rarely suffered from smallpox, which was devastating populations. He discovered that the reason was that milk maids usually caught cow-pox as a result of milking cows. Cow-pox was a less deadly relative of smallpox, and so, having contracted cow pox, the milkmaids produced antibodies, which then gave them protection against smallpox. Having identified this Jenner was able to then deliberately infect people with cow-pox, which meant that they then developed immunity against smallpox. The more who obtained this herd immunity against smallpox, the harder it was for it to spread. In fact, even when I was a kid, it was common for parents to send their kids around to visit other kids that had mumps or chicken-pox, so they would also contract it, and gain immunity. These diseases were not serious for kids, but represented a much greater threat for people as adults, so it was better to have them when you were a kid. 

But, governments in the middle of a media generated moral panic over COVID19, were under pressure to be seen to be doing everything in their power to prevent the spread of the virus. A media more concerned with its own headlines and ratings than with public health knew bad optics when it saw it, and seized on the term “herd immunity” to create a further sense of moral outrage around it, and various political forces keen to seize political advantage also seized upon it as a means of attacking governments that had quite reasonably set out to pursue such a policy, which had been outlined to them by their scientific advisors. But, as soon as the politicians buckled under the pressure of the media's outrage over the strategy of developing “herd immunity”, it was clear that the scientists themselves, having been hung out to dry by those spineless politicians, were also not going to make themselves the sole target of public vilification. Only a few honourable exceptions have had the backbone to do that, and have continued to point out that the Emperor has no clothes on. 

So, when Fred says, 

“But no matter who or what is responsible for the choice of method or if the method is a result of the pauperisation of the medical infrastructure there is no reason to let COVID19 spread?” 

And, in a further comment, 

“This is no reason though to accept that capitalism and imperialism kill more people right now by letting the coronavirus have its way?” 

I disagree. Or at least, the statement needs to be amended. It should read, “there is no reason to let COVID19 spread to the 20% of the population for whom it could pose a serious risk”. There has never been any question of simply “letting the coronavirus have its way”, but the question is how to intelligently deal with it as a threat, and thereby remove that threat. The truth is that absent a vaccine, there is no way of protecting 100% of the population from COVID19, any more than its possible to protect 100% of the population from catching a cold. Instead, we rely on the fact that the vast majority of the population who catch a cold will have only minor symptoms from it, and will develop antibodies against it, causing “herd immunity” to develop, and the outbreak to subside. In fact, one reason we have never had a vaccine against the common cold is that because a number of different viruses are responsible for it, and because these viruses mutate, its not possible to cover all possible eventualities. Not even the flu vaccine is infallible in that regard. So, even if a COVID19 vaccine is developed, it doesn't mean that next year, the same problem will not exist with COVID20, or the following year with COVID21, and so on. So, what, are we going to keep the global economy closed down for the indefinite future? 

There are essentially three models of how to deal with COVID19, and its possible future variants. The first is that adopted by South Korea, Germany and others. That relied on widespread testing from the start, which identified the small number of infected people, isolated them, tracked those they had been in contact with, tested them, and isolated them if they too were infected. It also involves borders being closed, and anyone crossing the borders having to be tested before being granted entry. The second is the strategy that has been adopted by Britain, New Zealand and elsewhere of locking down the country, closing borders, preventing movement of people inside the country, and so on. The third is the option adopted by Sweden which has been to allow continued free movement and social interaction, allowing citizens to act on information to isolate themselves appropriately where they felt they were at potential risk. 

The problem with the first two approaches is that, absent a vaccine, they provide no immunity for the population. They rely on essentially the number of infected people falling to such a low level that the virus cannot spread rapidly. But, this virus is at large in the world, and is not going away. Absent a vaccine, these solutions cannot work, and, even with a vaccine, they may not work if the virus simply mutates so that the vaccine is inoperative against it. Both rely on a shutting down of economic activity that is not sustainable in the long run.

That is most clear in the second approach where large areas of social interaction are shut down. But, the farce of this approach is shown in Britain, where people are told that they can't go to the pub or the gym, and so on, but they are expected to continue to go to work, and to get to work they have to go on the bus, tube or train! Now recognising at least the farce of this latter element, the government is instead proposing the ridiculous idea that people should instead walk or cycle several miles to work and back, thereby risking their lives in other ways. A largely unfit population is not going to do that, and many of them would have heart attacks if they tried it, and workplaces are not geared up to dozens of their employees coming in to work covered in sweat, and requiring showers and changing rooms. Nor do those workplaces allow their employees to use bikes where they need to use transport for work, because the companies insurance companies will not insure them, considering the use of bikes as to risky, which anyone who has actually ridden a bike on Britain's roads knows to be only too true. 

In an economy based upon extensive social division of labour it was clear that its impossible to actually shut down production. If the government had been serious about everyone staying home, then within hours the electricity supply would have shut down, water supplies would stop without the electricity to power the pumps, and everyone would have seen immediately that such a condition could not be allowed. But, the power stations, the water companies and so on, require supplies, which means their suppliers also have to continue working, and the engineering companies that supply those companies have to continue working, and so on. All of the workers need food and other supplies, and because supermarkets only keep around 2-3 days of supplies, that means that the companies providing the food and other goods sold by the supermarkets have to keep working. And, because all these workers need to get to work then public transport has to keep working, and to fuel the public transport, or the cars that workers use individually, the petrol stations, and the oil refineries that supply the petrol stations have to keep working. That means that the suppliers of those companies, and the suppliers of those companies also have to keep working. And, if you have a health emergency then you can't exacerbate it by not having refuse collected, which means the bin men have to work, and if the bin men are working, the council staff in the offices that deal with the timesheets, buy in the materials, process the payroll, pay the accounts, and run the computer department and so on, also have to be at work. 

The idea that Britain has been in lock down as far as work is concerned is baloney. That is why GDP – the amount of labour being performed – has fallen by only around 30%. That 30% is the labour of those people in those businesses that have had to close down, such as the small shops, hairdressers, pubs, clubs, gyms and so on. The good thing about this is that, because the vast majority of workers have continued to work, and so to come in contact with each other, a large number of them will already have long since contracted the virus without ill effects and have obtained immunity against it. The bad news is that, because it has been done in this way, some of the workers actually pressured into working will have been themselves part of the at risk 20%, and because it has been done in this way, there has been no proper protocols to ensure adequate PPE, or physical distancing.  The most obvious examples of that has been in the hospitals and care homes, which have also become killing fields for their inhabitants.  Had Britain actually imposed a lockdown of its economy, then it would possibly have limited the proportion of its population that now has such immunity, but the economy would have been destroyed, and as soon as it lifted the lockdown, any remaining cases of the virus would have a huge field of potential unprotected people to infect. 

The first approach avoids this problem of a more widespread lockdown, but it requires that the number of infections be relatively small. It also requires that borders be at least partially closed so that no one entering the country can bring the virus into it. It again implies a prolonged restriction on the functioning of the economy that is not sustainable. Moreover, because it means that no natural immunity is established, it also means that these constraints can't be lifted, because, as soon as they are, the potential for an entirely unprotected population to be infected remains. 

The only sensible approach is that taken by Sweden. But, Sweden too made mistakes. It should from the start have recognised the danger to the at risk 20% of the population, and particularly to those people contained within its old folks homes. It didn't do that, and so, as everywhere, it has suffered from large numbers of old people in those institutions succumbing to the virus. Because it has larger more concentrated old folks homes and a larger population concentrated in Stockholm than its Nordic neighbours, that explains why it has had a higher per capita mortality rate, other than early on. But, because Sweden did not impose a lockdown, it has avoided some of the damage to its economy, though not entirely, because it is impacted by the damage done to its neighbours and the global economy in general. What is more, Sweden has now achieved herd immunity for its population in Stockholm with a consequent sharp drop in the number of deaths it is now experiencing. By contrast, all the countries that tried to prevent the spread of the virus will see it continue to exact a toll for many months to come. 

Finally, let me turn to Fred's comments about “the very few remaining proletarian socialist nations”. I already dealt with this, yesterday, in my response to Jlowrie, but let me deal with it more, in direct response to Fred. One very short comment I had posted to Michael Roberts' Blog that was blocked, asked him also, given his Trotskyist lineage, as a former senior member of the Revolutionary Socialist League on his opinion of these “socialist nations”. We will never know his answer. Of course, it would have been useful if Fred himself had listed exactly which nations he was including in this category, does it include North Korea, as well as China and Cuba, for example, and does it include Venezuela or perhaps even Iran? 

Fred says that my refusal to recognise any of these nations as “socialist” is ultra-left, but for a Marxist the term socialist has a specific meaning, and its hard to justify that description to any of these unspecified nations that Fred is referring to. The only one he mentions is Cuba, so I will confine myself to that example, before making more general comments. I continue to define Cuba as a deformed workers state. It is a workers' state by virtue of the fact that the other classes in Cuba were destroyed as a consequence of its revolution, and the ripping up of the social roots upon which those classes rested. It is deformed, because from the beginning the working-class itself has never held or exercised power, or control over the political regime in its own name. The revolution itself was originally a peasant war, not a proletarian revolution, and was led by a petty-bourgeois nationalist movement, not a revolutionary communist party. On this last point, I would refer Fred to the “ultra-Left” Lenin, and his Theses on the National an Colonial Questions, where he wrote of, 

“the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form;” 

Castro's movement was such a petty-bourgeois nationalist movement that operated on purely bourgeois liberal politics. The reason that Lenin and the Comintern argued that we give no left cover for such organisations is precisely because they are our class enemies, we make short-term tactical alliances with them, but certainly do not merge with them, as the Stalinists proposed, or implemented, in practice, via the Popular Front, only in order to obtain the immediate task of national liberation, but only in the context of permanent revolution, recognising that not only after any such liberation will such forces be our class enemy, but that even before such liberation, if truly revolutionary forces are likely to seize power, these petty-bourgeois forces will stab the workers in the back, just as they had done in 1848, as the Kuomintang did in 1927, an so on. 

The Cuban working-class has never held state power or control over the political regime, directly in Cuba. From the beginning political power has been in the hands of Castro's regime. It fell in with the USSR, only as protection from the US, which rather stupidly drove it in that direction. As with many other Third Worldist regimes Cuba modelled itself not on a healthy workers state, but on the deformed, bureaucratised Stalinist state in the USSR, whose client it became, and on which it depended. But, even if Cuba were a healthy workers' state, it would not at all mean that Cuba itself was socialist. As Stalin himself admitted before he developed the Theory of Socialism In One Country, and expunged his earlier writings, 

“For the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are enough – to this the history of our own revolution testifies. For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country like ours, are not enough – for this we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries.” 

(The Foundations of Leninism) 

Socialism in one country, particularly a small, essentially peasant country, as Cuba was, is a reactionary delusion. Cuba never has been socialist. But, even if Cuba had developed beyond being an essentially peasant economy, even if it could be said to have had the support of other industrialised countries, what exists in Cuba could not be called Socialism, precisely because, Socialism depends upon the means of production being under the direct democratic control of the working-class, and also the state itself must be under the democratic control of the working-class, whilst no such condition exists in Cuba in either context. 

In fact, if we examine what Lenin says in Left-wing childishness, he notes the nature of the productive forces in Russia, and says that given their overall undeveloped nature, even state capitalism would represent a step forward. A Workers' state, almost by definition, inherits forms of property that are in transition, which means that they are not yet socialist forms of property. As transitional forms of property, there is always the danger that they may move backwards away from socialism towards capitalism, and that is precisely why Socialism In One Country is not possible. A Workers' State must also continue to operate in a global economy dominated by capital, and just as Lenin describes the way generalised commodity production and exchange leads inexorably towards competition, and thereby to the development of capital, capitalists and capitalism, so the continued operation of transitional forms of property, in a global capitalist economy, dominated by capital and commodity exchange, means that the transitional property is always being pulled in the direction of capitalism and away from socialism. The USSR, under Lenin, had to adopt the NEP; he tried to get multinational capital to invest in Russia, and ultimately the USSR collapsed. China has gone in the same direction. I don't know if Fred has been to Cuba, but I have, and he would see that it too, has lots of foreign investment, particularly in its hotels and tourist industry. I am not saying there is anything wrong with such investment, on the contrary, as Trotsky said, in relation to Mexico, even to build state capitalism, first capital is required. But, then, be clear that what exists is not socialism. 

Now, as I said, Fred doesn't actually tell us which countries he is referring to, when he talks about proletarian socialism, so its hard to respond. But, if we take another he might be referring to, such as Venezuela its again hard to in any way justify calling it socialist. Chavez himself was simply a petty-bourgeois nationalist, and his programme was that of petty-bourgeois nationalism, not Socialism. The creation of the PSUV as a mass workers party meant, as I said at the time, that Marxists had to relate to it, and enter it, in the same way we do with other mass workers parties, but without in any way giving it credibility as being a “Socialist” let alone “Communist” party. In the absence of any actual mass revolutionary party in Venezuela, it was necessary to work within it, precisely in order to stick with the Venezuelan workers, and to demonstrate in practice to them the true class nature of Chavez' regime as a petty-bourgeois nationalist regime, against which they would have to fight. 

The subsequent events in Venezuela, the almost inevitable destruction of the economy, despite the huge advantages the country had due to its huge oil industry, have again illustrated the reactionary nature of such regimes, and that has been compounded by the again inevitable turn of the regime to increasing levels of oppression against the Venezuelan masses, as it seeks to cling to power for its own interests. As I said, there is nothing socialist about these reactionary regimes.

21 comments:

George Carty said...

Didn't the UK impose its Covid-19 lockdown not because of an internal political decision, but because French President Macron threatened to ban UK citizens from travelling to France (with other EU countries likely following up with bans of their own) if no lockdown was imposed?

Boffy said...

It may have contributed, but I think the die was cast, whether or not, as the media piled on the pressure for lockdown.

George Carty said...

Aren't the victims of Covid-19 in Sweden who aren't care home residents disproportionately Somali immigrants?

The Somali population was particularly vulnerable both because they have a gregarious culture hostile to the Swedish government's social distancing advice, and also because (being black Muslims living at a very northerly latitude) they are essentially the worst-case scenario for vitamin-D deficiency.

Boffy said...

I'll bow to your knowledge on that George. The significant point, however, is that the main factor is age, with other underlying health factors being secondary. A lot has been made in recent days of the higher risk of people from BAME communities. I would make the following points. Any community, cohort that has factors causing greater contact with the virus is likely to have greater infection rates, and greater mortality, unless those within this cohort most at risk, the 20%, are protected from contact with it. That's simple maths and statistics. Its likely that those in longer, and more significant contact with the virus are also more likely to suffer more severe effects. In other words, a normal immune system is likely to kill off the virus before it is able to get a hold, but, if, as with a health or care worker, you are persistently in contact with large quantities of the virus, even a healthy immune system may have difficulty producing enough antibodies quickly enough to kill off the virus before it has multiplied inside the body, and started to cause damage. That is why it was criminal for the government not to have provided health and care workers with adequate PPE, to prevent them contracting and spreading the virus in those environments, as well as not having proper isolation procedures for patients/residents.

For people in BAME communities its not known exactly why they have higher mortality rates. Some reasons given - besides those cited above - are that there is a higher prevalence of diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and so on, in these communities, as well as sickle cell anaemia and so on. But, its also important to point out that people in these cohorts are thought to have a mortality rate around 4 times that for the general population. Notable as that is, it is very minor compared to the fact that the mortality rate for people over 80 is around 1500 times that of younger people in the general population, and that for the over 60's, around 400 times that of younger people in the general population. The definitive feature of the virus continues to be its almost exclusive impact on the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions, and the strategy should have been from Day 1 to protect that 20% of the population.

George Carty said...

Isn't the holocaust in Britain's care homes down to the effect that ten years of Tory austerity had on care work itself, as care workers not only weren't provided with proper PPE, and were often employed via agencies to work at multiple care homes, but were also coming into work sick because they couldn't afford to take time off (because they were on zero-hours contracts, and/or because they didn't get sick pay)?

Boffy said...

Yes, all that is true, but its also the case that the government's whole approach to dealing with COVID19 was media driven, as they sought to be seen to be doing visible, large scale measures to assuage attacks on them as part of a developing moral panic that was fuelled in equal measure by social media and the mainstream media. The full media hype the government gave to setting up the 4000 bed Nightingale Hospital in the Excel Centre is a perfect example. The mass media gave the government a Pavlovian reward, by giving it extensive coverage, because it complied with the kinds of big measures the media had been demanding. Why has nothing been heard since it opened? Because, although it sucked in large amounts of NHS resources, the fact is that it has only treated in just over 50 patients, with only around 20 patients currently being treated!!!

The same thing was true of all the media coverage of stories that it was going to be necessary to have mass burials, and so on, all of which was totally ridiculous hyperbole, which anyone who looked at the actual comparative statistics could see.

From Day One, the government typical of every populist government has jumped through the hoops that the media has presented to it, in order to get approval. But, those hoops were totally misguided. They focused huge amounts of resources on targets that were in themselves meaningless, and diverted resources away from where they needed to have been placed. They focused blindly on closing down the economy in order to prevent the spread of a virus that is innocuous for 80% of the population, because for the media that is a big story, its visible, it fills their screens and headlines. But, all of those resources could instead have been focused on ensuring massive testing and tracing as South Korea and Germany did. Better still, those resources could have been used to enable the 20% of the population actually at risk to have been effectively isolated. But, again that would not have attracted the same media attention.

Having chosen the lock down response, the government had and still has, as every other government that has gone down that route, the problem of how to get out of it as your economy crashes, because it does not deal with the problem of immunising your population. The news yesterday highlighted that South Korea is now experiencing a pick up in infections, so is China, and so on. The infection isn't going away, and it will continue to spread rapidly amongst non-immune populations, because although its innocuous to 80% of the population, for the same reason it also spreads quickly. But, having chosen the lock down route, its not surprising that they thought that the most obvious places where lockdown already exists - hospitals and care homes, should be safe, despite the experience seen in China and Italy, where it was precisely in those locations that the virus spread most viciously, and where it was able to kill most people.

They were led by headlines and media pressure to choose the wrong strategy, and to then see the danger from the virus arising from the wrong sources. They saw widespread infection as the main danger, because they were led to believe its mortality rate was at least 1%, appeared, on the basis of reported cases to be as much as 4%, and potentially as high as 10%, all based on the errors of the Imperial model. But, the actual mortality rate is likely to turn out to be around 0.02-0.05%, so the danger was never from widespread infection of the general population, but was always infection of the 20% of the population who are vulnerable. Because they focused on the general population they failed to put the resources into protecting the 20% with the inevitable consequence. It ripped through vulnerable communities in hospitals and care homes.

George Carty said...

Why is your own political position – of someone who was ardently anti-Brexit but who is now critical of the COVID19 lockdown – so atypical?

Currently it seems like it is mostly Brexiters who want to relax the lockdown, while Remainers are arguing that it should be maintained, or even made permanent for the perceived environmental benefits!

George Carty said...

Did the Imperial model itself also contribute directly to the care homes holocaust, as it frightened NHS managers (believing NHS was about to be overwhelmed) into sending infected patients back to care homes?

Nithya said...

A very good post on Covid-19 spread and its impact. It seems that herd immunity is one of the ways that can put an end to the spread of this deadly virus. The above post was very helpful to complete my research paper on Covid-19 spread. Iam the student from IAS coaching centres in Chennai

Boffy said...

George,

I am not sure most Brexiters want to relax lockdown. If they do its because a) they think that the growing economic damage will make pushing ahead with Brexit, especially a hard brexit more difficult. Incidentally, I still don't think Johnson would push through a No Deal Crash out, either way, because he knows it would be even more damaging than the lockdown. I also think that if the Liberals have any sense they will push a Rejoin agenda, because on that basis they will take a large chunk of Labour votes unless Labour also went into the election promising at least another referendum, or simply a manifesto promising reentry.

If the Brexiters argue for relaxing the lock down it will also only be to try to emphasise the need for reduction in free movement across borders, and so on.

As for Remainers arguing for continuing lock down its because they are liberal opportunists. They see an easy target for attacking Johnson - Trump in the US - and use it irrespective of the wider political/economic consequences. Indeed, as opportunists they see the economic damage as somehow playing to their advantage, because they think it will turn voters against the government. That might happen in the US in relation to the November elections, but it could also be that those supporting the lock down are seen as the cause of the economic damage, and in turn pay a heavy electoral penalty for it. They never seem to learn the lesson that economic crises almost invariably favour the forces of reaction, not the left. Also they are petty-bourgeois statists by nature. They see solutions to problems emanating from top down state action, not from working-class self activity and self-organisation. So, the idea that the solution could come from workers demanding that production continue but under regimes of workers control and inspection is totally alien to them.

I'm not in a position to answer your second comment, but what I would say is that in most parts of the country outside London and other very large cities, the NHS was far from being overwhelmed. I'm sure I saw recently that bed occupancy rates in many places were down to around 40%. In any case, as I have written elsewhere, the average number of emergency admissions to the NHS is around 6 million per year, so its hard to see why a few thousand COVID admissions should cause any such crisis, other than the fact that it was concentrated in a very small number of hospitals. So, whilst what you say might have applied in London, for example, its hard to see why it would apply elsewhere in the country.

George Carty said...

How would you respond to two arguments that have been used against the herd immunity strategy?

1) That evidence has been found that some people have been infected twice, thus showing that contracting COVID19 doesn't actually confer immunity, and
2) That isolating the groups most at risk of death (the elderly, the immunocompromised and others that are already have other serious illnesses) is inadequate, because many people who aren't killed by the virus still suffer permanent damage from it.

Boffy said...

On the first, that was raised several weeks ago. There is no evidence its true. In each of the cases cited, it was shown that the people either had not originally had COVID19, but some other virus, or else that they had compromised immune systems, as with who had spleens removed, or have some other immune system disorder that prevents them developing the required antibodies, which would apply in relation to any other disease. There is no evidence that COVID19 is different to any other coronavirus, or virus in terms of the body producing antibodies against it. Nor is there any evidence that the time these antibodies remain active and able to kill the virus is any different than for any other virus, i.e. for at least several months, and probably for several years.

Also, if it were true that people can be reinfected with the virus, it would mean it was pointless wasting time trying to produce a vaccine, because it would be ineffective. A vaccine is only a means of artificially creating herd immunity, by deliberately infecting people with a weakened form of the virus so that the body produces the required antibodies. If the body does not produce antibodies against COVID19, or they don't last for more than a few days or weeks, then a vaccine could not work.

On your second point, it mistakes two things. 20% of the population - the elderly immuno-compromised - are at serious risk from the virus. But, not all of this 20% would themselves die from it. Only a small proportion would be likely to die, perhaps 5-10%. But, its out of the remaining 90-95% of the 20%, that comes those people who do not die but suffer the permanent damage you refer to. In fact, anyone who has had serious lung disease, like me, who has had pneumonia, suffers permanent damage, as it leaves scarring. So, protecting people from this permanent damage is the same as protecting people from death, it comes down to isolating the same 20% of the population at serious risk of illness.

The 80%, are people who are not at serious risk from it, and so not at serious risk of either dying or suffering permanent damage from the serious illness. The 80% are people who not only are not at ill with it, and so suffer no permanent damage, but who indeed have no symptoms, or only very mild symptoms. That is why I said above that in terms of 80% of the population COVID19 is actually innocuous, it is less serious than flu, which makes pretty much everyone who gets it seriously ill, including, unlike COVID19, children.

Of course, its possible that some people amongst the 80% may get ill, and indeed some die, but, and however tragic this is on an individual basis, the numbers are statistically insignificant. Indeed, again that is not true in relation to flu, which can and does kill large numbers of people who are otherwise healthy, including children. The only reason that flu does not kill many, many more people each year, is because we have large-scale vaccination against it, which creates herd immunity against it, and as people get vaccinated with a different cocktail of 3-4 different flu strains each year, they gradually build up immunity against a wider number of strains.

George Carty said...

What do you think about how Malta successfully protected its care homes from the virus? They actually imprisoned the care home staff inside the homes, so that no-one at all came in or out for a period of 1-2 months.

Boffy said...

Sounds very authoritarian. Again its a top down statist response. If we had worker owned and controlled cooperative care homes that would not be required. It would be in the interests of the care home workers themselves to have been prepared, to have had all the required PPE to have SOP's for safety and isolation in place so that they were not in danger of contracting or passing on the virus.

Similarly, if we had worker owned and controlled health and social care cooperatives, the workers letting the contracts for such care would would liaise and cooperate with their fellow workers in the health and social care delivery cooperatives to ensure proper facilities and procedures to ensure that patients and residents in hospitals and homes are properly treated.

George Carty said...

Looks like I wasn't quite right about Malta: the care workers actually volunteered to be confined inside the care home, not prevented from leaving by the state.

Still the same principle though: ensuring that care homes have as little contact with the outside world as possible.

Boffy said...

I am always skeptical about how voluntary "volunteers" are when they are employees. If they owned and controlled the facility collectively as a cooperative, I would be more inclined to believe it was uncoerced, but even then, there is simple peer pressure. There should be no need if there is adequate preparation and provision of PPE, if there are proper protocols for isolation of residents, and so on.

George Carty said...

You seem to have gone very quiet on the subject of COVID19 – are you embarrassed by the fact that the UK now has the worst death toll in Europe (and second only to the United States)?

Certainly this is hardening public opinion, with these dire results being blamed primarily on the lockdown being too late and/or not stringent enough. (A lot of people seem to view New Zealand and/or Greece as models for how it should have been handled.)

When I look at the data it seems like the UK's problem is that every region was badly affected, even if none was as badly affected as Lombardy, New York City or the Paris region. Was the government culpable by allowing the Cheltenham races to go ahead (perhaps because the decisionmakers falsely viewed it as an outdoor event, lacking personal experience that jam-packed bars there for most of the day gave it superspreader potential), or by failing to halt air travel sooner (perhaps because Johnson's government wanted to maintain "Global Britain" credibility)?

Boffy said...

George,

Not at all. Why would you think that? In fact, I've been writing a lot on the series I'm running on Lenin, as well as spending the last week, sitting in the sunshine in my garden writing a series on post COVID prices and revenues, which I finished today, and which I have followed by starting writing a post on how terrible the left's position on COVID hs been, and what it should have been, which will probably appear, however, in a couple of weeks time. A lot of things I write don't appear until quite a bit after I wrote them, unless its something I just had to try to respond to at the time.

But, to return to your question, why would I be embarrassed? Its not my policy! To preempt my post referred to above, but in line with what I've said all along, my policy would have been to ensure that the 20% of the population at risk were enabled to self isolate; my policy would have been to ensure that care homes isolated their residents effectively from each other, visitors and carers; it would have been to ensure that carers and health workers had proper PPE, and contact protocols; to have used the Nightingale hospitals as proper isolation facilities; my policy would have been to treat it in the same way we should treat things like nuclear power, which is that, it should demand that production in general continue, but under workers control, that we should beef up Health & safety Committees as Committees of Workers Inspection, so that unless those committee say that safe working arrangements are in place, no work can continue. None of that is the UK government policy so why would I be embarrassed that their policy is such a disaster?

Actually, the UK per capita mortality rate is WORSE than in the US. Their population is 5 times ours, so their 100,000 deaths equates to only 20,000 in Britain, about half what it is, despite them having no socialised healthcare for all. In fact, the bit of my argument about infection not being the main issue, but mortality is born out by the level of current deaths in Sweden, which has no lockdown, where new deaths have been in low double digits for some time. The last day's data for Sweden shows just 17 new deaths equal to about 100 new deaths in Britain, compared to the actual UK figure that is about four times that! It shows the lockdown policy in the UK was not necessary, has not stopped huge numbers of deaths that were not necessary at the same time as killing the economy.

Cont'd

Boffy said...

Cont'd

On public opinion its led by social media and the mass media, and is simply wrong, as the Sweden data shows. And, if you want to understand the situation in New Zealand, I'd recommend reading the posts on it by New Zealand Socialists.

As for every region being affected etc., its because every region has hospitals and care homes, which are the hunting grounds of the virus, as its there that the elderly and infirm are concentrated. It continues to be the case that of those that have died, 99% are in those categories. But, whilst recognising how awful the government handling has been, let's keep things in perspective. We have 40,000 deaths, that is just more than double the number of flu deaths in 2018, and we have vaccines to prevent flu becoming a serious problem. It represents just 0.3% of the 20% of the population actually at risk from COVID19, and just 0.066% of the total population. It represents just half the number of people who die from smoking related illnesses each and every year, let alone the 320,000 people who become seriously ill as a result of smoking each year.

So let's not make this virus into something its not. Its a coronavirus, the same type of virus that is responsible for the common cold each year. The 40,000 deaths are terrible at a personal level, but looked at in total, its only twice as bad as the personal tragedies caused by flu in a bad year. It is NOT an existential crisis, that should have caused the economy to be closed down leading to the worst economic slowdown in 300 years, with all of the human tragedies that will bring with it, which will be greater and more long lasting than anything COVID19 brought with it.

George Carty said...

I'm looking forward to reading your post on the left's COVID19 positioning!

If you're not embarrassed by the way the situation has progressed, I can only say that it demonstrates the strength of your character in the face of the lockdown mania that has gripped most of the left. It's interesting that you brought up the issue of nuclear power, as perhaps both anti-nuclear-power sentiment and lockdown mania are driven by a similar combo of irrational fear and "anti-capitalist" asceticism.

The main point of my previous message is that in other countries (like France and Italy) the COVID19 death toll is much more concentrated in just a few geographical regions than it is in the UK, which could easily be used as an argument that the UK government locked down too late, and/or that it didn't restrict both international and internal travel enough (the roots of the Dominic Cummings scandal). Do you have a different interpretation of this, perhaps something to do with population density?

Another argument which the lockdown hardliners deploy is that the Tories should have been acutely aware of how the NHS and public health infrastructure had been damaged by their own austerity policies – this is why the early test-and-track approach to deal with the virus was abandoned (the talk of "herd immunity" for the government was mainly a way to gloss over this failure), and also why the Nightingale hospitals turned out to be worthless: there were no staff to man them and the government assumed that COVID19 patients transferred there would bring their carers with them!

They note that Greece (by means of an early and harsh lockdown) managed to keep its death toll down in spite of its health infrastructure being far more damaged by austerity than the UK's ever was. However, in the case of New Zealand there is a stronger case for arguing that the lockdown was unnecessarily severe: Australia managed to keep its outbreak under control with milder measures (and with an unlovable right-wing PM at that!)

You have often mentioned Sweden, but is notable that in spite of eschewing an enforced lockdown it has still issued strong social distancing recommendations, and nevertheless has suffered a considerably higher death toll than the other Nordic countries (even if it isn't comparable to that of the major Western European countries: all of which except for Germany have handled the pandemic badly).

The "hunting grounds" of the virus is the whole of human society: it would be more accurate to refer to hospitals and care homes as the "killing grounds" of the virus. From an evolutionary perspective the ideal virus would be something like the viruses that cause the common cold: one that doesn't do enough damage to its hosts to impede its spread. This is why many of the most dangerous viruses (including AIDS, Ebola, SARS and MERS) are ones which have recently crossed a species barrier, as they are more virulent than is evolutionarily optimal.

The exception (where evolution favours high virulence) is where a lot of hosts are crowded close together: this is why bird flu can wipe out an entire chicken coop in just a few days, and why normally mild viruses (including COVID19) can become deadly in care homes.

Boffy said...

George,

Just finished the post on the Left. I expect it will appear in about two to three weeks, after the posts on post-Covid prices and revenues. I agree with your comments about nuclear power. I have also dealt in the post with the point about austerity making test and trace impossible.

To be honest I haven't looked too closely at the geographic spread in the UK. My impression was that its concentrated in major cities, London in particular. I will try to find time to have a look. I know a few weeks ago, my wife went on line to look how many people in Stoke were reported to have the virus, and it was just 4. Its more now, though its not easy to get disaggregated data. I think population density is decisive, and particularly where in dense populations you have congregations of elderly, more disadvantaged (and so also usually less healthy) people, more vulnerable to serious illness or death. That is also why Sweden has worse figures than its Nordic neighbours, though as I wrote back in April, that was not originally the case. It had at least as good figures as Denmark. Its figures are distorted by the number of deaths in its large concentrated care homes, compared to those other countries. Remember Sweden also has double the population of Denmark, and the problem for Denmark as with others that have imposed stringent lockdowns is that their populations have no immunity, which it appears many in Sweden now do.

Its going to be another year before vaccines are available, and countries are going o open up long before then. If lockdowns have been successful in preventing infections - of which I am doubtful - then, because the virus is still at large, it will simply lead to another rise in infections, and those in the at risk 20% will again start to die, unless they are isolated. It will have solved nothing, but will have cratered economies. Its the problem of the forest fire where you smother it, but fail to create firebreaks, so that any remaining embers simply reignite all of the remaining unprotected trees.

You are right about hunting grounds and killing grounds, which is another reason I am sceptical about infections and deaths. The majority of deaths are in those specific locations, and i doubt its being cleared out of them. In fact COVID19, as a coronavirus IS one of the viruses that causes the common cold. In fact, as I've written the talk about pandemic denial and so on is a bit illiterate, because there is a pandemic every year, and one that involves the coronavirus, because each year there is a common cold pandemic, which infects millions, and also kills significant numbers in the at risk categories, just as COVID19 does. Yet no panic is raised each year over the common cold pandemic!