The Communists have found a better scam

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Frightening headline in the Daily Mail:

Frightening, that is, because of how stupid it is. The spike being referred to consists of… 7 deaths. Just 7. Not 70 000. Not even 7000. Just 7. The death toll rose from 33 to 40. On average, about 1700 people die in the UK every day. And we’re going to destroy our economy over what isn’t distinguishable from noise in the death stats.

What has happened is this. The virtual Communists and statists who dominate the establishment of the world’s countries got tired of waiting for climate change to do its work. Why wait until 2050 or 2070 when you can just seize power now on the basis of some spurious new emergency that requires martial law? Those emergency powers were there just waiting to be used. I had no doubt that a Corbyn government would have invented some pretext to use them if it had won the election. That’s why I was worried that if they got in, we’d never get rid of them.

So why wait when you can just invent a whole new fake emergency happening in the here and now? The emergency, of course, is all in the modelling, as it always is. Real world death numbers provide nothing to worry about, but the modelling, my God that looks bad. (Actually, even the worse-case models don’t look bad enough to destroy the world’s economy over, but then I’m not a frightened snowflake.) And the academics, and the authoritarians on social media, are demanding we do something. Looks like we have no choice but to pretend it’s an emergency and make a massive power grab.

The key is always to stay one step behind social media until there’s a clamour from the likes of Piers Morgan for more state action, and then it doesn’t look like it’s just us making a power grab. This is the first social media-fuelled coup in the Western world, although clearly the old media has also played its part.

(I’m writing a longer, more detailed post about why the health threat from Covid-19 has been massively overblown, hopefully finish and post later today.)

Thanks God for the surplus

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Isn’t it great that recent British governments have built up a healthy surplus during the good times in order to deal with the bad times, like we’re in now? That showed foresight. It would have been terrible, if, you know, the government had just splurged money on all sorts of non-essential crap and we’d ended up having to tackle Covid-19 and deal with an economic shutdown with a massive debt. Really glad we’re not in that situation.

Wuhan Flu not really from Wuhan?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

There’s talk around social media that Covid-19 didn’t really originate in Wuhan. It’s hard to know the truth here, because it’s become so political. The Chinese are now trying to say that it came from the US. The US is responding by calling it ‘the Chinese disease’.

We know that the Chinese engaged in cover-ups, and are not the slightest bit trustworthy. However, there is one reason why it wouldn’t surprise me at all to discover that Covid-19 didn’t originate in Wuhan, and that is (as I have mentioned before) that most diseases turn out to have been around a lot longer than we thought, and to have come from somewhere else than where they are first detected.

And here’s another thing that is now being said to be a possible vector for Covid-19: the 2019 World Military Games which was held in Wuhan in October 2019, with nearly 10 000 participants from all over the globe:

The seventh edition of the International Military Sports Council (CISM) World Military Games officially begins tomorrow in Wuhan.

 

Nearly 10,000 military personnel from more than 100 countries will gather in the capital of central China’s Hubei province.

I have to say, even though some leftists are also saying this and I hate to agree with them, that this looks like a possible (though not at all certain) source of Covid-19. There will be other possibilities, including transmission from other areas in China. What we need to do is to work out whether C-19 was around earlier in 2019 in other countries, or other parts of China. It’s possible that a lot of cases that looked like influenza at the time were really Covid-19, or some variant.

Update: Regardless of where the Wuhan Flu really came from, it still remains true that the Chinese Communists have engaged in criminal cover-ups, and we must seriously re-consider our relations with them. The ultimate origin of Covid-19 doesn’t really affect that.

I’m convinced you’re a woman, even if thousands aren’t

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Narcissistic media type puts on a dress and grows breasts using hormones and thinks he’s a woman.

It has to be said that the woman I encounter today is a world away from the man I knew during a period in the 1990s when, as journalists, we would frequently find ourselves writing on opposite sides of the gender divide. But the fact that we are now two 60-something women – hopefully on the same side – is not as strange as I expected it to be.

The reason it’s not as strange as you expected is possibly because he’s still the guy you knew, only with a dress and lippy.

There are, it should be said, certain areas of Diana’s past life that are not up for discussion. We do not, for instance, talk about her ex-wife (they were married for 30 years) or their three grown-up children; two daughters and a son

No, we don’t talk about them, because that’s rather awkward, isn’t it?

I don’t go into a ladies loo to oppress women. I go in there to have a pee. I go into a cubicle where no one can see me, pull up my skirt, sit down – well actually sometimes I have to stand because of my prostate

How much more ladylike can you get than having to sometimes stand up to pee because of your prostate? I’m amazed you’re not already the pres of your local WI.

And I absolutely don’t deny the guy in me. I am not pretending I am not still him in many ways. I mean I still do that thing of sitting down on Saturday and watching Sky Sports before the game, during the game and after the game because four geezers talking football constitutes entertainment to me. But I also blub my eyes out to Strictly Come Dancing and I rather like the fact that I can do both of those things.’

A guy who likes football and has emotions, that’s never been heard of before, you must totally be a woman and nothing else.

Are there, I nervously ask, now boyfriends in Diana’s life?

 

‘No, I wouldn’t enter into a relationship until some time after I have had the operation,’ she says carefully after a thoughtful pause.

Yes, well, it’s a bit hard to pretend you’re woman having sex with a man when there’s a big hairy cock and balls in-between you both. Who do those belong to? ‘Oh, sorry, darling, I don’t know how those got there, the cleaner must have left them behind, just ignore them and put your manhood into my womanly vagina, the one that looks and smells like a man’s bumhole, but isn’t’.

But surely, I persist, part of the dream she is pursuing must include the idea that one day her prince will come? ‘Yes, yes is the answer.

 

Yes, I do want my prince to come.’

It’s almost like you’re … a gay man.

And actually I think that ultimately I would make somebody a really good wife.

Good luck convincing a man to think the same.

I love creating a beautiful home, nothing makes me happier – except possibly cooking a lovely meal or going shopping.

You spent years writing blokey novels and editing Punch magazine. Somehow I can’t see any man being convinced that you’re just a sweet little homemaker.

Seconds later, though, that other Diana is back – the sharp, sassy, witty one who owes quite a lot to her former self and is determined to amuse, bemuse and entertain us all as we follow her on her journey. ‘I mean look at me – long legs, brand-new breasts, knows the offside rule and the LBW rule, and can tell a googly from a flipper and if you want to watch endless documentaries about World War II be my guest! I think I have a lot to offer any man, don’t you?’

I don’t know about other blokes, but ‘Is actually a woman’ comes higher on my list of desired female characteristics than ‘Can tell a googly from a flipper’.

Long-term lung damage?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

One thing that is particularly worrying me amongst all the Covid-19 panic is long-term lung damage:

Some patients who recovered from Covid-19 have suffered reduced lung function and now experience problems such as gasping for air when walking quickly, Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority has revealed …

 

Dr Owen Tsang Tak-yin, medical director of the authority’s Infectious Disease Centre at Princess Margaret Hospital in Kwai Chung, said doctors had already seen around a dozen discharged patients in follow-up appointments. Two to three were unable to do things as they had in the past.

The Mirror also has some scary news on this:

In the US, doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City were the first in America to analyse CT scans of Covid-19 sufferers.

 

The doctors said they identified specific patterns in the lungs of dozens of patients who were hospitalised in China at the height of the epidemic there.

 

The ground glass opacities, or patches, became more dense over time, and the patterns were similar to those found in patients who contracted SARS or MERS.

 

The doctors found “fully involved lung disease” in 25 patients who had scans between six and 12 days after they reported symptoms.

There’s no doubt that Covid-19 causes long-term lung damage in some patients. The thing to be hopeful of is that the figures on this will turn out to be low. There’s not enough hard data on this yet, and early newspaper reports are about as reliable as one of those gun attacks where all the media outlets report multiple gunmen, when it eventually turns out there was only one gunmen. Tens of thousands of people have now recovered from coronavirus, and there’s been few stories with real, individual people whose lungs are buggered.

(Not that proves much yet, modern journalists have no ability to go outside and interview real people even when the sun is shining and things are good, so I don’t suppose they’re going to do that when they have an excuse to stay home and read Twitter for their stories instead.)

“Shut everything down, but not travel”

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The academic community – not the ones advising Johnson, but most of the rest of it – seems to be strongly in favour of more drastic measures than the government is currently enacting. Here’s a typical article that’s going around academic Twitter.

I still have some academic links, and know of one senior academic (a behavioural scientist) who is advising the government, and that person was pretty strongly in favour of shutdowns yesterday, but has come out of the COBRA meeting today much less gung-ho, talking more in terms of the strategy that was being talked about last week in behavioural science circles, that people won’t be able to take a shutdown seriously at this point, so if that is used it will have to be in a few weeks time when things are more serious.

I’m not going to really comment on the government’s strategy myself, as I know what a difficult decision it is. I’m not convinced they’ve made the right decision, but I’m not convinced it’s the wrong one either. I do think, though, that travel bans need to be put in place from badly affected countries like China and Italy (in fact, this should have happened well before now). But the likes of Public Health England haven’t got a clue, because for the last decade they’ve spent most of their time and money on agitating against sugar in chocolate. In fact, it turns out that the Department of Health’s most recent strategy for dealing with an epidemic comes from 2011.

The government seems to have made its mind up that its not going to do much, but there is going to be massive pressure on them from academia, social media and Piers Morgan to do more, so I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually there is a partial shutdown.

What really gets me, though, is that you have all these leftist academics clamouring for decisive governmental action, and complete shutdowns of as much as possible, including their own academic conferences (which are being shut down all over the place), but on the other hand the very same people are aghast that Bad Orange Man has banned travel from mainland Europe. They want a Britain where everyone is locked inside their concrete bunkers for weeks and not allowed out except for the very basics, yet people can still waltz over to NYC for a few days sight-seeing or to see their grandparents. The insane lack of consistency of their position never troubles them. Nor does it ever cross their minds that if Obama had done the exact same thing they’d be praising him for his decisiveness.

Coronavirus really illustrates a fundamental difference between conservatives and the modern left. Modern leftists, for all their railing against fascism and oppression, are very authoritarian, and would gladly set up a police state to enforce the behaviour they approve of (while also dismantling the traditional parts of the justice system). They’re also in favour of open, or at least, weak, borders, and regard refugees and migrants and even foreign tourists (other than rich American ones) as victims of global injustice, and so deserving of special treatment. They constantly put the interests of these people above those of the citizens of their own country.

Conservatives, on the other hand (at least, the ones I have in mind), have very different views. They favour strong borders, and expect to see the citizens of a country put first. Consequently the approach conservatives would prefer is to have strong border controls at all times to keep out foreign problems like epidemics from the other side of the world, just as Russia and Poland have done (and as a result those countries have hardly any cases of coronavirus, whereas Italy, which has tens of thousands of illegal Chinese migrants in the north, is being swamped by it). That removes, or largely removes, the need to have authoritarian government actions to stop the virus, and allows the actual citizens of the country to continue on living their lives as normal, without damaging the economy.

That doesn’t mean that all of those conservatives are opposed to tough action against the populace if it’s required. James Delingpole, for example, is a prime example of the sort of conservative I have in mind, and he’s now in favour of shutdowns. But I’m sure he’d agree that it would have been better to have had strong border controls in the first place, so that this would not be necessary.

The progressives, however, regard the idea that we would keep out, say, people from China, with horror. That’s racist, and unjust, and so on. They’d rather let anyone in who wants to come in (as long as they’re in a protected category: no Texas oil barons) and then fire up the police state to deal with any problems caused by the open border. Because they’re pretty keen on the police state to start with. In fact, that gives them two of the things they’re most keen on: a swamping of the native population, and coercive control over everyone, which they won’t want to give up. Let everyone in, but turn the joint into 1984.

I know which side I’m on. And the strong border issue is becoming weaponised. COVID-19 may eventually go away, but the border issue is not.

Update: I know a lot of my readers don’t bother with Twitter, and that is especially wise at the moment. As you can imagine it is currently a cacophony of noise. Even the saner conservative side of it is badly split between the ‘No big deal, proceed as normal’ side and the ‘We’re all going to die, weld everyone into their buildings’ side.

Update 2: Thanks also for all the good comments that have been coming in lately.

Good and bad reasons to be worried about COVID-19

Hector Drummond Posted on by

There’s an article going around at the moment from Matt Ridley, saying that coronavirus will be a disaster. I’m normally a big fan of Matt Ridley, and will fully acknowledge that he knows more science than me, so I was disappointed to find that it was making thsee predictions based on very general and weak points:

So why don’t I think this hobgoblin is imaginary? First, because lethal plagues have a long track record.

Sure, but that applies to every disease. And most of them don’t turn out to be wreckers of civilisation. What we need is a specific reason why we should think Covid-19 is different to the usual.

The second reason is that new diseases are often more dangerous than existing ones … when they first infect our species, viruses can encounter a vulnerable immune system and run riot.

Again, true, but again this also applies to SARS and bird flu and swine flu, etc. Nasty diseases, all of them, but again the didn’t turn out to be mass killers.

The third reason for alarm in this case is the speed with which Covid-19 has crossed regional and international boundaries.

So do lots of other diseases.

It does seem to have acquired an unusual skill at getting passed on from one person to another

It clearly isn’t as contagious as the flu.

Then there is the effect of globalisation, and the huge growth in international travel. I wrote in my notes in 1996, when reviewing a book on new viruses, “If we persist in creating conditions in which viruses can be easily transmitted and amplified, then we will persist in experiencing waves of new viral epidemics. The problem lies in the ecology of our society, not destruction of the environment.” Human beings are just too tempting an ecosystem for an ambitious virus.

This is true, but it’s a general point, and it applies to all those new viruses we’ve had since Ridley wrote this in 1996, and none of those killed millions of people. Again, what we’re lacking is specific evidence relating to Covid-19. I’m not interested in general points about how a new virus could kill us all, but whether this specific virus would kill us all (or a lot of us).

Here, however, is a Lancet article which provides some more specific reasons to worry about Covid-19. One such reason is that it may be that the warmer months won’t cause it to die down:

Third, the effect of seasons on transmission of COVID-19 is unknown; however, with an R0 of 2–3, the warm months of summer in the northern hemisphere might not necessarily reduce transmission below the value of unity as they do for influenza A, which typically has an R0 of around 1·1–1·5.

The article seems on the speculative side to me, but it does at least provide some reason to be worried about Covid-19. Not that it’s going to ravage the country, or anything like that, but it may kill a lot of our older people, and who the hell wants that to happen? (Apart from fanatical Remainers, that is.) We should have never have allowed it to get going – our insane virtually-open borders policy was responsible for that – but now that it has taken root I think that, like it or not, the government is going to start take action. I’d be surprised if schools aren’t shut down soon.

Rosemary’s baby

Hector Drummond Posted on by

A devastating account of Mia Farrow’s campaign against Woody Allen by their son Moses. From various sources I had already worked out that Allen was very likely innocent of child abuse charges, but this just puts everything beyond doubt. I think Allen going out with his ex-wife’s adopted daughter was not a good thing, but Farrow has wreaked an evil and unjust revenge on him.

The bird’s-eye versus the personal level

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Not being worried about COVID-19 at a bird’s-eye-population-epidemiological level does not mean that one should not be worried about it at a personal level. I don’t want to get COVID-19 any more than I want to get the flu. Both can be really nasty, and sometimes fatal.

Figures that look acceptable from the epidemiological point of view will contain numerous personal and family tragedies. If I play down the risk of a health and economic disaster, that doesn’t mean that I am dismissing the awfulness of each individual person who dies from coronavirus. But then everyone else is happy to talk about flu and car accidents and all sorts of other causes of death in abstract terms without feeling the need to apologise to those personally affected by those things every time.

Anyway, I will of course be personally taking steps to reduce my exposure. But it’s a difficult balance. For example, my wife is wondering whether to go to a massive all-schools-in-the-area singing concert with my daughter. Not going would reduce the risk of them getting it slightly. But then not going means they miss out on an enjoyable experience. What’s the balance here? I can stop driving my car, which will slightly reduce my chance of dying, but it also reduces my quality of life. These sorts of trade-offs are not always easy to calculate.

 

COVID-19 shutdown?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Epidemics generally have a bell-shaped curve. There’s a steep exponential climb, then a plateauing, then an exponential tailing-off. So the question is, when will the tailing-off start with the coronavirus? Official figures show that this is already happening in China and South Korea, as I said yesterday. But commentator dearieme (himself a distinguished scientist) wonders about the Chinese figures:

Here are the views of My Source in Singapore based on his conversations with expat Chinese and Japanese and with native Chinese Singaporeans.

 

(0) It probably goes without saying but they all think the Singapore government and people are doing a grand job.
(i) Nobody believes the figures from China.
(ii) They all think that the figures from South Korea are probably the best quality available from countries with lots of patients. (They also think the S Koreans are doing a grand job.)
(iii) Because of the Olympics the Japanese figures are not to be trusted.

DM has a point about the figures from China (and Japan, for that matter, although I wouldn’t expect them to be as bad as the Chinese). Any figures from China, on anything, are to be treated with great suspicion, and especially on something like this, where they are keen to save face. However, the scale of the drop-off is very large, and the presence of WHO in the country makes it harder (although not impossible) for the Chinese to dissemble too much, so I’d say that the disease really is dropping off in China.

Some say that the drop-off is caused by China’s drastic, totalitarian measures, which we can’t emulate even if we wanted to, so it will be worse in the West. No doubt that these measures have helped. Should we have a shut-down here to emulate that? The sense I am getting from academic contacts (from a distance, mind), who know of other academics who are advising the government, is that a lot of these people are in favour of a shutdown. The current thinking seems to be that it’s better to have a shutdown earlier rather than later, it will be more effective. Don’t let it spread, because then it gets harder to stop it. (This is contrast to the idea going around a few days ago that it’s better to have the shutdown later because if it’s too early people won’t take it seriously). These people seem to think that CV-19 will go pandemic if there’s no shutdown.

(It’s probably true that medical scientists and doctors are more authoritarian than other people, and less concerned with the other effects that a shutdown would have.)

But there will also be people advising the government who will be against a shutdown, because that may be a cure worse than the disease, that a shutdown would be pretty ineffective here anyway, and also because they think that COVID-19 will die off or at least slow down considerably anyway soon, especially with the warmer weather.

There are, of course, many complicating issues. One is the possible lack of respirators for patients whose lungs are under attack. We should definitely prioritise medical treatment for the at-risk categories.

Update: Also worth pointing out that South Korea’s figures are improving well too, without any dictatorial shutdown (click to enlarge):

What did South Korea do?

South Korea’s government opted against localised lockdowns, concentrating instead on testing large numbers of people in an attempt to identify infection “hotspots”, along with encouraging social distancing. As one of three designated “special care zones”, Daegu received extra medical supplies and staff, and troops were sent to disinfect the streets.

 

The country is conducting about 15,000 tests a day, free of charge, and has carried out almost 200,000 screenings so far. It has also set up about 50 drive-through testing centres and distributed smartphone alerts about the movements of people who have tested positive.

 

Calming down about COVID-19

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Michael Fumento wrote a great book years ago called Science Under Siege, which looked at health scares and green hysteria in a very careful and rational manner, so I take him seriously on coronavirus. He’s not so worried about it, which is good news:

China is the origin of the virus and still accounts for over 80 percent of cases and deaths. But its cases peaked and began ­declining more than a month ago, according to data presented by the Canadian epidemiologist who spearheaded the World Health Organization’s coronavirus mission to China. Fewer than 200 new cases are reported daily, down from a peak of 4,000.

 

Subsequent countries will follow this same pattern, in what’s called Farr’s Law. First formulated in 1840 and ignored in ­every epidemic hysteria since, the law states that epidemics tend to rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern or bell-shaped curve. AIDS, SARS, Ebola — they all followed that pattern. So does seasonal flu each year.

In the UK dozens, maybe hundreds, of old people will die, which is awful (hoping none of my readers are affected), but it’s not going to bring down Western civilisation or crash the economy (unless we choose to do that).

We’re going to need to divert some money into emergency care, though.

Update: Found some relevant graphs on this page about the decline of COVID-19 in China:

 

 

I assume transwomen are welcome

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Telegraph article in praise of women-only tours:

She led me into the darkness of her hut, and lifted her faded black T-shirt, gleefully. Her breasts, marked by motherhood, hung deflated against her chest, but that wasn’t what she had wanted to show me. She grinned and jiggled her hips, showing off the rows of multicoloured beads that encircled her waist – maybe 20 or more. “One from each lover,” she said, erupting into flirtatious laughter.

This reads like the most blatant parody of the old foolish white middle-class Western women going to Africa trope:

I ran my fingers over the round glass beads. Without warning, she whipped up my top, detached some from her waist, and reattached them around mine. “Now everyone will see you have admirers too,” she winked. It was a gesture that struck a chord of friendship between us and an exchange that only took place because we weren’t in the presence of men.

And so on:

As we danced beneath that open sky, without embarrassment or judgment, there was no way of distinguishing between our different shadows.