Showing posts with label Slow Spread. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Slow Spread. Show all posts

People's welfare, mental health and general stress levels does much better under elimination strategy.

Why not stop the spread of the virus, as a way to both prevent further fatality and disease and to avoid future lockdowns, now? People's welfare, mental health and general stress levels do much better under elimination strategy. 

These are very difficult times, for everyone.

And leading into the spread of the virus, and the disease, there was a surge of chronic stress induced by a culture of acquisitive competitive 'meritocracy' grounded in free market fundamentalism exacerbated by 'Austerity' policies mandating vast cuts to social welfare, health and social care programs based on a series of outright lies about fiscal policy and fiscal possibility pre-existed the pandemic. 

Allowing the virus to spread led to repeated lockdowns which added to the stress the more vulnerable among our population were dealing with. Stopping the spread, as Vietnam, New Zealand and a good number of other countries chose has demonstrably led to much better outcomes, on every available measure bar international tourism.


Why are the English Government and others wilfully ignoring the widespread evidence that is right before our eyes, the evidence that 1.8 billion people are being protected by elimination of community transmission strategy. 

How could they all ignore something so blatantly real?

The UK governments, the UK Press News Media, the Labour Party front bench, The Churches, the Green Party , the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party and all broadcasters of TV and Radio refuse to bring that evidence up for detailed discussion. 

What is that?

How could anyone let that slide?

This is to me where the government position is weakest.

They cannot argue all that evidence away without lying or making up stuff .

That is why they dismiss it out of hand, refuse to discuss it. They can’t handle it safely for their objective, because any acknowledgement of that evidence undermines their positions, and their policies.

Why do they dismiss Elimination of Community Transmission?

I think it is in part because doing so requires that the state resources and empowers local government to support all the people to stop the spread, to be helpful, to prioritise help for the local population to take best care of one another and that is too close to socialist practice for neoliberal free market fundamentalists to allow. That cat must remain in the bag.

How does the language of  'freedom' and 'restrictions' emerge to dominate the public discourse, that is to say the discourse published by official news media, mirrored by leading politicians and pundits. What does it seek to 'stimulate' in significant cohorts of the population?


Where the evidence leads is that stopping the spread of the virus in the community offers the best chances of freedom preserved, and allowing the virus to spread reduces all our freedoms, not least when the spread of infection runs out of control, impacting services visibly. For the English government that visibility is about optics, not people's welfare. 

It's not a good look, denial.

In my view Sir Keir 'less with the evidence' Starmer is daily betraying the working class he purports to represent by not bringing that evidence up every time he sits opposite Johnson, every time he speaks to the press. He is also betraying everyone else.

Just one short sentence is all he needs to say "Elimination Strategy is working for 1.8 Billion people" and  "You do know that spread is placing them at greater risk than their own governments are." 

I even have a pithy slogan for him.

"Stopping the Spread is Spreading the Love!" 

One breaths worth of words, at the start or end of every briefing, statement or public utterance. Such a small effort, for such a huge benefit.

Never in the field of population level health care has anyone avoided so small an effort in order to avoid so huge a benefit to so many whilst blatantly supporting a government that is causing immense  deliberate harm whilst pretending to be a political opposition. Not quite as pithy as the Churchill original.

The dynamic of the slow spreader Governments, the English, Brazilian, Indian and other NeoLiberal Free Market Fundamentalist  governments who for whatever reason have chosen to allow spread of the virus have literally made the virus more dangerous and the populations they govern more vulnerable on very front. 

What drives that kind of policy decision making, most recently articulated by Savid Javid, the English Health Secretary, as not 'cowering before the virus'. The little bully. 

"With income distribution at current levels, roughly half of the working population in both the US and the UK would be unable to survive without external help. Most people regard this as a sign that the system isn’t working properly, and they view providing the help as an intrinsic part of a civilized society.

To a market fundamentalist, though, these people are simply not worth what it costs to keep them alive. Their existence is not cost-effective, and being forced to sustain them is an unjustified burden.

Market forces, they say, are meritocratic – and the problem is that these people have too little merit.

Ira Sohn, Professor of Economics at Montclair State University, has pointed out that with technological advances, many of these people (i.e. people who have to work for a living) will no longer be needed at all:

The prospects for adopting labour-saving technologies in many of the labour-intensive sectors in the economy are improving annually: self-checkout at supermarkets, self-check-in and -out at hotels, self-ordering and bill settlement in restaurants, self-administered health diagnostic tests and so on all translate into a reduced need for workers per dollar of gross domestic product on the one hand, and fewer total workers along with higher levels of GDP on the other.

Horses were used extensively on the farm and in transport in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Europe, but once mechanization and electrification were implemented, and the railroad, automobiles and buses became commercially viable as transport alternatives, owning horses became a hobby of the rich, and the horse population declined quickly and dramatically.

The same can probably be said about humans in the 21st century: we just don’t need that many of them – and, in the rich countries, they are expensive to ‘produce’ (prenatal and postnatal care), ‘assemble’ (nurture and educate), and ‘maintain’ (from adolescence to death). As technology continues to become ever more capable and most humans, frankly, do not, there is less and less need for workers to produce the goods and services required by society.

source : https://99-percent.org/what-is-the-market-fundamentalist-agenda/ 

Does that fit the dynamic of the current English Government's policy direction?

There is a good case for Elimination strategy countries to impose sanctions on the spreaders, for reckless endangerment.

The 'try to control a slow spread' countries are more dangerous to the people than the virus needs to be. 

It is a try out, as in it is a trial, as in a well-dodgy experiment based on a fallacious position - ignore known evidence and let's see what happens.

They are exacerbating matters on every front, deliberately. Worse they are taking a huge risk because we know that the virus's evolutionary pressure will find ways to escape vaccines precisely because it is allowed to spread.
 
And it is the spread among the vaccinated who have not yet met the virus where that evolutionary step will occur, not among the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated have already generated variants out of our various conditions. Proving that the virus can interact with different environments and make changes that increase it's ability to thrive.

Suggesting to the vaccinated that they should go out and risk contracting the infection in order to assure economic recovery is a nonsensical suggestion. The economy would be in much better shape adapted to a successful elimination of community spread strategy.

Tourism, for example, does not have to be international.  There are plenty examples of tourism consumers and providers successfully adapting to the current situation, where people take their holidays more locally, putting cash back into their own economies.

All live events and hospitality industries do much, much better under elimination strategy.

Health care does much, much better under elimination strategy.

Everything that affects ordinary people's welfare, mental health and general stress levels does much better under elimination strategy.

Remember each of us is not safe until all of us are safe. This applies to this virus as it does to the matter of climate change, for example. Or poverty. Or air pollution.

Stopping the Spread is spreading the Love.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Grooming others vulnerabilities is as low as it gets, in terms of everyday abuse of power."

Apologia: Distal Power does not Apologise as we know it - we the ordinary folk pay the price, bear the costs, the Rulers retain their Power.

The Dominic Cummings road show is back in town. Cummings is spilling the beans on some of the inside stories around this English Government. Cummings is as culpable for the avoidable harms not avoided as any in office today. He remains unrepentant. His apology rings hollow, even as he eviscerates his colleagues in public.

He should be prostrate on the floor, tears streaming from his eyes, wailing his sorrow for what he has occasioned since 2016, on so many matters of critical national political behaviour, action and outcomes. He should be begging for forgiveness, for his part in rejecting Elimination of Community Transmission strategy. 

Cummings should be opening up to tell the fullest truth telling possible, in order to bring to an end the non-avoidance of avoidable harms, in order to cease this headlong rush towards a health disaster for the English population, in order to make the case for elimination strategy that expert epidemiologists, public health professionals, nurses, doctors, teachers, parents up and down the country know we need to implement and resource, fully and at pace.

He's none of that. He is still playing everyone. His outing is not altruism or genuine honesty.

One of the threads that I have been following for some time is the resonance down through history of what appear to be repeating patterns. It is not that history repeats itself, so much as bullies behaviour does not change much. Including publicly made apologies for long denied historical harms caused to masses of people by callous Governments, the purpose of which is to retain power, status and position rather than address the harms caused as they ought to.


I have written about the similarities in English Government attitudes, behaviour, policy and outcomes when mass trauma events 'occur' at different times in History. Some situations were genuinely events that could not have been avoided, others were events entirely man made or natural events made much, much worse than they needed to be. The difference between a Volcano erupting and a war breaking out. The difference between a crop failure and a famine.

An honest study of the Irish and Bengali Famines of the Late Victorian era will reveal similarities in English Governance attitudes towards the adverse outcomes for ordinary people vis a vis the Iraq War, the COVID19 epidemic and pandemic, Hillsborough, Grenfell, Orgreaves, collusion in Northern Ireland, arming, training and maintenance of Saudi War Planes in Yemen, and the years of support for anti-Syrian violent militia who literally destroyed most of that country.

What is seen is a callous disregard, born in part by distance and class consciousness and in part by venal greed, a dismissal of the value, the human meaning of the lived experience of the most vulnerable people,  harmed by the policy decisions made by the most powerful. The men and women who occupy positions of executive authority and who control a distal, leveraged institutional power are not vulnerable in the same way those who live where the policy has its greatest impact. Asymmetric has meaning in this context. An insensitive jackboot and a vulnerable ant. 

"Many more loved ones will die!"


I have written about the way the people in power use apologia to defend their position and status, without changing their behaviour. They make public apologies, yet they never suffer indictments, trials, convictions or incarceration. The people who occupy distal power are immune to social material civil and criminal justice. They apologise, and reparations are not made or if they are made they are piecemeal and delivered late, after many years, to exhausted survivors who are largely forgotten, obscured by the passage of time.

Apologia - a defence of one's assumed power.

And so we read in today's Guardian News Paper the story of the Apology by the English Government of Tony Blair, issued in 1997, for the behaviour of the English Government during the Irish Famine. Blair did not write it, he did not sign off on it and he did not speak it, he did not mean it and neither did the English Establishment. It was the usual publicity promotional event, nothing more. Apologia. Sorry, not sorry.


“The key sentence in your message is the acknowledgment that the British government at the time could have done more to prevent the tragedy. This is no more than a statement of fact, and falls well short of an apology, but the British government have been reluctant to say much about this in the past,” added Holmes, who said he had checked with “all and sundry” including press secretary Alastair Campbell that it was right to make such a reference.

“I hope this does not cause you any problems. It should go down well with the Irish, and I cannot see anyone here or in Northern Ireland seriously objecting.”

The text was honed by No 10 aides from a draft by the Foreign Office. An implicit apology was exactly how it was interpreted by the welcoming Irish press who saw it as an attempt to inject fresh goodwill into Anglo-Irish relations and encourage the peace process.

That the Irish Establishment were so ready to accept it as such speaks to their submission to desired myth rather than their ability and willingness to face reality, honestly. But of course, faced with a neighbour far more powerful than they and understood to be more than capable of inflicting harm (collusion in Northern Ireland, false convictions of innocent Irish citizens jailed for decades in English jails, the financial power of the City of London were all well known to the Irish Establishment) upon anyone who challenged them, their readiness to accept the apology at face value contained some wisdom. It's not a good idea to confront a more powerful bully with the truth, in International politics. And when both leaderships are steeped in NeoLiberalism, it's even less likely that a confrontation with the truth will happen.

That said, the truth about the Famine and how it was 'managed' remains. Some harms are so great that they can never be forgotten, not least if those who caused the harm remain unapologetic. The Irish establishment tries its best to  say something of the truth, without going the full hog, as this RTE article outlines.


First and foremost, Trevelyan saw his role as essentially limiting the financial exposure of the British exchequer to funding relief for the Irish poor whose lives were devastated by the failure of the potato crop over successive years after 1846.

What he shared with the politicians and indeed the British Establishment as a whole was an ideological outlook that saw the Great Famine as an opportunity to bring about far-reaching reform of Irish society, clearing the land of the poor, developing commercialised agriculture, and making the Irish economy more ostensibly modern.

Sir Charles Edward F. Trevelyan, K.C.B. Engraved by D.J. Pound from a photograph by John Watkins, Parliament Street. Image: Getty Images

Sir Charles Edward F. Trevelyan, K.C.B. Engraved by D.J. Pound from a photograph by John Watkins, Parliament Street. Image: Getty Images

Let the Herd take it on the chin, protect the Hoard. The past 18 months described in one sentence in the 'United' Kingdom.

Others tell it like it was. 

Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect."


"This book, alone, provides the covered-up facts of 1845-1850 Ireland. There was no famine in the ordinary sense of that word. It was genocide perpetrated by more than half of Britain's army (67 regiments of its 130 regiments total). They removed, at gunpoint, Ireland's abundant meats, livestock, and food crops to the ports for export; thus starving the people. The book's colored map shows the locations of lengthy deployments of each of the sixty-seven regiments while they removed livestock, meats, flour, oatmeal, and other food crops to the ports for export. The same map names the locations of some 180 of the resultant mass graves."

The impoverished Irish native Catholic population, subsiding on potatoes, working for their Anglo landlords, were left to rot as their crop rotted. There was plenty of food, readily available, within spitting distance. It went to market, under armed guard. The Irish workers were deliberately impoverished by centuries of 'Austerity' policies designed to impoverish them, render them submissive and weak.

'Toraidh' is an Irish Gaelic word for a certain kind of egregious thief. It is also the roots of the English word 'Tory'.

Credit where credit is due?

Blair did not initiate the Northern Ireland peace process. It was initiated by Catholic and Protestant women finding solidarity in each other, building a peace movement, confronting the men of violence in their communities, building bridges across the divides, even as the British Security State was waging covert warfare from within both groups of paramilitaries and their communities. These women persisted with their humane struggle to bring the violence to an end. Mo Mowlem, Jeremy Corbyn and others followed pathways worn in by the ordinary women, the mothers, aunts and sisters of Northern Ireland.

Blair took the credit that others built up over decades. 

The English Government of 2020/21 is no different.

They and those they truly represent are not bothered by the costs they have imposed upon the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish peoples by their rejection of Elimination Strategy. They have no plans to ameliorate the situation going forwards. Herd Immunity is now the obvious strategic position, and by mass infection. 

Even as they claim kudos for the 'world beating' vaccination, developed by a pan European collective effort, administered largely by the NHS and volunteers, of which the best that can be said is the Johnson administration did not impede it  in the same that the way they have impeded effective find, test, trace, quarantine and isolate systems that could suppress community transmission of the virus.

We have ample evidence of this Government exploiting the epidemic to enhance their own power, to enrich themselves and their crony associates, to bring in profound and damaging changes across social and health care provision, to avoid dealing with climate, environmental and other pressing problems.

Their latest wheeze is to recruit the youth in this task.

Disco of Malign Intent.

Saying to young people, whose development of their frontal cortex is yet to complete, and in the middle of an intense national level surge of infection via a new more transmissible variant that has vaccine escape, that they can and indeed should (to save the night time economy, do your patriotic duty) attend night clubs, knowing the frustration and intense desire of that cohort to socialise, to 'party like it's 2019' again, given the pressures they have had to endure these past 16 months of daily mismanagement, misinformation and blatant grift, suggesting that they 'take personal responsibility' rather than the government delaying opening up, maintaining legal provision (so called legal 'restrictions') to prevent spread of the virus and then say that in one and a half months time, for Health and Safety of the whole community, they would need proof of double dose of a vaccination to attend club nights (as a 'nudge' to increase vaccine take up) shows that they really do not care about the adverse effects of their policy on people - they want people to endure mass infection in the hope or gamble that this latest scheme will work.

That is the real meaning of Freedom Day!

It really doesn't have to be this way.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-virus-will-eventually-force.html

The question is simple - the economic costs of zero community transmission strategy and quarantine borders with known benign outcomes vs the human and economic costs of slow spread towards herd immunity, with repeated cycles of re-opening and shut down as the viral infection spreads in waves, wave after wave into an indefinite future of unknowable adverse outcomes.

The Virus will eventually force governments to adopt Elimination Strategy. Duty of Care applies universally.

The Virus will eventually force governments to adopt Elimination Strategy. 


Breaking  community transmission is the go to evidence led, grounded, proven strategy. It works. 

Here's a solid report, with references, on the evidence that Elimination Strategy prevents the harms associated with Mitigation policy.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00978-8/fulltext

Study it, share it. Stopping the spread of the virus is spreading the love



Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

The Fit, The Chronically ill, Poverty and the Economy - between a rock and a hard place. Stop the Spread.

The thing that strike me most about this virus SARSCOV2 is that it is a highly infectious viral infection, in that it transmits from human to human with relative ease.

There is a period where the infected person shows no symptoms,  the person feeling no symptoms is wholly unaware of it and is therefore spreading the virus to other human beings without knowing that he or she is a vector of the viral spread.

Therefore  the virus can run through any culture where there are many large group phenomena such as international travel on planes, boats, trains, shared public transport, pubs, clubs, football matches, prisons, care homes, parliaments, apartment blocks, temples of all kinds and large family homes and much else besides.

There is a blind spot among some fit healthy people that I have been feeling into and I will explore what this is in this article. "It can't be all that bad."



The dynamics of close urban living organisation and a silent virus.



In effect an invisible spread before any signs of it happening ever emerge.

Many people will become infected and they will show no symptoms at all. Their immune systems get on top of the virus before it causes any problems. Nobody is any the wiser. Nobody is at fault. We do not know why this is the case. All we have to go on is the experience. What happens.

Fit, healthy people can pretty much shake it off.  There are exceptions, of course, and whilst media tend to hype those or minimise them, we are still learning about the disease state as we go and fear is not really useful, whereas caution is.

Stay calm, act responsibly for the whole community.

For the people with strong immune systems the viral infection appears to them to be a not so serious problem. For some it's not. There is no way to predict in advance if one is one of the unlucky few. It is a gamble, a risk.

For people whose immune system is compromised, the issue becomes the disease, COVID19.

The disease is what happens when the virus begins to replicate faster than the body's immune system can cope with, and starts to impact on the body. When the body's immune system response is not robust enough to stall the viral replication which destroys body tissue.

That is what the disease is - the destruction of tissues within the body as the virus takes over cells and then destroys the cell once it has replicated many more copies within the cell, releasing the replicates which seek out new cells and these repeat the cycle, thus destroying enough cells to cause a variety of breakdowns depending upon which tissue is affected, that can then lead towards death : liver, kidney, gut, lungs and heart can all be impacted.

The disease COVID19 is really, really dangerous to a significant percentage of those who have chronic immune compromising health issues, or co-morbidity's.

That is why the Government and NHS has issued instructions to people at risk to shield themselves.

If you can imagine what it is like to live in what is called shielded status, where you cannot be touched by anyone in your immediate family, for months on end, for a year, for a year and a half. A situation where everything that comes to you has to be washed and cleaned, a situation where all your facilities such bath, toilet, clothes washing and handling and all your cooking, if they are shared,  must be policed with constant attention to detail every time anyone in your household uses those shared facilities. Imagine being confined to one room.  Imagine have to think about every move you might make outside that one room.

Add to that the conflicting narratives that percolate across news media and social media, spreading confusion and uncertainty, and then we can see that there is an extra avoidable element of situational  stress loaded onto people who are already dealing with significant stresses not of their own making.

Can you imagine living as an elder in care home that is shielded? The complexity and pressures that are added to those that already exist? What must it be like to be a carer at home?

What must it be like for carers working in large care homes?

In the UK population of people with multiple conditions is about 15 million people.  Not all are shielded of course. There are degrees of vulnerability.

In the USA it is about 83 million people.

The existing data from around the world suggests that about 20% of that cohort will, if exposed to the virus, experience severe and critical symptoms of the disease, and about half of those will potentially become fatal. Breakdown of the bodies systems and organs. This is a horrific way to die. 

How do we protect those people?

To protect the 10%  most at risk we must protect all of those people who could be vulnerable.

Co-morbidity, Disability and Vulnerability within a stressed culture.

The impact of multiple stressors on the human body and psyche that arise from living within a culture where chronic stress and inter-generational trauma patterns remain largely unresolved is well understood in the medical world and not widely understood across the grass roots.

Observe  how even media will publish articles that castigate people suffering from obesity: fat shaming is one aspect. Blaming smokers, suggesting they are doing it to themselves and should pay for their treatment, whilst protecting the Tobacco makers, even though we know that smoking involves addiction, The NHS offers treatment for that and other addictions.

There is the all too common negative attitude towards disabled people.

This makes gathering the intention of the population to focus on the needs of the vulnerable more difficult than in ought to be. Nonetheless the majority of people are decent, and will take into consideration the vulnerabilities of their fellow citizens.

To protect the vulnerable, those people with multiple combined health issues, the only proven strategy is to stop them from getting the infection in the first place.

They must not meet the virus.

We do not have a vaccine. There are no medicines that can reliably prevent escalation of the disease or can be used as treatments of the disease. There is evidence that vitamin D and C have offer some degree of immune system boost. There is evidence reducing stress reduces immune system effectiveness, so it stands to reason that reducing stress improves immune response.

SARS was a corona virus pandemic that happened in 2003.  It was less infectious than SARSCOV2  but more more lethal, with a case fatality rate of 60%, and because it generated symptoms rapidly it was much easier to trace and close down.

We still have no vaccine for that particular virus. The Governments in countries affected by SARS working with the WHO,  informed populations of the threat and what needed to be done, contact tracing, quarantine, treatment in isolation, limiting movement for a period, and they stopped the spread, and in time eradicated the virus from the population. The same procedure was applied in 197-18 epidemic. The process has been learned over a 100 year term, with new learnings since SARS in 2003. In clearest terms we know that suppression of transmission can lead to elimination of transmission, and that cause eradication of a virus that cannot live outside a human body.

We hear talk of a vaccine.

However vaccines are very difficult to make, and even more difficult to test to the degree that they can safely be used across entire populations. Such is the risk that Governments indemnify vaccine makers from litigation and financial compensation that arise when a few cases of vaccination cause severe and lethal reactions.

There are only two strategies that can protect vulnerable people in this situation.

One strategy is to isolate all vulnerable people from the general population, to isolate them from any possible community infection vector.  To enclose them behind a virus proof barrier.

That is really, really really difficult, and made much more difficult if you allow the rest of the population to slowly become infected while you wait for a vaccine. Waiting for a vaccine is not a health and safety protocol. Slow spread is not a health and safety protocol.

Those who service the vulnerable must  also be isolated from the general population.

If they become exposed,  then they must be set away from the vulnerable until they become provably immune, and can then re-introduced to continue their caring work - but they will still have to adopt clean site protocols upon entry into each caring facility as they could still carry the virus in by fomite transmission. Or they must live and work within the isolate environment of the point of care situation.

You have to somehow generate a population of immune people to service the vulnerable to maintain that separation from the virus, and you have to maintain that population in constant state of vigilant surveillance for viral particle presence.

The other way to protect the vulnerable is to stop the spread across the entire population.

That is to say to eliminate the transmission of the virus from within a given population, which leads to eradication of the virus. Stop the spread, spread the love.

This is also difficult, but it is proven. We know it works.

It was proven in SARS and MERS, and in other outbreaks of infectious disease where human to human transmission was the vector of spread. Suppression of the spread of infection, leading to elimination of community transmission and eventual eradication when the virus can find no new human hosts, and it dies out.

The process is complex, yes. It requires a lot of human resources, and a lot of co-ordinated action willingly undertaken by citizens, businesses and state officials. What makes it complicated are political and economic agendas intruding on the Health and Safety requirements.

New Zealand, Vietnam and others are showing that stopping the spread is a viable policy choice, across very different populations and economies.

Economics and Health and Safety.

Governments that have chosen the slow spread approach have all done so for economic and political reasons, not for health and safety or public health reasons.

And there is another dynamic that clouds the judgement of many people in this matter, going back to the start of this article.

Fit, healthy people are to a large degree thinking of and quite rightly concerned with how any of the protocols to stop the spread, social distancing, contact tracing and quarantine of workers, and a general shut down impacts them, their jobs and livelihoods. Because of the media narrative that the disease does not affect fit, healthy people, that many if not most will have no symptoms or will experience very mild symptoms,they are not so much worried about getting the infection and suffering severe symptoms.

Many believe that getting the infection will grant them immunity, and that as such getting the infection is desirable, to get it out of the way. This is understandable.  They have not been given the full accurate picture. 

Support - in economic terms - to take on the task of stopping the spread in the UK is minimal, and conditional and not well organised, as it was offered in an off the cuff move. This makes it less likely that working folk in the UK will readily consider what it might take to stop the spread - if your livelihood is under threat that is a reasonable feeling to have. They solution is to provide adequate and timely support. That is the job of the State in this kind of situation.

Austerity.

In the UK there is a further complication, that being cuts to public services  and the decades long policy of restricting support to disabled and chronically ill people who require state benefit support, as pursued under the policy banner of Austerity.

That the general population has been unwilling  or disinterested in confronting this over the past ten or twenty years or so in any meaningful manner is largely a matter of how media refuses to cover the dynamic honestly, how ineffective Parliament has been as a body with oversight that reins in harmful policies, and how the media and right wing politicians have been pursuing narratives that undermine empathy for people who need and deserve support - the attack on the welfare state as a thing that undermines the economy.

The UN report into the mistreatment of low income, unemployed, chronically ill and disabled people in the UK, by Government policy, was barely noticed by the population, and almost totally ignored by the largely right wing media, and robustly denied by Government, without any firm rebuttal - because there was and is no defence of those policies given the harm they have caused.

With regards to SARSCOV2 and COVID19 the Government attitude and it's stance is clearly focused on the economy, rather than on the welfare of the whole population, fit and vulnerable alike. The poverty of 14 million people in the UK is real. The feeling of deprivation amidst a growing population of billionaires whose wealth gains are in inverse proportion to the wealth losses from the low income groups is real.

Ironically, many of the fit and healthy feel as if they are being oppressed by the situation of the shut down. That said most people are adhering to the social distancing measures, and are diligent in their compliance and that is a really wonderful phenomenon - I know that most people are decent people, caring people. That decency is not reflected in the corridors of power, as the PPE scandal and others reveals.

And there is a large degree of confusion and resentment across the divided UK electorate  which is largely a consequence of Brexit and the deliberate bipolar adversarial dynamic deployed by it's proponents. So we can see that there's a lot going on here.

Protect the Economy, allow slow spread of the infection.

The confusion of political and economic and ideological perspectives in News media and across social media that filter perceptions of the nature of the threat and we have a perfect storm that creates confusion when what is need is clarity so that the population as a whole understands what is happening and what needs to be done.

Stop The Spread is the only viable policy facing this infectious disease.

Slow the Spread renders the whole population vulnerable. Loss of income is a serious leverage in deflecting attention from the realities of the Governments chosen stance. But we must transcend that and integrate it to resolve this situation.

What we are looking at is a factor that will determine the lethality of this viral infection will be socio-economic - low income population are much more at risk in any situation where an epidemic occurs.

This is born out by the most recent statistics produced by the Office of National Statistics.

Socio-Economic Status

Low income is a factor, as much as health and fitness, or lack of it in outcomes during an epidemic.

Universal Basic Income for the duration of a stop the spread policy duration could resolve that issue, and it would put cash flow into the local economies. 

Global international general trade must take second place for the duration. Internationally, resources movement must take precedence over personal travel so that areas that are less developed are more effectively supported in stop the spread policy implementation. We need every state to follow the stop the spread protocols. We have to help each other through this.

Tourism and Air travel are luxuries that must wait. Both were major vectors of the global spread of the infection. Nobody is talking of blaming either of these, and nobody should. That said, caution must be the stance, a until we are in control of the pandemic.

The dynamics of power as a factor in the exploitation of the situation.

Bullies will always, always seek to exploit any emerging vulnerability in a family, village, town, organisation, institute or population where they hold degrees of power over others. This is a behavioural dynamic, almost an un-thought about reaction other than they will think about how to maximise the opportunity - they will not have to think about choosing to exploit the vulnerability, that will feel natural, second nature to the bully.

Trump, Johnson et al are clearly part of a bullying dynamic, as are their hard core supporters. Their behaviour reveals this. The hatred poured out at those who are their political opponents, the bile and the misleading narratives with which they project and scapegoat others is well documented.

I think that British Government and their sponsors have made a  huge strategic error in allowing and endorsing a slow spread in order to protect the economy. That choice means that the hit to the economy will be much, much worse than if they had chosen the stop the spread policy, because it will mean extended periods of economic disruption as successive waves of opening up and closing down inevitably flow from the slow spread policy towards the fiction of 'herd immunity'.

The hubris and the arrogance of that decision stops them from admitting it, and now they are just bluffing through, which is why the media denial is so intense.

There is still time to stop the spread, but it means we must remove those in Government who refuse to take on that policy, because they have ideological and economic attachments to the slow spread policy and they cannot be trusted to carry through a stop the spread policy. Because they have already caused so much avoidable harm, they must be prevented from causing any more. They must be held accountable, and they must prevented from causing any more harm. The prevention of more harm has to be the primary concern right now.

We must address the issue of acknowledging that the often unspoken origin of distress, disease and ill health across entire populations lies in how power is mediated,  and where that observation is avoided, ignored, muted and suppressed - we must confront the deliberate gaslighting focus on what is 'wrong' within the individual, that avoids addressing what is harmful about the culture itself.

That is a serious problem - the resolution of which must come from a widespread, accurate and wholly evidenced understanding of the situation and fuller engagement across the population based on that understanding. Honesty and transparency matter profoundly. Spin causes harm. Lies are wholly unacceptable.






Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

The argument for Stopping the Spread of Infection, as opposed to Slowing it down.


#StopTheSpread #SpreadTheLove

The lock down, keep your distance, no large crowds, stay at home, isolate the elderly and the vulnerable for 12 weeks and wash your hands approach is best described as the top down approach.  Government Advice.

It is imposed or suggested from above.

It is an umbrella policy. 

It is a very broad brush.

It has no detail.

It is partly an order,  and partly an advice, issued by the UK Government.

The policy is to slow the spread of the infection.

As things stand there is no policy in place to stop the spread of the infection.

Two entirely different policy choices, with profoundly different outcomes.

The UK Government's claim is that this slowing of the spread is necessary in order to prevent a potential overwhelm of the NHS as it stands.

Their claim is that by isolating the elderly and those in care settings we can allow the infection to spread among the general population of 'fit' people and thus protect the vulnerable and the NHS.

Sounds good.

What does slow the spread of infection really mean?

It means to allow the spread of the infection, albeit more slowly.

How is that possible?

When we all  carry on as normal, what do we need to do to make the infection spread more slowly than if we deliberately exposed ourselves to the viral infection by continuing with our everyday interactions.

Masks, physical distance, hand hygiene, limits on indoors gatherings, work from home is what is on offer.

What is not available is the resource base for rapid suppression of localised surges and outbreaks - expert effective local contact tracing,  economic support for quarantine, economic and medical support for isolation treatment, local real time data and information so that locally people can see where outbreaks are happening and take action to reduce contact or exposure to infection and then stop the spread of the infection.

What is on offer guarantees that the infection WILL spread, just slowly.

That is what slow spread means. There is a problem - slow spread cannot be controlled, it will always lead to exponential growth at some stage.

The Government ignored calls by responsible health professionals an epidemiologists to properly resource the NHS and the 15,570 care homes across the UK with PPE.

The UK Government ignored calls to make other provisions in advance, calls that were made from early January when the genome of the new virus was sequenced, and the virus given it's name (SARSCOV2). The disease was named COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019).

Because of that failure to respond to rational warnings,  the NHS frontline staff have been placed in harms way,  they are forced to deal with a multitude of cases of infection without the appropriate protection kit, and other essential supplies amidst staff and bed shortages, and they are suffering the impact of the governments choice, and we can see clearly now that the claim that they are protecting the NHS was and is obviously false.

They knew it was false the day they announced the policy to slow the spread of the infection.

Slowing the spread means infections have already hit care homes, and the entire population within care homes, carers and the cared for alike, are now at serious risk because they do not have the PPE kit and other situational practices to prevent infection spread.

Therefore the claim to be protecting the elderly and the people in care homes was a non-starter, it is demonstrably not the case.

What does slowing the infection spread mean for the 5,000,000 people in the UK with known  chronic compromised immune system conditions?

It means they are guaranteed to be imprisoned, in isolation or in shielding, for as long as the spread is allowed to progress, however slowly.  It means masses of early, painful, horrific deaths within that cohort -  a conservative estimate would be 1% of that population would be 50,000 deaths.

Slowly, over a period of a many months, or more up to a tear - what does that mean?

How many deaths a month is acceptable?

Why not adopt a stop the spread policy?

https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/01/the-coronavirus-crisis-eight-week-suppression-strategy-could-stop-covid-19-in-its-tracks-says-ex-who-director/

"We know we can get this under control,” says Dr Anthony Costello, a former Director at the World Health Organisation (WHO), where he headed up maternal, child and adolescent health. “The problem is that Europe has been too slow to act compared with Asia; and America is now facing a huge crisis.”

Costello, who is Professor of Global Health at University College London where he previously headed up the UCL Institute for Global Health, spoke to me via telephone from Yorkshire, where he is currently isolating from his family members, many of whom are experiencing symptoms of the novel Coronavirus.

Having worked at the WHO from 2015 to 2018 before returning to UCL, Costello pulls no punches about the failures that, he says, have allowed the virus to rampage across Western countries.

He is also concerned about tepid Government messaging. “It’s not enough to just have modellers, virologists and behavioural scientists.

You need people who can translate this into action. Social scientists. Public health experts experienced in community mobilisation.

Right now, we are locked into this strange idea that the Prime Minister or President makes a speech and suddenly the entire country changes its mind. That’s just a fantasy.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen that just giving people a few of the right messages won’t necessarily change behaviour. We need a more serious, decentralised approach and to share data with local communities.”


He refers to some of China’s mass communications measures.

“The Chinese managed to suppress the virus in provinces outside Wuhan without the same sort of total lockdown by operating quickly.

They had a TV station giving out information on the virus round-the-clock on a 24-hour basis.

We had policing of supermarkets and pharmacies.

But most importantly we had a comprehensive mass testing and contact tracing programme. And proper protection for frontline health workers. And that’s how this was brought under control within seven weeks.”


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636331/ - a paper outlining how the SARS epidemic was stopped in it's tracks.

Which is to say take the proven steps to eradicate the virus from within the population in any given area, from a village to towns, to cities and entire territories.

Because we have no vaccine we have no time to waste.

There is no lee-way, no room for any margin of error. Every error will cost lives, will cause avoidable horrible deaths.

So here is the protocol to stop the spread of infection.

A) Officially declare a legal shut down, and pay all non-essential workers to stay at home, by providing a Universal Basic Income for the duration of 3 months itwho  would take to stop the spread, and eradicate the virus from the population.

To make this easier to bear, if UBI is not acceptable then consider a pause rents, mortgages, major bill payments and roll out temporary income support for the duration of the program to stop the spread of the infection.

That money will not be wasted, it will  be going back into the local economy.

Support all essential workers - food production, distribution and retail, public transport, utility, health, police, fire brigades, NHS, military and civil service by ensuring they have full PPE and training adequate to their roles, and provide them and their employers with exact and accurate information on the virus, the infection, the disease and the protocols demanded by the situation.

Clear communications that  treat the citizens as rational adults.

B) Roll out fully resourced contact tracing - Trace all the contacts of every case that presents, and meet each and everyone  of those contacts with a team who can gently and firmly assess and test every one of those contacts to see if they

1) have the virus - send for treatment in isolation wards to avoid treatment at home which leads to more spread

2) have the antibody - have survived the infection, are presumed immune

3) have not yet been infected - people who could become infected - they must be protected from contracting the infection and also quarantined for two weeks to see if symptoms emerge.

Use school buildings that are empty as co-ordination centers locally. Distribute testing and organise local contact tracing through these as well.

C) Treat symptomatic people from the contact list and all who present with symptoms in isolation hospitals, rather than leaving them at home, where they can spread the infection, and where the patients condition can escalate without support to deal with that.

(This was observed in Wuhan before the contact tracing and new build isolation hospitals kicked in - in the end they had 1800 teams of 5 people each meeting all the contacts, contact tracing is resource heavy in that it needs lots of people working at it, nonetheless it works really well, and then mobile phone tech was integrated into that to monitor symptoms and spread. Potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs which puts more cash back into the local economy and build community cohesion at the same time.)

D) Quarantine all asymptomatic contacts, and as soon as they show symptoms, move them to treatment hospitals to prevent or reduce escalation to severe or critical  - this also means less pressure on the available intensive care units and general hospital admissions.

E) Everyone who is quarantined is supported financially and monitored for signs of symptoms so that earliest treatment can be given, to reduce escalation of symptoms into severe or critical.

If the Government had taken this route, back in February, or even in Early March, a method which is proven already in 5 largely urbanised states, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea and is being deployed successfully in others as I write, we would be closer to stopping the spread and then eradicating the infection spread within the UK population.

We know that it would take 8-12 weeks to stop the spread across a large populous state.

Those states that have applied this protocol are experiencing imported cases, that is to say the infection is being carried in by travellers from outside those States are bringing the virus back into those virus free territories.

F) Quarantine all incoming travellers, via Air, Land or Sea, for two weeks, and monitor them strictly.

If the Government were to move immediately to stopping the spread with an eye to eradication, we could clear the infection within three months.

https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/01/the-coronavirus-crisis-eight-week-suppression-strategy-could-stop-covid-19-in-its-tracks-says-ex-who-director/

We have the resources, we have the people, we have the desire - but do the Government share this vision?

The aim is to find all infection routes and to chase them down to where everyone infected is known and observed, and no new infections are starting - when the virus runs out of new hosts, it vanishes in that population. Quarantine must be fully implemented upon all incoming  and returning domestic and international air, sea and land travel. Even from Northern Ireland.

We need both the shut down and the bottom out approach.

Instead the UK Government policy is encouraging the slow spread of infection, and pretty much guaranteeing importing extra new infections by way of air, sea and land travellers arriving from other countries where there are serious infection outbreaks, because, as of today, 17 April 2020 is no testing or quarantining of those arrivals.

This is insane.

Let me repeat - within the UK we could, given the fullest resourcing, eradicate the virus in 3 months.

Then a fully funded quarantine must be in place for all incoming or returning travellers to maintain that eradicated status, until a vaccine is available or we have implemented the stop and eradicate policy across the Earths states and communities...

Allowing the slow spread will play out over many,  many more months, possibly years...

In economic terms the difference is between losing three months of GDP or losing a years GDP plus the other costs as various systems reach collapse or stress beyond repair due to continued shut down, re-opening and further waves of infection outbreaks generating a cyclic pattern that persists because there is no vaccine.

It's not just about me, or you my dear reader, it is about all of us.

This situation is about all of humanity as one human family, one society of many cultures and languages, it is about unity across diversity.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.