The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
The World Health Organisation and many other eminent expert bodies are saying that the COVID19 Pandemic is still a long way from being dealt with, 15 months on from the first proven cases of the disease.
Estimates vary depending on who is presenting a narrative and where they are presenting from.
People in New Zealand and Australia are more confident of an end to the pandemic than people in USA, Germany or UK. People across East Asia are confident they will remain with low fatalities, yet are not so confident the pandemic will cease in the West and other places where zero community transmission is not chosen as a strategy, anytime soon. This chart lays out in bleak lines the background to the variance of opinion. It is of course incomplete, and does not reflect the full scope of the situation. It is indicative.
More cases is always the result of increased transmission, lower cases is always the result of lowered transmission. It is that simple.
Right now, as I am typing, zero community transmission strategies are protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania. In these countries deaths from COVID-19 have been kept to a minimum. In these countries they have not been subjected to repeated National level shutdowns. In these countries the people's economies are robust and thriving, given the global circumstances. These are the effects of zero community transmission strategies.
Granted international tourism is shut down. International passenger travel is shut down. Some people's livelihoods in tourism are adversely impacted, and they are mostly getting support from their governments to get through the pandemic.
Across East Asia and Oceania children are attending school, young adults are attending universities, the bars and restaurants are open, local tourism is open, shopping malls are open. Weddings, funerals and wakes are happening. Life goes on, pretty much as 'normal'.
1.8 billion people.
Protected by an evidence led set of strategies, without the utility of a vaccine.
People still wear masks. People living in East Asia and New Zealand are aware that any outbreak that occurs must be suppressed, and they are well are informed and fully engaged thus when outbreaks do emerge, they and their Governments, local and national, take the appropriate action and suppress the transmission until all cases are traced, all contacts quarantined, the ill are given best possible treatment and all of this is carried out until the virus dies out due to finding no new hosts.
Zero Community Transmission not complicated, it is complex, it is expensive yet cheaper than high fatalities, high long covid rates and repeated economic shocks - it is epidemiology and public health practice at its best, and it is not an extreme set of actions and behaviours, it is mostly a matter of common and collective caring.
It is not rocket science.
Right now, in the USA and UK and EU and Brazil, a different set of strategies are being deployed and these strategies and policies have caused millions of avoidable horrific deaths, millions of avoidable long term chronic disease cases (1 in 10 of all disease level infections), vast economic harms all of which have disproportionally impacted and afflicted the low income, the poor, the destitute, the chronically unwell and the vulnerable and disabled cohorts of their populations.
Evidence ignored, opinion and belief promoted, every single wheel re-invented turned out to be square, appalling death tolls, long term sequalae for hundreds of thousands of people, vast economic harms.
These slow spread herd immunity strategies are causing immense psychological and emotional harm to hundreds of millions of people through badly managed lockdowns, followed by openings, surges of transmission and yet more lockdowns, with no end in sight and barely 20% of the UK population (where I live) exposed to the virus, as these governments push their populations towards a mythical herd immunity in order to 'protect the economy'. It's utter nonsense to claim they are protecting their economies with these strategies.
These strategies have cause wholly avoidable economic damage - from small businesses to self employed, from the live entertainment industry to international tourism we see millions of job losses, businesses going to the wall, entire industries failing.
Here, in the UK where I live, rocket science is nowhere to be seen, and neither is common sense epidemiology.
There is a pattern where those in power and others online cite the harms caused by bad management to argue for worse management rather than better management as in epidemiologically sound, proven and reliable zero community transmission strategies.
Behavioural Science, Data Modelling and Economics.
Government Scientists and Advisor cite behavioural science and data modelling as the source of their policy strategies. They do not cite epidemiology, they do not cite virology and they do not cite best practice public health. The UK Government have claimed all along that they are protecting the British Economy, that "having a strong economy is the best way to ensure a strong National Health Service".
They are failing even in that simplistic task.
Here where I live we have seen multiple waves, shutdowns followed by opening up while community is active, followed by shutdowns as hospitals are over whelmed, and the death toll rises. Cycles of death and harm, all totally avoidable. Yes, the NHS has managed to deal with being pushed to it's limits again, but at the cost of the general service that it provides. Meanwhile American insurance firms buy up local health providers paving the road of insurance schemers 'good intentions'.
Each and every death by covid19 is a horrific, tortured death. 140,000 and rising horrible, painful and very stressed lonely deaths.
Long Covid is estimated to affect 1 in ten of disease level cases.
Asymptomatic cases account for 20% of infections, and these people spread the infection without knowing they are doing so.
There is, within the UK, no effective localised contact trace system.
There is, within the UK, no effective, localised quarantine support system.
There is, within the UK, no effective, localised isolation treatment system.
Some people are being paid to not go to work, others must work and be exposed to risks because they are 'key workers' - shop staff, services staff, police, fire brigade, ambulance, sanitation staff, meat processing staff, Amazon staff, factory workers and builders, and many others.
And there are others who are forced to work because the economic support systems are inadequate for low wage earners - people who are low earners who become symptomatic choose to work because the support for quarantine is inadequate, slow and cumbersome. Food banks are feeding hundreds of thousands of families. The charities and their workers are forced to take risks.
This week, 8th March, 2021, we see the UK Government coercing students, parents and teachers to return to fully open schools whilst community transmission is at levels above 23rd March 2020 when the first shutdown was imposed.
A year later we see no shift to an evidence based epidemiologically sound strategy. A year later we see the continuation of policy options that are causing avoidable fatalities and long term harms to the people of the UK and to our economies.
The evidence of the lived experience in the UK is that the policies of the UK Government are causing vast harms, and when compared to countries following zero community transmission strategies, the variation in policy and outcome is clear.
In simple terms the difference is between opinion and evidence.
Opinion is lethal, evidence saves lives.
Opinion, belief and ideology is lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives.
Gavin Williamsons opinion is that schools are safe for full attendance re-opening. Williamson cites a .002% case rate among students during the September re-opening period. Sounds like a small figure. .002% of 8.9 million students is 17,800+ cases. That is not a small number. Factor in the inadequacies of a centralised contact tracing system that has failed on almost every metric then we have a situation where were do not know how many infections are linked to those cases, what their index cases were, where the virus was transmitted... Gavin Williamson is playing tricks with numbers to push a deliberately egregious policy.
"On Feb 22, 2021, the UK Government announced that schools in England would fully reopen on March 8, 2021.
While returning to school as soon as possible is imperative for the education, social development, and mental and physical welfare of children, not enough has been done to make schools safer for students and staff.
Without additional mitigations, increases in transmission are likely, this time with more infectious and possibly more virulent variants, resulting in further lockdowns, school closures, and absenteeism. Even when schools were supposed to be fully open, at points of high community transmission, 22% of secondary school children were not attending due to self-isolation.
Arguments that schools do not contribute to community transmission and that the overall risk to children from COVID-19 is very small have meant that mitigations in schools have received low priority. Yet the evidence cited for these arguments has serious limitations.
Primary and secondary school closures have been associated with substantial reductions over time in the effective reproduction number (Rt) across many countries (including England) and time periods.
In contrast, data from the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) 2020 COVID-19 Infection Survey show that the prevalence of infection among children aged 2–10 years (2%) and 11–16 years (3%) rose above the prevalence for all other age groups before the 2020 Christmas break (appendix p 4).
Both modelling and real-world data in preprint showing rising cases in regions where the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant was prevalent during the lockdown in November, 2020 (when schools were open),
suggest that opening all schools now without robust mitigatory measures in place will probably lead to Rt rising above 1 in almost all scenarios. Modelling data by the University of Warwick and Imperial College London
despite fewer students being in school at this time, teaching staff were at higher risk of infection. Recent school outbreaks in northern Italy, where the B.1.1.7 variant is prevalent, are also concerning."
The study goes on to outline a series of mitigation steps to suppress transmission within the school community.
None of which is currently provided as logistical support or funded by central government at this time.
A former OSTED chief urged teachers to put their lives on the line, for the future of the children they are teaching.
I saw the interview and to my mind he was impatient and dismissive rather than attentive to the needs of the teachers and the students. He was not calmly presenting evidence.
Mary Bousted, of the NEU, corrected his assertion that schools were not functioning, which was a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts - she pointed out that teachers are in already in schools teaching key workers children and vulnerable children, and are helping children in a variety of ways to make up for the fall off in social services provision, as well as running remote online tuition.
Ideology, belief and opinion are lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives.
More from the study...
"Although COVID-19 is unlikely to cause severe disease in children, estimates of the prevalence of long COVID symptoms based on the ONS Infection Survey suggest that 13% of children aged 2–10 year and 15% of those aged 12–16 years have at least one persistent symptom 5 weeks after testing positive.
Given uncertainty around the long-term health effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection, it would be unwise to let the virus circulate in children, with consequent risk to their families. Reopening fully in the setting of high community transmission without appropriate safeguards risks depriving many children of education and social interaction again, worsening existing inequalities.
By contributing to high community transmission, it also provides fertile ground for virus evolution and new variants."
What kind of person demands that children take these risks? The same kind who launched a war against a country based on a careful set of obvious lies, claiming that they are bringing Democracy to an oppressed people? That went well.... not! Ideology, belief and opinion are lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives
This country really needs a Union of Teachers, Parents and Students who are studying the evidence, who are learning about the evidence base for zero community transmission strategies, because it directly affects their lives now and into the future to confront this situation and to support the NHS by confronting MPs, local councils, local media, national media and any other arena's of influence with the evidence.
We cannot leave that study to the News Media or The Government. They are deliberate in their failure to present accurate and timely evidence since last December 2019.
We need the 8.9 million school children, the 2.38 million university students to be studying the evidence that exists on zero community transmission strategies. We need their parents to be on board, as learners in this.
We cannot trust the UK Government to be honest, so we must be the voices of honesty within the UK.
We need this cohort to engage with NHS staff and with other representing organisations to co-ordinate a push back at every level of society, aware that the Government and Media will not support this push back and will actively resist the most honest, evidence based analysis.
If I have repeated myself, and I have, it is only because the frustration of seeing what is possible being deliberately ignored by so many for such little purpose with so much harm attendant that I persist.
Not yet blue in the face, not yet breathless, I will continue to posit zero community transmission strategy until it is in place. It is the only strategy that makes humane sense.
Landing a lander on Mars whilst bombing Yemeni villagers is not progress, just as landing a man on the Moon whilst bombing Vietnamese villagers was not 'progress'' - there is an argument that it represents a technical progress, but that is all it represents, at best, and to hold it up as human progress or cultural progress is nonsense, irrational and an avoidance of the realities we all must face.
Man on the Moon 1969
Vietnam 1969
Yemen 2020
Mars Lander 2021
A poem, by Gil Scot Heron, might find resonance today in Yemen or Libya or Syria, and indeed within the United States even still, where Racist violence by Police is as common as pie.
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I was already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wasn't enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
Whitey's on the Moon by Gill Scott Heron 1970
I was 14 years old, 1973, when I realised the tech spin-offs of war were not worth the harms that war causes. To claim the benefits is to ignore the meaning of the harms.
Infamously Madelaine Albright dismissed the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children over the course on a decade of warfare against Iraqi Ruler, Saddam Hussein, who was elevated to power by American influence on Iraqi politics "We think, we think It was worth it!" was her thoughtless commentary, when questioned about those deaths, the cost to Iraqi civil society and it was indicative of the cult she was a member of.
Madelaine Albright - "I think this is a very hard choice" - a choice made for the Iraqi children and their parents, not by them.
The culture of Violent Hierarchy, the culture of competing industrialised militarised powers as the dominant culture among modern human societies, is a cult. Generalised acceptance of any cult is typically based on false beliefs, misinformation, gaslighting and disinformation. I know this from personal experience, having been hooked into a number of cults in my life time.
Cultish Beliefs.
The Malthusiams of Boris Johnson are likewise cultish beliefs which are directing the disastrous management of the Corona Virus epidemic sweeping across Britain in successive waves - he obviously believes the costs of the 130,000 (and rising) fatalities, the 250,000 long covid cases, the disproportionate burden borne by disabled people are a price worth paying 'to protect the Economy' (which it clearly is not doing).
Those who in the UK compare the costs of the 'successful' Mars lander operation against the budget of the deliberately 'failed' UK Test and Contact Trace mission are missing the point.
Comparing one success of the abuse system against another failure of the abuse system, without calling to mind that it is an abuse system, without acknowledging in full the harms caused by the abuse system and without putting the harms front and foremost for attention, accountability and prevention is irrational, it is a non sense.
Crowing over the success of one element of the abuse system to highlight the failure of the other is illogical, dismissive and deeply, profoundly disrespectful and callous..
The same 'family' system that landed the lander on Mars is waging illegal, amoral wars that are killing families, destroying communities, crushing entire civilian infrastructures of whole countries.
The same 'family' system that landed the lander on mars and photographed the landing from above the lander, in live real time, from the drop modules angle, an 'amazing feat' which 'has never been seen/done before' is engaged in wars that cause wholesale slaughter, and is deliberately mismanaging epidemics that are killing hundreds of thousands of people.
The UN called for a total ceasefire of wars in April 2020. Their call for common sense was ignored by the primary war mongers.
"Freedom!" people cry. "We have such great Freedoms!"
Others claim: "Our Freedoms are being imperilled! Don't wear a Muzzle!"
Both of these are lies. Cultish lies.
In the UK and USA there is no public domain discussion of zero community transmission strategy. We know that News Media in co-ordination with the political hegemony of the ruling faction are censoring any discussion of zero-covid strategies. There is no freedom. The temporary need to stay indoors is not a loss of freedom, as some idiots claim. It is common sense. Stopping the spread is spreading the love.
There are lobbyists who are deploying the harms caused by bad management to argue for opening up, which is worse management, rather than argue for better management as in a zero community transmission strategy. They too talk non sense, they adopt an irrational and holly unjustifiable position.
Vulnerable Peoples Lives Matter.
Vulnerable people such as the disabled, people with 'learning disabilities', people with chronic disease are subject to 'rationing' of healthcare resources and doctors are ordered by Government to adopt 'do not resuscitate' orders as a rationing policy for these vulnerable people, who cannot dissent let alone consent to such a decision, simply because the Government of the day refuses to adopt a zero community transmission strategy.
Between 24 January and 20 November 2020 in England, the risk of death involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) was 3.1 times greater for more-disabled men and 1.9 times greater for less-disabled men, compared with non-disabled men; among women, the risk of death was 3.5 times greater for more-disabled women and 2.0 times greater for less-disabled women, compared with non-disabled women.
We do not, as ordinary people in England, have the freedom to prevent the State, the Government and the News Media from ignoring the science. We do not have the freedom to prevent the State, The Government and the News Media from deliberately ignoring the proven established public health mandates for handling an epidemic, just as we have no freedom to prevent the State from engaging in war and pursuing deliberate harm causation policy.
Boris Johnson lied in Parliament about the efficacy of zero community transmission, which we know is protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania. It's not rocket science, it is best public health epidemiological science. He claims his policy is led by data, not dates and yet he coerces 10 million school children to attend unsafe schools on an arbitrary date even as community transmission is well above levels recorded prior to the first lock down two weeks short of one year previous.
Johnson lies in Parliament.
Tony Blair is still a free man.
Tony Blair also lied in Parliament.
When Prime Ministers lie in Parliament why must millions of innocent people pay the price?.
Progress? What Progress?
Landing a lander on Mars whilst killing hundreds of thousands of citizens with bad management of an epidemic is not progress. Removing Saddam Hussein at the cost of 600,000 Iraqi lives was not bringing democracy to Iraq, it does not represent progress.
We need to have one - progress - without the other - avoidable harms to vulnerable citizens -to be able to say that we are a safe and functional Democracy. That would indeed represent human progress.
We need to be able to land a lander on Mars and not be waging war, not be deliberately mismanaging an epidemic to be a safe and healthy Democracy.
This system is a cult. It is not a culture, it is barely a society, it is a nasty, violent hierarchical cult. we the ordinary citizens are caught in it's grip, stuck between a wall and a hard place, doomed by the cult's desire to retain, maintain, enhance and project it's power above all other considerations. I do not blame ordinary people - we are all victimised and dehumanised by this situation.
When a person has internalised the cult, that person cannot see it for what it is.
When a person has de-colonised from the cult, that person can see it for what it is.
There are many valid questions concerning the long term efficacy of the various vaccines being rolled out, questions which can only be answered accurately as we see what happens, as we gather the data from the post vaccinated cohorts, which are matters of genuine and acceptable scientific uncertainty - this indicates to me, at least, that a zero community transmission strategy is still the only viable strategy available with which to save lives, protect our health care systems, our people and our people's economy in 2021/2/3.
The technical issue of how much time a good roll-out would take (setting aside for now concerns about mismanaged roll outs) implies continued risk of virus spread and community transmission continuing through out the time frame, with the additional risk of more mutations that might confer an advantage to the virus.
It is not too late to prevent further avoidable fatality and long term illness for many millions of people by stopping the spread of the virus. We are still at the early stages. no more than 10% of people in USUK have been infected, according to various estimates - there are variations where surges have been concentrated in large urban settings.
Such a strategy - Zero Community Transmission - can only work when the population is fully supported by the state and by industry. Every gap in support undermines our collective safety.
We are all in this together and that demands that all of us are working together for the same goal.
Lack of adequate support drives industries to compete for support for themselves, rather than for the whole of society.
People trying to merely survive due to inadequate support, oligarchs trying to make profit and a government trying to manage a slow spread whilst grabbing more powers ain't gonna work.
The Wealthy
Billionaires will take on more wealth no matter what - that is the nature of owning immense wealth that cannot be spent. It is invested, and those investments generate more and more and more wealth, irrespective of the daily activity of the billionaire owners. They can sit back and do nothing and still get up the next day much wealthier than the previous day.
Billionaires can never return to average financial status.
Billionaires can play philanthropy - and many do and quite a few are very focussed on providing support in a genuine and humane way. There's a lot more that can and must be done. But it is not to be left to individuals to take action.
There is resistance to a change in the existing systems of wealth creation, which is based on externalised costs, which creates their vast wealth. If all externalised costs were paid, such wealth would soon vanish and a new balance would emerge.
The poor and low income folk.
Externalised costs are the costs incurred in any activity that are not paid by those who are directing the activity - they are paid by others, by the environment and by the people.
Right now the US and UK Governments are externalising the cost of mismanagement of an epidemic to us the people.
Who is paying the price of mismanagement of the epidemic in the UK?
Billionaires and the wealthy can afford to isolate themselves from any epidemic with much more ease than the poor, the low income, the middle income working wage population. Some of the wealthy are arrogant enough to travel across borders, and become super spreaders, precisely because they can afford to isolate themselves more readily, in relative comfort.
I have access to small garden, in a shared house, which I rent. That places me in a much better position than people renting an apartment in a block of flats or a high rise. That affords me a bit of leg room and a safety that others cannot access.
I am in a better situation that someone who owns their apartment, in a block, even as I am substantially poorer. I bless my good fortune, yet I am uneasy about that lack for so many others, living in London..
That seems unfair.
Who am I to deserve such good fortune?
The poor, the disabled, the vulnerable and other low income folk.
And then there's all those who are homeless, those who are struggling with mental health and chronic ill health, there are entire families living in small apartments, some in high rises that are known fire traps - for those people this situation is a double danger induced by UK Government policy decisions.
Then the 'key workers' the lovely folk in the super market I frequent, the drivers and stackers, the door staff - the risks they are exposed to, their dedication to ensuring we are fed and well supplied.
It is a burden not shared by Westminster elites.
That is unfair, it is an injustice.
It is unfair because the policy choices of USUK Governments are the root cause of the repeated lockdowns, one after the other. There is no other causation for that cycle.
The correct strategy is one lockdown, breaking community transmission fully, treating every case in isolation, quarantining borders, etc for at most 12 weeks (and if done well, it does work) and then maintaining surveillance systems that can jump on any new clusters, isolate them and suppress the transmission of the virus. I would go as far as to say to pay people to do that is the Governments responsibility, it's core duty of care. Once the community transmission is totally suppressed, then the community can re-open, safely.
Stopping the spread is spreading the love.
Repeated open/shut policies as a result of deliberate government policy choice and action creates more time for more viral mutations, which can increase the risks for everyone. It adds stress to people's lives in myriad of ways untold, unspoken, endured.
Healthy people are the major spreaders of the virus, not the chronically ill. Tourism and Business class travel mixed with mismanagement has transformed an epidemic into a pandemic. UK has imported and exported variants since the beginning of the epidemic. Refused to control the borders. How ironic after Brexit.
Is there a Vietnamese or New Zealand Variant storming across Europe or America?
Allowing the virus to reach that part of our population with immuno-suppressive conditions - 11,000,000 people in the UK, 83,000,000 in USA - creates another lengthy well for more mutation possibilities, in that the virus lives for much longer in such cases, and thus has more time for more mutations and the emergence of new tricks.
The adverse outcomes of the deliberate policy of USUK Governments is what forces us indoors - it's not the virus that is doing this.
It is not people's confusion, nor is it peoples 'bad' behaviour either that drives this vicious cycle. These are for sure real problems, yet the solution is not more confused Government 'guidance' that appears to be more about the Governments saving face than our welfare as a people. That is totally unfair.
The root of the problem is the USUK Governments deliberate active policy.
To sum up the current situation: where we are is that both US and UK Governments have deliberately pursued a policy of slow spread, of letting it saunter through the population (rather than "rip through the population" as he said) until it is out of control, and galloping - repeatedly, surge upon reduction upon surge - even as New Zealand and Vietnam and others controlled the spread and broke the transmission of the virus within their communities, and thus proved the efficacy of zero community transmission strategies in different countries, with differing demographics. It works. It can work in any State.
This disaster has been enabled through deliberate mismanagement.
This is a deliberately induced cycle, it is not merely incompetence.
Deliberate is when the Government ministers and leaders are shown the evidence, when they are advised and warned by the best scientists across the globe, when they see other countries getting it right from the get go, and they still refuse to change course, even as more and more deaths occur, even as we find more long term chronic disease amongst survivors, even as health systems are pushed to their very limits - that is deliberate.
The mussed up hair, the blather, the messy suit and the portrayal of incompetence as a mask, a comfort, a soother rather than an accurate critical analysis. The taste of truth is bitter in his mouth.
To add to the charge sheet, we see the UK Government and Media repeatedly scapegoating different demographics of deliberately confused citizens exposed to all manner of conTheory which the Governments have allowed to permeate - indeed both Governments are in place precisely because of their political use of conTheory as a weapon within an electoral process - then we have a situation that is close to murderous as one can get, outside an ongoing war.
I stopped writing about the USUK Governments approach to SARSCOV-2, and the disease COVID19, and I stopped writing about reaching for a zero transmission status as the basis of correct strategic approach, back in June.
I felt had written everything that I felt that needed to said about the issue. The scale of dishonesty in Government, in Parliament, in News Media mirrors that found in ConTheory's funded by billionaires and others, and is a narrative so deeply embedded that it cannot be spoken too clearly in any area where ordinary people can regulate political and legislative and economic power.
"Shhhhh...! We're trying our best, in difficult circumstances!"
What? A series of contracts rushed out to 'friendly' private contractors, without an open bid process, quite often cutting out the pre-existing suppliers of what ever was being contracted, from PPE to Contact Tracing, from full body bag storage to Ventilator Machines (which are not as efficacious as CPAP) being reinvented by a Hoover Company. The PR folly of Nightingale Hospitals which were designed to house serious cases, with ventilators for every bed, a deliberate choice, instead of Fever Hospitals to feed symptomatic cases at the earliest stage, where they can be treated and monitored away from the community and away from General Hospitals.
"Fancang shelter hospitals were developed and used for the first time in China to tackle the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak.
but it refers to a novel concept: large, temporary hospitals built by converting public venues, such as stadiums and exhibition centres, into health-care facilities to isolate patients with mild to moderate symptoms of an infectious disease from their families and communities, while providing medical care, disease monitoring, food, shelter, and social activities."
That choice coincided with the choice to return elderly patients from Hospitals where the virus was know to be present, without testing them, back to their care homes, to make space in Hospitals for what was expected to happen. Both choices increased likelihood of spread of the infection. I have written about this previously.
Many people were making big fees in all of this, others banking huge profits, for what appears to me to be getting in the way of the proven and known efficacious responses that were need.
New Zealand's government acted on the data, the evidence and the lived experience and lessons learned by the East Asian countries.
The UK Government had the same data, the same evidence, and outside of advisors who are in reality political appointments, Epidemiologists and Public Health expertise were shouting the alarm. The experts were ignored, some Government appointed experts in SAGE touting 'Herd Immunity' as the final solution.
"The only way to stop this epidemic is indeed through achieving Herd Immunity." Professor John Edmunds.
I could go on. We all need to log all of this, to know what is being done, and to find ways to reduce harms across the board, and not accept the false narrative set up of The Economy vs The Welfare of the People, as a dichotomy/
I don't like to think in terms of 'masses', demographics, nationalities or large group labels.
People are persons, human beings, each and every one is precious, unique, important.
I don't subscribe to terms of superior or inferior, primitive or civilised, or to terms that caricature whole groups of people.
"All Women are......", or "Men are all alike..." are caricatures and they obliviate important meaningful detail. Indeed avoiding those human details is the curse of national policy protocols designed by ideologues. They assume an aggregate, and design policy on that basis, quite often with thought to the detail variations of each persons life and experience.
Life is way too detailed and personal for each of us, only to be blotted out by averaging, finding a mean, creating a label, imposing a caricature.
Detail matters,
Thus the Good Law Project looks at specifics, the detail. News Media tends to headline and sub-edit much of the available information. One needs to check it oneself....
I had been quite feverish in my interest, having spent 5 weeks in bed, more or less, going through this strange 'flu'. I have not yet been tested so I cannot say 100% that those 5 weeks were due to COVID-19. It was certainly worse than any previous viral infection I have had. Being feverishly ill at that time focused my mind a bit,
Me, and COVID19, maybe.
I have to say that I was very worried, and that I was frightened when symptoms started taking hold. I knew very little about this. I had not been paying attention to what had been happening in China, East Asia etc, largely because I do not watch News.
I was also unaware of the 2001 SARS outbreak and containment. I think 9/11 pushed that off the front pages. Just as the Invasion of Iraq pushed awareness of MERS in 2003. Two previous outbreaks, which were successfully contained, by breaking community transmission, using contact tracing, quarantine, isolation treatment, social support. A fact that most East Asians were well aware of.
Nobody I know in London or anywhere else knew anything about either at the time I was falling ill. It was my daughter who alerted me to the situation, in that I demonstrated the arrogance of my ignorance enough for her to comment on it. I realised I knew nothing about this SARSCOV2/COVID19
That there was already a history to this story became clearer over the next few weeks, as I learned more.
Give me Fever!
Fever is part of the bodies natural anti-viral response, and I learned this from Dr. John Campbell, whose videos I found in late March. Vitamin C and D, fluids, rest, keeping warm, enduring headaches, aches, (avoiding Ibuprofen and others like it) confusion, weakened breathing, sweats in waves of intensity and hoping everything I was doing was helping my body deal with the infection.
One of his videos suggested that learning from the experience, the errors and corrections of the East Asian approach to the epidemic might be a good move. There's so much valuable detail in those errors and learnings that ought to be informing USUK collective action on this epidemic nationally and globally the pandemic.
All the while I was reading, sweating, coughing, studying, watching news reports, reading specialist blogs, looking to see what I could find out that was reliable evidenced nuanced descriptions of what was really happening.
I even looked for and found a CoViD-19 anti-gen testing kit that one could buy online - the East Asians already had them before the European stage of Pandemic - and found one that could deliver a reading within 30 minutes, based on a pin prick blood sample. As to it's efficacy, it is still available on the market.
Learning refused.
And yet the Western States decided to create their own new tools, from scratch, as local and national epidemics were emerging. Rather than hit the track running, they hit the track of infection control stumbling, and have continued to refuse to learn how to run in this particular challenge. That said, they have disbursed a lot of cash, tax payers cash, in failing to learn - or perhaps it is intentional, and Herd Immunity is the price of Hoard Immunity in the eyes of the Establishment,
This was mostly via private sector contracts with political supporters rather than National Health and University systems. I watched in horror as USUK ignored the experience of the East Asians in order. It just did not make any sense. I could see what New Zealand and Vietnam, Taiwan and Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore and many others had done and were doing, and it was working.
My mind boggled when it was explained away by 'well they are compliant populations in authoritarian states'.... what? There's no way to reach that level of stupid, that internalised caricatured delusion.
Then in April I was shown Johnson's February 3rd Speech in Greenwich where he says :
""And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.
And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.
We are ready for the great multi-dimensional game of chess in which we engage in more than one negotiation at once and we are limbering up to use nerves and muscles and instincts that this country has not had to use for half a century.".
Really?
worried that others "go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage."
Medically irrational policies, one after the other.
Policies that make no Epidemiological or Public Health sense at all.
"Empty the pubs at 10pm? "
Ludicrous!
There is no scientific evidence to support that policy.
"Groups limited to 6 people at 6 feet distance, 1 metre if wearing masks."
"Masks are ineffective."
Masks slow down spread, reduce viral loads.
"Masks are an imposition upon our God given freedoms."
Lunacy on all sides.
Contact Tracing is is a core capability needed to track where the virus is, and to identify cases to be treated, contacts to be alerted, quarantined and underpinned with economic or financial support for people to stay indoors, until the community transmission drops to zero. It is not test dependent.
Testing enhances the precision of contact tracing, yet testing does not replace that basic task - with every identified case of illness, that cases contacts are reached and supported fully to enter a two week quarantine.
If, during that time, they develop symptoms, they are moved to a Fever Hospital for immediate treatments support, designed to prevent escalation of the disease, to provide support to all mild cases to recover, and then return to the community, more or less immune, feeling looked after. If they do not develop symptoms they return to the community, and the community adopts zero community transmission as their collective strategic approach, supported by the State. It's not complicated, it is complex, and it is a person to person job at the point where contacts are being met and supported....
China's Central State Government, Universities, Corporations and Military collectively ramped such a system system up within weeks, deploying 18,000 contact tracers, in the middle of an uncontrolled infection transmission in a city of 11 million people. And it worked, even before testing was widely available.
We in the UK after 8 months have a bunch of privatised provisions with none of that efficacy, with a Tax Payer bill for £12 billion for the basic tools, which are not functional.
£12 billion of which a substantial portion has been gouged out as profit, fees, commissions and so forth, all of which add no social material value or efficiency to the privatised test and trace system. Quite a few new millionaires have been created. Small, inactive companies with no previous experience are afforded multi million pound PPE supply contracts. If a paper company with £130,000 assets gets a no bid contract for £108 million, someone has made a 10% cut on that deal.
Other examples of grift abound - Contact Trace Staff are paid basic wage, yet the company charges the government more than twice that amount. Meanwhile the workers are not so busy, and their systems are inefficient.
If those workers were integrated into local NHS and Council provision, with the funding to go with it.... that's more effective systems, more integrated systems, local knowledge and understanding, community cohesion, and thus better roll out, better outcomes for the community and no one needs to be making a vast profit..
Seeking power to make more profit makes everything complicated.
We are where we are.
As I have already told you, I starting back in end of March I read a lot, thought some more and wrote about this experience as it seemed to me then. My blog went from average 800 hits a month to 14,000 hits per month. And nothing changed. The irresponsible insanity continued. I realised that I am such a small teenie little being in all of this. Barely a ripple in the water, and with water this choppy what's a ripple worth - the ripple of an empty life jacket floating on the surface whilst the person who wore it sinks and drowns? My trade has disappeared. No more sound engineering, no more event hosting, no more live gigs, and when the 'economy was reopened' we had to host small events that never even broke even. The Music Industry is quiet on Zero Community Transmission. Who will help us?
Impotence
I gave up on the writing about it all for a while. I decided to stop, to watch and to be - to protect myself, my state of mind, to avoid burn out or worse, I chose to relax as much as possible throughout the summer, outdoors as much as I could be, getting the sun shine, feeling the nurture of a fertile spring and summer in the vegetation. I let go in the hope that something would change, and in order to give me time to assimilate my newly re-discovered impotence. I am tiny. Really feeling that right now. I have always been well aware of it.
We are, as individuals, impotent by comparison to the institutions of State. That is why collective organisation and action is so important. The emergence of workers organisations in the 19th Century is meaningful.
When the institutions of State fail to address the needs of the people, unless the people are united we cannot act in ways to correct the problem.
It can be done.
It has been done.
It is a process, an incomplete and imperfect work, that will require constant attention over generations.
"....countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle.
They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.
Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty.
When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation.
Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment.
Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living."
It was not easy.
Strikes, deeper poverty, state violence, an economic depression, mortgage failures, unemployment.... over two decades of effort by the lower income sector until economics undermined the middle class too, and they participated in the shift, consciously.
Consciously.
The Norwegian grass roots had the evidence, the lived experience and thus a fuller collective understanding of the specific issues confronting them.
The material truth will set us free, always, whereas 'The Truth' as an ideological stance or religious belief is always a prison.
Belief as a weapon system.
Belief and custom are relative, what is true is universal. A table is a table, yet some make tables for sitting on the floor with, others for sitting at the table with chairs.
Invoking 'The Truth' is usually an attempt to avoid or negate the universally experienced by claiming an idealised specific is universal, and the lived experience ought then to conform to that, and where it does not, it must be corrected.
Belief in a God of Wrath, a Loving Bully, reflects a belief about the righteousness of Hierarchy and the justification of violence utilised to protect Hierarchy. Both God and Natural Hierarchy of Power are belief system concepts, and are made materially real by institutionalisation and by the people operating within those institutions who tend to assume the power of the institution is theirs, personally.
Internalised values, those values absorbed by being inducted into an institution - military training internalises the Military ethic into the infantry fighter and the officer alike. Obey orders, with commitment, protect your team mates, conquer the enemy.
Passive aggressive management and behavioural nudge non-science.
The deliberate mismanagement of their local epidemics by USUK Governments (their scapegoating, their misinformation and the public narrative gas lighting are all deeply, profoundly dishonest and they are using confusion as a shield, and that much at least is deliberate, as in deliberate avoidance of duty of care and responsibility) and the scope and spread of viral ConTheory has ensured that there are enough people who are misled, misinformed and vocal about it as to be able to 'report' and thus market the confusion of conTheory to make it look bigger than it really is, big enough to mask the deliberate mismanagement.
Passive aggressive management techniques include giving targets vague sets of instructions, which require them to take decisions the manager ought take responsibility for.
The passive aggressive manager neglects to provide full support to the targets, and thus sets the target up for taking the fall. If things go wrong, blame the actions of the target.
The passive aggressive manager is a politician seeking power.
Making mountains of mole hills.
In populations of many tens of millions a one day protest of 30,000 people is a minute event. A small football stadium. Everyone there thought it was huge. It was not huge.
Put it on the News, and it's hit!
Even getting a million hits on an online video is no longer truly huge. A politician speaking at a conference is a small event. Put it on the news, it becomes something else. Reality and myth making.
Put the conTheory protesters on the News to castigate or 'censor' them, and they look much, much bigger than they really are. Justin Beiber. Madonna. Fame mechanics. Making conTheory Famous Already.
Cult Bands
A band with a following of 30,000 is a small cult band. But if I am one of the cult, I think we are bigger than we really are, and more special than we really are.
That is a key to the manipulative 'magic' of marketing, the Oz factor - magnifying any given subject by repetitive exposure and suitable props. Theatre.
I might occasionally read of a terrible crime, and then in a sudden news surge I hear of five such incidents in a day, for a week throughout the News cycle and even though I have no direct experience, nothing in my life or community that reflects that kind of criminality I am worried.
My emotional state has been affected. Worry hormone cascades occur. If that surge persists, then what it triggers becomes my habituated state. It is also possible that I have unresolved trauma, and that some of my reactivity is embedded in that experience, my woundedness, my protectiveness.
And I don't really notice this is actually happening. I notice what the News media train me to notice, and I internalise it. Daily habituation. What I might not know is that there are hundreds of such crimes daily across a population as the average, and that average has dropped over the decades, and that the real risk of contact with such crimes is growing less and less with each passing day, that I am in real terms pretty safe. The Cult of Law and Order that Right Wing politicians deploy is rooted in the narrative that this is not so.
Fear of The Immigrant is a Xenophobic Cult Belief.
You do know that Capitalism is a cult, right?
Idealised beliefs opposing or denying any part of the whole of the evidence held by any group of people, that also includes othering those who do not subscribe to the same sets of idealised beliefs.
I was born into a cults and went through a number of cults throughout my childhood, teens and into my thirties. You were too, most likely. Cults are everywhere.
What I was doing was swapping one set of beliefs for another, like a download, without any integration or real understanding, and sad to say, it was only because that was going nowhere for me, I was not feeling any better about myself or my life that I asked myself "what was the point? "
Why swap one set of beliefs for another? Why belief?
On the positive side - and this is just a personal assessment, and in no way condones the practice - the variety of cults exposed me to many different ideas, practices, pragmatics, ways of seeing and thinking, ways of cooking and composting poop. On the negative side was the insistence on attaching to The Belief and The Mission - the two operate together. A sense of purpose. and yet the same psychological and emotional issues emerging, time and time again. No real growth. No wisdom. Nothing gets dome.
The Mission.
The Mission is to spread The Belief.
Believers know the value of their belief for everyone else! lol. The Believer feels more secure when more people share The Belief and when they can gather together, the social bond of The Shared Belief deepens. Thus they always want more people to join in The Belief.
Maintaining The Belief becomes a central activity - exposure to any evidence that undermines The Belief initiates fight or flight reactions because The Belief is internalised. Thus the mission becomes a personal matter, a question of identity. I am The Mission, I am The Belief. And therein lies the hook. As long as I remain on The Mission I must maintain The Belief. I must never look for and the real me.
If I maintain The Belief I must carry out The Mission. Even if I only convert one person over a life time, that would be considered a victory. If I question The Belief, then The Mission fails. If I question the tactics of The Mission, then The Belief is brought into question. And so forth. A bit like co-dependent 'intimate' relationships.
These are all lessons I learned in the slow process of becoming consciously observant of myself....
The Mission is a fake. The Belief is a fake. The Work is a Fake. Civilisation as we know it is a fake. The Space Mission to fly to the stars is a fake. War is a fake.
Any policy other than Zero Community Transmission is fake.
The purpose of being alive, as far as I can tell, in biologically meaningful terms is to live well,
To live well is to behave in ways that nurture the habitat and the community.
It is to live with much loving attention across one's entire community, to care for the young and watch over them as they learn how to live, knowing they will learn everything they need, in good time. a healthy community understands that the children are to be trusted in this, and never forced.
That is it. Thrive, and do not harm the children, your own or any others. In terms of physical fitness, emotional balance, psychological groundedness and general sociability, these are biological health benchmarks of the egalitarian human being.
With that in place, then the natural creativity of us humans expresses itself in a myriad of languages and cultures, practices and ways of living with very specific habitats, from Ice and Ocean, to Land and Forest. Diversity is our natural state, homogeneity is not our natural state - we vary because we are sensitive to the habitat and to one another.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
