Coronavirus: The Big Wake-Up Call

Well, we’ve had our VE Day celebration, but was World War Two anything to get fussed about? Not if you share the mindset of Covideniers.

The second Great War killed 384,000 UK military and 70,000 British civilians https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympic-britain/crime-and-defence/the-fallen/, in all 454,000 casualties out of a 1939 population numbering 47,760,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_in_1939 , or 0.95%. On average we lost around 6,200 per month from start to VJ Day.

By contrast, UK deaths attributed to coronavirus since the first on 28 February have run at the equivalent of over 16,000 per month. The latest ONS figures https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales , bringing us up to May Day, show that something is certainly happening, and the shape of the virus line in the graph below matches the grey line pretty well, so if the bulge is not owing to Covid-19 then I should be interested to hear an alternative explanation. As to the meme that ‘they would have died from something else soon anyway’, the jury is still out; we leave the excess-deaths calculations to the official analysts, and it could take them years to decide.

Fortunately, the curve was heading downwards at last report. The much-criticised Professor Ferguson had forecast around 600,000 deaths if no action were taken (0.9% of our current population of 66.65 million – very similar to the WWII toll); I think it is far too early for the Internet’s neo-experts to use the present decline as evidence that the model was wrong and that nothing much need have been done.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t review strategy now, and not merely because the public and the world of business is keen for a return to what we used to regard as normal. We now have more hospital beds, more ventilators (assuming they are the answer) and more (though still not enough) supplies of PPE equipment and testing kits. That said, there is the possibility of another, perhaps bigger spike later this year, as per the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919, so spare capacity may turn out to be barely sufficient after all, pace the empty-hospital Nightingale-nigglers. The vital need to maintain our economy, against significant loss of life: it’s a horribly difficult balance to strike.

Did that balance need striking? A crisis develops into catastrophe through a series of forced moves and hard choices. The point of contingency planning and preparation is to sidestep that sequence, but historically, the British way is to let a disaster happen, then scramble to survive and hope for a big helping of luck. If only we had listened to Churchill in his wilderness years… HMG, binge, brewery.

So, among the lessons that are definitely to be learned, one of them is that not all need have been learned the hard way. The UK had two golden opportunities to prepare: first, the studies and simulations here and in the USA going back years, that taught us some of the things we would need; secondly, a last chance to get ready as the virus burned its way through China but hadn’t yet come here.

It’s not entirely our fault. When the Chinese were so ruthlessly locking down Wuhan and other areas, why did they let international flight departures continue with little if any restriction, when this form of transport was known to be a main vector for spreading respiratory disease around the world? Nevertheless, even now, the UK Government is merely considering quarantine for incoming airline passengers. Melanie Phillips contrasts our approach and its consequences with those in Greece and Israel, here https://www.melaniephillips.com/terrible-cost-ignoring-common-sense/ . The Greeks say, ‘Pathema, mathema’: ‘I suffered, I learned’; but it seems that our lessons aren’t learned. even after the pain.

Now that our eyes have opened, there is more we should be seeing. One is the long-standing disgrace of the care home sector – scramble, scramble, goes the Government. Another is standards of public hygiene generally – how many deaths from influenza were preventable, over the years?

There is a personal lesson to learn, too. We know that we are more liable to suffer and die from the virus not just if we are old but if we are obese, diabetic and so on. This disease is now out of Pandora’s box and it’s not going back in. Sooner or later, we are likely to come into contact with it and our best chance of survival is to be as fit as possible. We have to address our weight issues, dietary habits (that can cure Type 2 diabetes in many cases, it seems) and exercise routines (without getting sweaty in gyms). These are things that the Government and NHS cannot do for us; and they could also help us defer or escape other health challenges.

Don’t wait for a vaccine. In the first place, it’s not certain that a safe and effective vaccine can be developed. Bill Gates has what (if I am to be charitable, and discount the profit motive) is a naïve belief in vaccines, despite his less-than-encouraging experiments in mass vaccination schemes in India and Africa; but even he has referred to the need for legal indemnity (see from 16:00 in this video https://youtu.be/o7A_cMpKm6w ) as he contemplates jabbing the whole world. He plucks a figure of one-in-a thousand adverse reactions out of the air – a mere seven million humans – but who knows what the actual casualty rate would be? Remember that much of the world is far less well-nourished than we – and even in our country, many people are technically malnourished, used to eating the wrong (cheap) things. Also, it’s possible that a vaccine may itself trigger outbreaks among the ‘immune-depressed’, as witness the massive measles epidemic among Yanomami jungle tribespeople in 1968 http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Methods/Tierney.htm .

Now let us widen the focus. We have become far too dependent on a system of international trade that has made us very vulnerable. I have read that when the USA opened up its markets to the Chinese economy, in part it was a strategy to drive a wedge between the Middle Kingdom and Russia, both then Communist countries. However, this was exploited by the Western business class to undercut and immiserate their own workers and boost corporate profits, so weakening our economies and throwing enormous debt onto us all -

‘Global debt across all sectors rose by over $10 trillion in 2019, topping $255 trillion. At over 322% of GDP*, global debt is now 40 percentage points ($87 trillion) higher than at the onset of the 2008 financial crisis—a sobering realization as governments worldwide gear up to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘ [* Gross Domestic Product, i.e. total economic activity] https://www.iif.com/Search-Results?sb-search=total+debt+to+gdp&sb-bhvr=1&sb-logid=51481-gqau9z7y7v88l19y  (£)

… but especially the ‘First World’ economies; and it’s not just government debt we should be talking about. Governments can keep rolling-over and increasing their debt issuance, whereas private individuals and corporations can be driven into cashflow crisis with loans that must be repaid within some limited timescale.

Overall, it has been getting far worse, even without the dislocations caused by Covid-19. In 2012, a McKinsey report https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Global%20Capital%20Markets/Uneven%20progress%20on%20the%20path%20to%20growth/MGI_Debt_and_deleveraging_Uneven_progress_to_growth_Report.ashx

 looked at total national debts -  what the US calls ‘Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding’ (TCMDO) – and found that the burden on America was then 279% of GDP; by the end of 2019 this had grown to 347% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=7h0A . The same report showed that Japan and the UK were far worse off – over 500% debt-to-GDP. Unlike the USA, the UK does not routinely record this ratio and goodness knows where we stood before the coronavirus hit us.

We have been in systemic trouble for a very long time. As debt grows, it cuts into discretionary income. Financial commentators like this one https://capx.co/keep-calm-we-can-bear-the-cost-of-coronavirus/ sanguinely hope for a bounce back, but a wave of insolvencies will start a round of beggar-my-neighbour: who is ready to splurge when the all-clear sounds? So far, the UK and USA have kept things going by dropping interest rates to near-zero, but this is hammering the ability of pension funds to pay annuities, which are generally secured with government bonds. Add in a stock valuation swoon and the prospect of a comfortable retirement flees ahead of the investor.

In a way, the coronavirus was a trigger, or catalyst, for problems that have developed personally and communally for decades. Be prepared.