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.
