I can’t believe what I’m hearing on the news these days with the “experts” telling us all that we’ll have to lock up at home for several months and social distance for months.
How absurd.
Let’s have a look at what they were originally trying to achieve, and what they are doing now.
First, North East Asia.
North East Asia experienced a SARS outbreak in 2002-2003, so their initial response makes sense. SARS had a mortality rate of around 18%, which is massive. Furthermore, it was easy to contain because people weren’t contagious until they experienced symptoms. So anyone with symptoms was quarantined and they fixed the problem.
But COVID-19 is highly contagious even before the onset of symptoms. Some people don’t even have visible symptoms (e.g.. fever, cough) until hours before they die. So COVID-19 simply isn’t containable. It WILL spread, much as the H1N1 flu did. That ended up infecting around 1.4 billion people around the world.
It should be clear to all of Asia that COVID-19 is a very different beast from SARS, and the measures taken to combat SARS simply aren’t appropriate. But like governments elsewhere, when they set on a course that clearly doesn’t work, they keep on going. Korea and Singapore may indeed be slowing the spread to just 2-3% a day, but they can’t stop it. Even if they were able to knock it on the head domestically, once international flights resume, it will return.
THE US and Europe
The experts wheeled out on the news channels, when they’re allowed to talk sense, generally talk about “flattening the curve.” This makes sense for countries with robust health systems that can handle a lot more patients than usual over an extended period. Hopefully the measures they are taking will indeed flatten the curve.
But it does look like they are losing sight of the objective. Most states have “Stay at Home” directives which essentially kills the entire economy. And for what? The experts generally agree that the virus is uncontainable and the best that can be achieved is to slow it down and flatten the curve. But state governors seem to think staying at home will contain the virus. Even if it were, it would lead to an unhealthy, overweight population living on processed food. Ok, so not much difference there. But most experts agree that there’s very little chance of contracting the virus when out of doors.
Spain and France are locked up, the UK has largely shut down, and everyone is forced indoors to become unhealthy and more vulnerable to the virus.
The mayor of New York closed down playgrounds. That’s the antithesis of staying healthy.
Even given the absurdities going on in Europe, the US, Australia and other countries with robust healthcare facilities, they may be able to flatten the curve and save some lives, but is it worth it? That’s the subject of another post.
Developing countries with poor healthcare systems
Here’s where the real absurdity starts. Flattening the curve ONLY makes sense if it means the longer curve gives the state time to ramp up medical facilities. In countries with healthcare systems that can’t even handle a good day in summer, what’s the point?
Flattening the curve just means the same number of people get sick and die over a longer period while causing incredible economic, social, and medical hardship on the population. In fact, it arguably going to lead to MORE people dying because it means the already inadequate healthcare facilities will remain clogged with COVID-19 patients over a longer period, denying the facilities to the normal load of accident victims and patients with other maladies.
Politicians in these countries aren’t even doing their own thinking. They are listening to other experts in countries with completely different circumstances.
How is a curfew going to help in South Africa where there are 20-30 people sharing 3-4 bedroom dwellings in the townships?
The hardest hit country by official figures is San Marino with 0.7% of the population testing positive. But they have 47 doctors per 1000 people. That’s 5 doctors per COVID-19 patient. They still have a mortality rate of 1.4%.
How is flattening the curve going to help in the poorer African countries who have only 47 doctors per MILLION people? That’s rhetorical question. It’s not going to help at all, obviously.
Even Nigeria, which has a whopping 280 doctors per million people, can’t possibly cope. Most African countries can’t even afford the tests, so the reported numbers are meaningless.
And unlike the Ebola outbreaks, there’s no help coming from the rest of the world. Nobody has spare medical staff and equipment to send overseas.
All they are achieving is a protracted economic and social disaster. The smart politicians (e.g. Hungary) are using the crisis to gain more power. But if politicians aren’t even using this for a power grab, they are stupid sheep.
India
It may not have been a special case, but it’s becoming one.
The Indian government decided to lock down the population. “Go home and stay there.”
This was AFTER cancelling air flights and trains.
So the Indian population is heading home. On foot. In large crowds. 250 million of them live in poverty in overcrowded slums with no income now that they’ve been forced off their jobs.
Sending 250 million people to overcrowded slums to beg on the street, scavenge in scrap heaps, suffer malnutrition, and possibly starve to death isn’t a solution to anything other than over population.
But… this is the same government that cancelled all large denomination bank notes overnight to curtail corruption. It didn’t work of course. History will show that the demonetization debacle wasn’t the dumbest thing this government did. Not by a long shot.
Venezuela
Interspersed between news items describing how the US and other western countries are fighting the war against COVID-19 and attacks on the few US governors who haven’t ordered all the businesses in their states to close down, Venezuela pops up once in a while as a country sent into economic crisis by government intervention in the economy to help the people.
Somehow, the irony seems totally lost on the reporters and news anchors.
And now… China
Amazingly, China seems to be the one sensible country. The Chinese government is unique in the world in that it has the power to order the pandemic to stop and command all Chinese citizens to top dying from COVID-19.
Like other countries, China went into lockdown in several cities to prevent the virus spreading, and even started reporting (on a selective basis) positive COVID-19 tests.
But once the Party decided the crisis was over and that Winnie the Poo could visit Wuhan, reporting came to a halt (except for imported cases from foreigners and returning Chinese).
Xi ordered China back to work and ordered cinemas to reopen. That only lasted a few days and they were closed again, despite hardly any new cases being reported.
The fact is, COVID-19 is way out of control in China, but reporting on it is now illegal.
Maybe China could have just admitted that the virus is out of control, but that wouldn’t really be in character for a totalitarian regime. Better just to control the news and let the virus run its course.
Ironically, this denial of the virus may help China weather the storm because the sooner everyone gets exposed to it, the sooner it’s safe to go outside.
So what’s next?
Given how contagious this virus is, and I’ll look at that with a comparison with what happened with H1N1, it looks like either a) it goes out of control and 30-50% of the world’s population contracts it; or b) it gets suppressed, businesses return to normal, and like the Spanish Flu of 1918, there will be a second wave which will be more deadly in countries which suppressed the original outbreak.
Yes, this is conjecture. But it’s based on historical fact — as recently as this year and as far back as a century ago.
This is a pandemic that can’t be stopped and can’t be suppressed.
Some may remember a period when parents would simply accept that their kids would get the mumps, German measles, and chicken pox, and develop a lifetime immunity to them. I’m not suggesting that we deliberately spread the infection through the population. But maybe politicians need to accept that, like the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the H1N1 epidemic of 2002, a third of the population is going to contract the virus and millions will die no matter what the state does.
It takes a gutsy politician to do that. But eventually the idiots we elect will need to see that forcing half the world’s population into poverty will kill more people than it saves. Arguably, half the world’s population already lives in poverty. Forcing these people into extreme poverty, where 3% of children die before they are five years old, so save them from a virus with a 1.5% mortality rate doesn’t make much sense to me.
In the US, where 9.6% of the population lives in poverty, being in the bottom quartile means you have a 5% shorter life expectancy than those in the second bottom quartile. Shoving tens of millions of Americans into poverty where they live 5% less seems an odd remedy for attempting to save a few thousand lives.
More soon.
P.
