Things in Australia are now moving almost as rapidly towards a less insane policy as in the UK. It is already too late to avoid catastrophe in the UK but Australia has more time in which to at least reduce the scale by a larger factor than the UK can hope to achieve.
Basically scientists have been unleashing a flood of papers that make it pretty clear governments will be held criminally liable for negligence, with proof beyond reasonable doubt. They are more polite about it, but they are “expert witnesses” spelling out the case for prosecution.
The UK Center for Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases has published some prototype “Explorable Explanations” with widgets eg so that anybody can get a “feel” for the UK running out of hospital critical care beds by the end of this month (with the numbers needed doubling every 1-2 days).
These are still server based Dashboards probably prepared from Jupyter R notebooks using “Shiny”. But they seem to have the server bandwidth to sustain the traffic so far. It won’t be long before easier to understand “Explorables” are available for routine inclusion in any blog post using only browser resources without server support. The difference in impact is roughy comparable to the printing press vs copying out manuscripts by hand. But the prototypes had to come first.
The “Group of Eight” Universities have come out with a group of experts from all relevant fields insisting that the government must “go hard and go now”. Oddly the only google link for that is here:
At the end there is a link to the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies – SAGE:
That page is now being updated “on a regular basis with the latest available evidence provided to SAGE.” Note the word “to”, not from. The flood of research is now spilling out of academia onto official government web sites.
There is even a fine grained Agent Based Model for Australia now available via a link from this summary:
I am still studying it, but it does argue that 80% compliance with “social distancing” measure would be needed to get the outbreak under control in 4 months. It does not spell out that 80% compliance is rather implausible without Quarantine accommodation.
Nor does it emphasize that “under control” merely means ending the first outbreak so that it isn’t just doubling every couple of days and there is time to cope. Controls will need to continue on and off until either an effective vaccine has been deployed or most of the population has been infected at a rate the hospitals plus any anti-viral drugs developed can cope with.
I still haven’t seen anybody else advocating a crash program for Quarantine accommodation to isolate infected and vulnerable people from the households they are in. But there is now lots of thinking about how to organize school children during a long shut down.
As explained in my last post in this series that Quarantine accommodation can be arranged much actual new buildings. But it still takes time and needs lots of help from tradies. So it is particularly stupid that the construction industry as being treated as though it was an “essential service” when it obviously isn’t constructing anything essential – like Quarantine accommodation. Most of the construction workers still getting infected on the job will recover in time to help with fitting up Quarantine accommodation for the next few waves if not for the first one. But it suggests there is still no intention to rapidly move into using the establishments and workforce now shutdown to actually do anything to reduce infection rates apart from staying at home.
Still, the complacency is ending. That had to happen for action to begin.
The title of this post in the covid-19 series here is from a pamphlet by Lenin at the end of October 1917. Lenin begins with the words “Famine is Approaching”:
We are not in that situation nor anything like it. But there is an impending catastrophe which has been thoroughly documented by the “Imperial College Covid-19 response team” in a series of technical reports:
The current absurd floundering will not result in famine. But it could result in more avoidable deaths from Covid-19 than the total deaths from the “Spanish Flu” which killed more people than the “Geat War” that immediately preceded it – the “War to End All Wars”.
This is very likely in countries ruled by Kleptocracies like many in Africa. But already the failure to prepare is killing large numbers in Italy, with Spain and France close behind and London less than three weeks behind Italy on the same trajectory. Lots of people will also die unnecessarily in countries that are modern industrial democracies with blithering idiots in charge of pretending the owners care about the people.
The potential catastrophe we face is much smaller than the consequences of famine. A Case Fatality Rate of 6% or so instead of less than 1% that could have been achieved if quarantine arrangements were prepared to spread out the peak case load. Say half a million avoidable deaths in the UK, 2 or 3 million in the USA, less than a hundred thousand or so in Australia. Nowhere near as bad as famine…
Most of the deaths will be the result of hospital Intensive Care Units so overwhelmed they cannot provide life saving treatment for the most severe case numbers beyond available capacity.
Figure 3 of this recent authoritative announcement has a clearly labelled graph on “flattening the curve”:
Figure 3 Flattening the Curve – Avoidable DEATHS not prevented
Instead of just the usual horizontal line showing “Health System Capacity” lower than an early high peak and just above a slower spread out peak it adds a label for the very large shaded region above that line for the high peak and the smaller region still above that line, for spreading out.
The label is “Unmet Need”.
That is clear enough. A sharper version, more easily understood and acted on would be:
“Avoidable DEATHS not prevented”.
But even the milder version is omitted from more recent authoritative announcements.
Australia is on roughly the same trajectory as London, Italy and the United States. “Community Transmission” is already well under way in NSW and Queensland and has just got started in Victoria. It makes sense for the other States and Territories to close their borders to buy some more time just as it made sense internationally.
But it won’t be enough.
Update: If this sounds alarmist check out today’s Australian on what others far more qualified to express an opinion are saying:
Infectious disease modellers say the current round of restrictions would quarter the number of likely infections at the peak of the epidemic, but even with those social distancing measures in place, unless further measures were taken, Australia could still hit a peak of 125,000 infections a day — a level that would overwhelm the nation’s intensive care units.
…
Cases of COVID-19 are currently doubling every four days in Australia and heading towards a trajectory of a three-day doubling. If the epidemic were allowed to continue in this manner, University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely said infections could climb to as many as 500,000 a day within weeks.
Under that scenario, the reproductive number of the virus is 2.5 — meaning every person infected with the virus would pass it to 2½ others. Social distancing measures are likely to reduce the reproductive number, known as R0.
Professor Blakely has modelled the impact of social distancing measures and predicts the moves to close pubs, clubs, restaurants and sporting facilities could reduce the R0 to 1.2 by the end of May. That would see the epidemic peak at about 125,000 infections a day in late May, with 60 per cent of the population infected.
Based on modelling completed by epidemiologists from Imperial College London, and adapting their model to Australia, Professor Blakely predicts that by the epidemic’s end, 165,000 people, or 0.84 per cent of cases, would require intensive care, assuming 60 per cent of people of all ages were infected.
Medium Term
Below on “How to Combat It” is mainly about short term measures. Days and weeks of “Impending Catastrophe”.
Fortunately longer term measures are already under way as explained at the end
Scientists and “nerds” are already pushing aside the barriers to effective cooperation from “Intellectual Property” far more rapidly than the rest of society is moving to push aside other forms of private property in the means of production.
The Enlightenment “Republic of Letters” is emerging again in a modern form with rapid mobilization forcing changes in public health policy as documented in earlier articles of this series:
For those who think they already understand and could not even bother to read the links in those posts there are already some excellent animated videos to explain the basics eg:
Why the actual numbers are much larger and growing faster than the statistics catching up:
Estimating actual COVID 19 cases (novel corona virus infections) in an area based on deaths
Some visualizations that are steps towards “Explorable Explanations” with sliders and other widgets to get a “feel” for what is happening and what can be changed can be found here:
It also makes sense to immediately commandeer hotels as well as private hospitals for conversion into Emergency Hospitals and use entirely separate hospital buildings for covid-19 rather than attempting infection control within the same hospital buildings as wards for other patients. No doubt that will all be done along with many other things to raise capacity.
For those interested in the measures for rapidly expanding healthcare capacity a thorough current account of covid-19 for Emergency Medecine Critical Care professionals is here:
Only the first section is likely to be of wider interest to other health workers. I think that first section is adequately summarized for a wider general audience in the public information campaigns now based on accurate advice from Centers for Disease Control etc. Note that the discussion of precautions against possible airborne transmission in above link is only relevant for those actually treating infectious patients.
No doubt surgeons no longer doing elective surgery will be taught how to do intubation procedures to provide ventilation for the vastly increased numbers of severe cases with viral pneumonia including many with further complications such as bacterial pneumonia, even though most of the teaching will be on the job assisting. Inferior split ventilators will be used and supplies will be ramped up.
Supply Chains
Naturally the main focus of the media has been on shopping. The newspapers are printed on the back of ads for shopping and the broadcast news is squeezed between ads for shopping both online and on air.
My view is that the shopping shambles is not of major signifcance and will be sorted out without major impact. Even if 80% of the workforce have mild to moderate illness lasting 2 to 3 weeks over the same relatively short period and there is disruption generally, essential services can be maintained. Most workers are employed to not do anything useful, let alone essential. Workers from large sectors shutting down now can be fairly rapidly mobilised as (unskilled and bewildered) assistants in essential areas while training on the job.
That is what I expect to happen when the blithering idiots in charge notice that funding businesses to continue trading while insolvent does not actually achieve much in the long term for a shutdown that reduces their turnover to near zero. Even the sheer idiocy of disrupting all credit arrangements by not enforcing payment terms so that deliveries will only be for cash will not be catastrophic in itself although the financial system may be fragile enough to come up with a related catastrophe.
Some fumbling and blunders are inevitable. The supply chains for groceries and pharmaceuticals will recover from panic buying without those stuff ups in emergency management causing many unnecessary deaths. The shortage of face masks and alcoholic sanitizers was avoidable but not necessarily catastrophic.
Impending Catastrophe
So what is the “Impending Catastrophe” if the Medium term is looking good, healthcare capacity can be rapidly expanded and supply chain hiccups are not especially catastrophic? Simply this.
There is no reasonable prospect of increasing the capacity of Intensive Care Units rapidly enough for a pandemic that will accelerate to double the case load every 2-3 days. A week after hospitals reach full capacity they will be dealing with a case load more than four times capacity. A fortnight later, more than 16 times. This is happening now in Italy. London is about 3 weeks behind Italy and Australia and the USA not much further behind, all on much the same trajectory that leads to catastrophe.
What cannot be fixed quickly enough for the first peak is the supply of mechanical ventilators etc for Intensive Care Units. Vastly accelerated scale up still cannot possibly keep pace as countries are now entering the period of doubled demand every 2-3 days:
Clin Infect Dis. 2015 May 1; 60(Suppl 1): S52–S57. Published online 2015 Apr 10. doi: 10.1093/cid/civ089 Estimates of the Demand for Mechanical Ventilation in the United States During an Influenza Pandemic Martin I. Meltzer,1 Anita Patel,2 Adebola Ajao,3 Scott V. Nystrom,4 and Lisa M. Koonin5 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4603361/
The impending catastrophe is lack of preparations for serious quarantine.
Given a shortage of Intensive Care Units and no vaccine, such measures are the ONLY way to prevent or reduce catastrophe.
Quarantine
The measures for people outside the health system to focus on are for “flattening the curve”. Spreading out the infection directly reduces the death rate by directly reducing the number of people with severe cases who cannot be treated when they all arrive at hospital Intensive Care Units at once and equipment is available for only a fraction of those who need it.
That is not something achieved by telling people to stay at home doing nothing. It requires actually building and organizing things.
We need to actively build and organize QUARANTINE facilities. This is not just passive “social distancing”.
The whole point of the “containment” phase of tracking new arrivals for a short period of “self-isolation” and closely tracking the contacts of anybody infected was only to buy time before “Community Transmission” began. Containment merely keeps the numbers of new infections “contained” at a smaller rate to delay the “local transmission” that will inevitably eventually grow at a much larger exponential rate until “herd immunity” is achieved with effective vaccination (expected 12-18 months away). Some cases were bound to get through and eventually result in enough people infected from unknown local contacts that the origin of most new infections is “the community” rather than some tracked or untracked individual cases seeded from outside. Then the pace accelerates from doubling each week to doubling each 2-3 days as in Italy and others that are near the first peak.
The World Health Organization, WHO, has recommended “test, test, test” because the surprise at the Italian hospital system being overwhelmed showed the pandemic was being fought blindfolded. Containment through border control and isolation cannot work when you do not know who to isolate from whom. It was known since late January that most people infected had only mild symtoms or none (with estimates of 86% of cases not reported in the statistics that media have been relentlessly staring at).
Even with an adequate supply of test kits there has to be somewhere to put people who test positive for the couple of weeks or so until most of them recover. Instead they are being told to stay at home and infect the rest of their household who are now (belatedly) being told to also stay at home. That will reduce the acceleration more than if they were told to just keep going out. But three very urgent measures were obviously necessary then.
Their necessity should have been announced loud and clear while rolling out implementation as fast as possible after announcement. So far not even the necessity has been announced. Here is my view of the three most urgent measures that are critically urgent now:
How to Combat It
1. Quarantine Hospitals for the mildly and moderately ill
Also separate facilities for unconfirmed suspected likely cases (eg travellers from areas with more community transmission to those with less).
I don’t know what the correct term is for what I have called “Quarantine Hospital”. People who don’t live by themselves should obviously not be told to just stay at home and infect their household while they wait to see if they are actually infected or while recovering. Nor should they occupy full hospital beds needed for people more severely ill.
The rest of their household can be told to just stay home for a couple of weeks to see if they are already infected or not, but anyone infected should be immediately separated from people who are not known to have been infected. That is blindingly obvious whether they need additonal medical treatment or not and whether any treatment they need is available or not. Any country not doing this is not seriously trying to flatten the curve.
“Quarantine Hospital” sounds better than “Quarantine barracks” but just somewhere to stay and be fed with some nursing staff is all it takes to seriously spread out a peak. It will require an enormous effort but it can be done using space that must be shut down anyway, emergency furnishings and staff from businesses that must be shut down anyway.
Commandeering hotels etc is for full emergency hospitals, not for the larger numbers of beds needed in Quarantine Field Hospitals. Lots of office space unused with people working from home and entertainment venues shut down must be converted to emergency accommodation. The kitchen facilities are available from the cafes and restaurants being shut down. The beds and bedding are available from households in proportion to the numbers moved out of households that will need those beds, and the staff are available from the huge numbers of small businesses trading while insolvent as well as from those already laid off. So far as I can see that has not even been planned, let alone started.
2. Quarantine Accommodation for the vulnerable
Older people and people with various severe health probems are especially vulnerable to being part of the less than 1% who might die before a vaccine is available or part of the additional 5% or so that are killed by government incompetence as a result of intensive care not being available for them when the hospitals are overwhelmed. No doubt local communities will get organized to help those who need help while staying isolated in their own homes but there are others staying in households with less vulnerable people equally susceptible to infection.
“Tough” restrictions on visits to aged care institutions are obviously ludicrous. These can only be intended as justification for very soon saying people had an opportunity to make their last visits immediately before an essential full shutdown until proper procedures for safe visits fully separated by glass barriers etc can be organized.
But vulnerable people currently living in households with others must also be offered accommodation separated from the rest of the susceptible population until the peak has passed and sufficient intensive care facilities are available. That will be hard for many. Many may refuse and many may die. But doing nothing to make viable separate accommodation available is criminal. That seems to be the current “plan”.
Neighborhood support groups are starting to be formed spontaneously through social media:
It is important to keep them entirely separate (although overlapping with) closed small “affinity” groups of households with children discussed in item 3 below.
3. Quarantine Separation of children
Obviously schools will have to be shut at some point except for children of households working in healthcare and other essential activities. Meanwhile schools are vitally important community organizing centers for households with children.
The shutdown won’t just be for a couple of weeks. It will end up lasting for many months.
while still open, and even after closing, schools should be organizing children into small groups, much smaller than class sizes, that will be allowed to interact with each other within school and after the shutdown and prohibited from doing so between groups.
This obviously needs to be coordinated with parents because all the households with children in whatever group any child continues to interact with will tend to get infected together. It will be especially difficult for households with children in different age groups and different schools but every household with children must be assigned to a particular group of households it is permitted (not required) to socially interact with. The kids are not going to just stay at home with their parents for six months, let alone eighteen months! Humans evolved in Hominid bands of a couple of dozen, not as isolated nuclear families.
Hopefully if we move really fast the necessary interaction can be online in Virtual Reality but we don’t know how well that will work, for how long or how quickly. It still ought to be based on non-overlapping groups that should be organized now by schools.
These separate child based groups are likely to continue to mix with and infect each other and must accept that their own group of households will or may end up having the larger risk of earlier infection corresponding to an enlarged single household. They must be confined to small numbers of households who trust each other to maintain isolation from the rest of the world to the same extent as the individual households.
Households with older and more vulnerable people are a major complication as self-isolation within a household is unlikely to be effective for long.
Six months is a rather optimistic estimate of how long this crisis will last. It could “conceivably” be as short as 6 months if all goes perfectly but that is not the period to plan for now. Avoiding overwhelmed hospitals requires dragging things out longer, until an effective vaccine gives “herd” immunity or effective anti-viral drugs reduce the death rate. Even if it could theoretically be even shorter than six months most serious estimates are for 12-18 months of on and off waves.
But even Italy where the hospital overload is currently greatest has only had 0.1% of the population as “cases”.
South Korea has a very long way to go before herd immunity and there is nothing in the lower numbers of new cases after the first peak or the success in dealing with that first peak to suggest that there won’t be many further peaks:
Likewise for Singapore, another success being hailed as though it were not just success with the first peak.
I don’t know whether anybody has solid evidence of whether and how it may be possible to stop transmission between househods via their children during an extended shutdown. As far as I can make out there is just empty hoping that for some unexplained reason it won’t happen. This mainly takes the form of highlighting the distraction that children have much less severe symptoms (which actually enhances their role as disease vectors).
Current Plans
Compared to Australia and the USA the UK is a model of serious but still unsuccessful efforts to explain public health policy to the public via journalists in a joint effort by the PM, the Chief Science Officer and the Chief Medical Oficer.
It is worth spending the time on these two long videos less than 5 days apart to understand how rapidly the situation is changing and how uncomprehending the journalists covering the “issue” are.
Coronavirus: Boris Johnson holds press conference after Cobra meeting 308,797 views – Streamed live on Mar 12, 2020 – starts at 23’30” of 1:10’57”
Coronavirus: Boris Johnson sets out “drastic action” BBC 292,849 views – Streamed live (Mar 16, 2020)
The pandemic model that now forms the basis for planning in the UK expects multiple waves of infection each time “social distancing” is relaxed after successfully suppressing the peak rates to reduce case loads to hospital capacities. This is in Report 9 from the Imperial College team:
A shorter Australian attempt at explaining the model to a journalist is this video from the ABC’s Dr Norman Swan on 17 March. (I watched it after having written the rest of this article). In many ways it is better than the UK and Australian official explanations but he still ends up distracted by issues of case tracking from the “Containment” phase rather than the current accelerating exponential growth on entering the “Community Transmission” phase. He simply does not get the fact that spreading out the peak necessarily reduces total deaths from unavailable intensive health care units and instead claims that a spread out peak could still have the same total deaths.
“Explorable Explanations” with widgets for people to actually manipulate the paramaters of the models themselves are really essential instead of literally hand-waving – with or without a background graph:
If any of these people trying to explain had access to such Explorables they would be using them on TV. Instead they are waving their hands.
The primary mechanism for transmission during a long shutdown might well be the overlap between different groups of children from different groups of households interacting to transmit the virus between their otherwise separated groups of households. It will certainly occur with younger children still at school.
Similar transmission will occur from the essential workforce in different workplaces also transmitting between different households, but stringent “social distancing” controls at work can reduce that far more effectively than among younger school children. Likewise smaller households without children will get infected more slowly than extended groups of households whose children infect each other.
Tests
School closure timing and arrangements is the hardest issue to grapple with and the least data is available as to transmission rates through these channels. Currently there have been no adequate systematic random samples of the population generally as test kits are only available for more urgent needs such as border control during the containment period and testing health workers.
In particular there is no blood testing yet to measure the immune system responses of people who have already had the virus without symptoms. Such testing is hoped for soon and could be a game changer for enabling decisions on the optimal timing for imposing and lifting isolation restrictions before and after hospitals are overloaded. It could also shed a lot more light on the transmission between children and between adults and children. At present decisions on how to time for less overloading of peak capacity in successive waves are being taken blindfolded.
The separation of groups of children and their households necessarily involves the widest participation in community decision making and implementation and the most discussion to come up with ideas right now. Explorable explanations with widgets are needed urgently for this.
All UK schools closed last week, very shortly after official announcements that the best “science” showed that overall effects of closing schools could be negative because of:
Large effect on essential workforce diverted back into parenting and child-minding, especially from already overloaded health system. (Private schools closed earlier but essential workforce is generally lower paid with a high proportion depending on schools for childcare while working in health system).
Likelihood that traditional reliance on grandparents to assist will result in more rapid infection of the most vulnerable.
Unlikelihood that school students will remain socially distanced from each other while away from school, short, medium and long term.
Previous announcements were correct. So is the new decision.
What follows from the correctness of the two opposite decisions of our dearly beloved leaders both 5 days earlier and 5 days later is that urgent mitigation measures can and should be taken for all 3 issues. Others can contribute more to discussion of those measures so I won’t attempt it in this article.
All I can say on it is that school closures will happen soon whether desirable or not.
Here is some confusing advice from USA of the same sort that will dominate discussion here:
In addition to the advice only now being widely disseminated by authoritative public health information campaigns, households with both children and older and more vulnerable people should carefully consider stronger advice from people who have been campaigning for full social isolation to be implemented sooner.
They cannot be considered “authoritative” but I will be carefully studying the technical background necessary to be able to understand both.
Epidemiology for the Uninitiated
Lots of people, like me, will need to acquire some basic epidemiological concepts to understand what the models are about. Studying this is very good practice for understanding the economics of the capitalist business cycle. (The Explorable Explanations will be more accessible for most people both for pandemics and for the business cycle).
If the serious critics are right there won’t be another peak in China and Italy after full social isolation measures are enforced. If the mainstream epidemiological view is correct (as opposed to the government waffle about 6 months) there will be successive waves over 18 months or so until a vaccine is effective, possibly ameliorated by anti-viral drugs. This is because “social distancing” restrictions end up becoming intolerable and therefore ineffective and get relaxed because they cannot be maintained for long when new cases decline to near zero after dealing with each peak in the overloading of ICUs and consequent deaths from unavailable medical treatment. Transmission can be expected to resume gradually and then again suddenly as long as there are large reservoirs of people still susceptible. There will still be large reservoirs susceptible to infection after the first peak overloading the hospitals is shutdown by emergency isolation measures just as there was for the first peak.
The business press is already editorializing about not “over reacting” and the importance of quickly getting people back to work for them. Their views will eventually prevail while the owners are still in charge. Here’s a couple of the Wall Street Journal’s editorials urging that more people be killed quickly to save money:
They can rely on help from lots of people who think correct ideas fall from the sky or are inherent in their minds as “just common sense” and are simply not interested in studying the knowledge acquired from social practice and from it alone. The three kinds of social practice include class struggle, the struggle for production and scientific experiment. This is not a good time to be glued to the business channels and ignoring the political class struggle and the struggle for production being waged by workers in the relevant sciences.
Simply assuming the first peak will be the last is as helpful as the Wall Street Journal’s editorials.
The kind of mathematical modeling that is done to help inform public health policy for dealing with this pandemic is closely related to the sort that is needed for understanding the capitalist cycle and the transition from capitalism. So studying the pandemic is not a diversion from other priorities.
The modern form of the “Republic of Letters” is very much based on the communist mode of production and distribution already widespread in the Open Culture (eg Wikipedia) and Open Science offspring of the Free and Open Source Software movement. Such intellectual activity was not enough to produce the Enlightenment, let alone the bourgeois democratic revolution against Feudalism. Nevertheless it was a very important precursor.
Wikipedia has an impressive portal showing the current extent of collaborative effort:
The “pirate” backbone for disseminating scientific and other knowledge from “Library Genesis” and “Sci-Hub” is being hardened against attack and is openly confronting the crisis:
The main scientific publishers have accepted demands to make all covid-19 research immediately open access (they were being bypassed anyway by pre-prints on community archive sites and by Sci-Hub).
Activists have organized collections of relevant non-current background material. Major Big Tech companies have co-opted the US government to neatly classify what is “Open Access” and what needs to be extracted from behind paywalls and disseminated by activists:
The 34,000 GPUs mentioned in that article are a drop in the ocean compared to what mobilizing the gamer PCs can deliver.
So anti-viral drugs and vaccines will arrive a lot quicker than usual, as will saner public health policy.
Even before governments started using their powers to commandeer manufacturing resources for ventilators and other hospital supplies, people started organizing to just do it:
As already mentioned, the Emergency Medecine Critical Care professionals took care well in advance to prepare training materials for their reinforcements before they are overwhelmed:
Unfortunately Library Genesis does not have the only book in that list with the word “Intubation” in the title, nor any others in english that look relevant:
The Airway Cam Guide to Intubation and Practical Emergency Airway Management 1st Edition, Richard M. Levitan
Presumably anything relevant wih a doi can be obtained via Sci-Hub or this can rapidly and easily be arranged by the relevant professionals if necessary. Activists are working now to make the relevant materials freely available for people who will find themselves on the front lines along with other health workers quite soon.
Anyway, people are moving way faster than governments.
A new world is being born from the ashes of the old.
Update: Today’s Australian (Tuesday 2020-03-24) also has confirmation from Singapore PM that further waves are expected. I did not notice it last night:
“We are under no illusions that the problem is over at all,” he says.
“If I made an analogy, it is not that the tide has turned, it is that we put the dykes up. We are watching very carefully to see where water may leak in, and if you take your eyes off it for a moment, suddenly I have an outbreak, like what happened in South Korea, and I will be in a perilous situation. It can happen to us at any time.
“Australia is grappling with the same problem. The countries around us in Southeast Asia are also facing the problem. It (the outbreak) is going to catch fire in many countries and is going to take a long time to burn out.”
…
“I would not say we have successfully prevented it,” Lee says carefully. “I think I would say so far we have reasonably successfully hindered the transmission.”
The key, Lee explains, is checking out all the people any infected person may have unwittingly infected before diagnosis.
“We work very hard to contact-trace,” he says. “Who are the people you have met within the last two weeks, where have you been, what have you done, who may have been exposed to you?
“We make every effort to trace those people down as well and put the immediate contacts either on notice or in quarantine, depending on whether they have symptoms. It is very labour-intensive. We have 300-plus cases now, but we have contact-traced several thousand people already, at least.
“It is labour-intensive but it is helpful in preventing a single case from becoming many hundreds of cases, if you catch it in time.”
…
“Looking at the behaviour of the disease and the way it is jumping from country to country, you can push it down within a country, but it has not disappeared worldwide,” he says.
“I think this is going to be with us for quite some time.”
…
“Their population is not immune to it yet, in very large numbers. Because even if a million Chinese have got the virus so far, that still leaves almost 1.4 billion people who have not yet, and are still, in immunological terms, naive and at risk.
“So, what you can hope for is that you control the spread of the disease, you hold the position, and hope and pray that the scientists come up with either a treatment or a vaccine within a year or two — and in time for us to exit this without the doomsday scenario, namely that the disease goes through the whole population, and then eventually we have herd immunity. Either it is going to leave you with huge casualties, or it is going to take forever to lock down.
“I think it is an enormous economic cost, and a human cost too.”
Note: Like South Korea the proportion of the population that remains susceptible to infection in the next wave is even higher than in China where one province, Hubei did have an initially uncontrolled outbreak so are substantial proportion of that province now does have at least short term immunity so there is a fair chance the next wave there will be smaller.
The proportion still fully susceptible in Singapore and South Korea is as close to 100% as makes no difference. So whether the next outbreak is smaller or larger depends largeely on how effectively long term “social distancing” can be maintained until a vaccine. The initial success was “containment” using tracking and quarantine. When actual “Community Transmission” develops rigorous quarantine becomes far more important as then tracking merely confirms that most of the new cases were infected from “the community” rather than from a specific known contact who can be promptly isolated.
Unlike any other statements I have seen from national governments Singapore is clearly stating what the media and pretty well everyone who thinks they don’t need to know more, does not yet understand.
But it still needs “Explorable Explanations” of the model for even a small minority to not be surprised when subsequent waves happen.
[Tried to add this update as a comment but will have to figure that out later]
This is currently my only means of communication. After concluding that my phone could have been stolen (incomprehensibly while I was sleeping and with no other sign of intrusion) I took a half empty tram to the city and bought a $89 Telstra Slim Plus as the quickest way to keep in touch, try to find it if has mysteriously hidden itself and turned off regular alarm times and as spare phone for emergencies so I won’t have to deal with Telecos while sick even if it does turn up.
Convinced that Telstra would have a nightmarish registration system online I proceeded to the nearby Telstra shop cnr Bourke and Swanston with my phone and driver’s licence to have it activated while I wait and asked for the form. Told there was no problem but also no form and a “consultant” would assist. Some time later while reading the papers, at 13:39 I was told (without asking) “won’t be long now”. At 14:07 a “consultant” quickly and efficiently established that I simply wanted the phone activated without going online and went off with the phone and driver’s licence.
At 14:23 she returned and told me the phone was “activated” presenting me with the used SIM card container showing the mobile number and a message on the screen inviting me to send a text message. I returned to base to attempt catching my previous phone in hiding by tempting it to make a noise anywhere near me when I call or text it from the new phone. But first I entered a couple of phone numbers in the contact book to get back in touch. On calling each of them I got the message “this number cannot be reached at present from this service” or something equally uninformative.
So at 16:47 I gave up and texted “Hi” to my new number and duly received the message at the only number that CAN be reached with my “activated” phone. So I then had to go through exactly the procedure the “consultant” had spent 15″ pretending to do. But first I had to go online by turning on mobile data and clicking the link for “Activation”. That ensures that purchaser’s of new Telstra phones will set “mobile data” on so they can be billed for more than just making calls. Then I entered a 13 digit SIM card number from the cardboard container after carefully analysing the two different 13 digit barcodes and correctly identifying that the one with ON at the end must be the right one since the N is just to maximize confusion and is not a digit.
The purpose of this is presumably in the hope that I would have thrown away the cardboard SIM card number as completely useless since the SIM was already in the phone and registered to Telstra.
So much for Telstra. Now comes the government surveillance. I knew what to expect and had therefore taken my driver’s licence on the tram trip. Naturally everybody is required to continuously notify the three closest teleco antennas of where they are at all times when their phone battery has not been removed from the phone and this needs to be linked with other surveillance IDs such as driving licence. So I entered the name, address and date of birth shown on my driving licence.
This was completely unacceptable. I was further required to choose between “Mr”, “Miss”, “Mrs” or “Ms”, none of which is on my driver’s licence, compelled to retype the address omitting the “c/o” in front and compelled to provide an email address. Then had to choose between “Prepaid Max” and “Long Life”. There is a 47 page booklet “Telstra Pre-paid Welcome Guide” which I may consult later.
I knew I would have to provide a working email address since the online form would send a verification message and would not activate the phone without me answering it. This is a standard convenient way of handling the common problem of people needing to reset passwords etc after forgetting them and is particularly convenienent for correlating online activity with movement and phone calls as well as for Teleco spam. So I gave them my working gmail address and was told I would get a confirmation email in 4 hours. GOTCHA!
So a completely pointless 4 hour delay was imposed in which I could not search for my missing phone or make other calls. It isn’t even like the banks adding days of delay between accepting cash and adding it to an account because they keep the interest on the “float”. Nor does it serve any government surveillance purpose I can think of quickly (though perhaps others have given it more thought). Seems to just be Telecos being as irritating as possible. Perhaps as further punishment for using a pre-paid account instead of getting a “Customer ID” and linking in all financial transactions for surveillance.
Anyway, off I went to the park to finish reading the papers, honestly thinking that I would just be able to click on the email link without further hassles. OF COURSE NOT.
Google told me “Account Action Is Required” and then at 19:56 “Your password was changed 14 hours ago”. Same on both Tablet and Laptop. So either Google changed it or my phone WAS stolen. No problem, Google had kept insisting that I provide them with a phone number for verifying changed passwords, which is convenient both for solving that problem of verification when unable to access email and for ensuring that email addresses and phone numbers are tied together in both directions for surveillance. So I did.
AND NOW I AM REALLY STUCK. Since Google can only reset the password when verified from my old phone and the thief has the phone, Telstra won’t activate the new phone. I assume I will now have to call Telstra at some functioning number hidden towards the end of the 47 page booklet and then sort things out with Google later. First a good nights sleep.
Meanwhile, in case my access to this WordPress blog disappears I could start using another WordPress blog on the same account at:
Could anyone that sees this and has my phone number, please start repeatedly sending (tiny) text messages alternated with phone calls until it rings out to answering machine, while I hunt for it.
It is currently Friday 2020-03-20 at 12:30 pm and I am in the room where I expect to hear a very short whoosh from msg arrival (or less likely a nice long ring tone which it randomly chooses not to do).
First, please post a comment here so I know you are doing that and post another when you stop. (I will see these by email and delete or update this embarassing post when phone found or I give up and go out).
My phone was last seen in the company of another phone I carry only for listening to text to speech books. I am certain they have not escaped from the building and are hiding somewhere inside but I expected to hear a 12 noon alarm from the TTS phone in the room where I expect them to be hiding and I expected to hear it if it was in any other room. So I am very much hoping for a noise from the working phone. I remain certain they are somewhere in the building, for good reasons. Thanks.
People over 70 will soon be asked to self-isolate themselves for up to four months to protect themselves from the risk of contracting coronavirus, the UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, has confirmed…
He said older people would be “shielded for their own protection” and that the plan would be announced, with further details, when the time was right.
Don’t wait for the government to get around to this “big ask” in a few weeks. The danger of infection is doubling every few days and the number of Intensive Care Units cannot do so.
Here’s the introduction to the first of two references attached to a statement signed by over 400 scientists demanding immediate “social distancing”.
With everything that’s happening about the Coronavirus, it might be very hard to make a decision of what to do today. Should you wait for more information? Do something today? What?
Here’s what I’m going to cover in this article, with lots of charts, data and models with plenty of sources:
How many cases of coronavirus will there be in your area?
What will happen when these cases materialize?
What should you do?
When?
When you’re done reading the article, this is what you’ll take away:
The coronavirus is coming to you. It’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, and then suddenly. It’s a matter of days. Maybe a week or two. When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed. Your fellow citizens will be treated in the hallways. Exhausted healthcare workers will break down. Some will die. They will have to decide which patient gets the oxygen and which one dies. The only way to prevent this is social distancing today. Not tomorrow. Today. That means keeping as many people home as possible, starting now.
As you surely know, Italy is suffering a dramatic spreading of the coronavirus.
In just 3 weeks from the beginning of the outbreak, the virus has reached more than 10.000 infected people.
From our data, about 10% of patients require ICU (Intensive Care Unit) or sub ICU assistance and about 5% of patients die.
We are now in the tragic situation that the most efficient health system of the richest area of the country (Lombardy) is almost at its full capacity and will soon be difficult to assist more people with Covid-19.
This is the reason why an almost complete lockdown of the country has been ordered: to slow down and hopefully stop the contagion as soon as possible.
As it emerges without a doubt from the data available, all the European countries are in fact experiencing the same rate of contagion speed and that they are just a few days behind on where it is Italy now [2].
The beginning of the outbreak had the exact same number of infections in China, Italy, and other countries. The difference is that China strongly and quickly locked down Wuhan and all of the Hubei region 8 days before Italy [3].
Just 8 days of delay for the Italy lockdown will result in an enormous increase in the number of total deaths in Italy with respect to China.
This exact same initial dynamic in the number of new cases can also be observed in every country outbreak.
It’s hard for non-specialists to intuitively grasp the way an exponential rate increase can get out of control.
So it’s very difficult to realize the tragic consequences that an exponential growth can have in a contagion like this one.
As a scientist, you surely do understand it. You do also understand that, as long as the rate of increase is exponential, no linear solution to contrast it will work (I.e. increasing x times the number of ICU machines, etc.)
Similarly, just imposing a limitation on people from staying together in large groups is not a sufficient solution.
This is an appeal to you, as a member of the scientific community, to urge your government to act now for actively stopping the virus!
In most EU countries you have enough time to make a lockdown similar to China or South Korea to quickly slow down and stop the contagion with much less effort and cost of what is now needed in Italy.
If Italy had strongly acted just 10 days ago, and that is more or less where you are now, there would have been much fewer deaths and economic tumble.
South Korea and China should be taken as the example to follow to stop this epidemic.
There is no other way.
So please, make your best effort to urge your government to act now! Time is our common enemy as the virus is very fast and really lethal.
Every minute is exceptionally important as it means saving lives. Don’t waste it!
I’m not competent to comment on the optimal time for “social distancing”.
The scientists statement is clearly initiated from mathematicians expert at modelling. But the expertise required for these decisions is in epidemiology.
However it seems bloody obvious that whenever the peak should be, or will be, older people (and others with severe health problems) need to avoid infection until AFTER the peak, when there are again intensive care units available. That may be a lot longer than 4 months and many may not be able to do it. But the “time is right” to be told now.
Please note the article to pass on is the earliest of the three in this series all tagged covid-19. It highlights the collapse of intensive care in Italy that makes it essential to mobilize for social distancing immediately without waiting for government advice. The links provide authoritative information:
Spain’s government today announced a lockdown for the whole country, which begins on Mar 16, affecting 46 million, El Pais reported today. The order, slated to last 15 days, allows people to leave their homes to buy food and medicine, to work, and to care for minors, the elderly, and other vulnerable people.
Behind Italy, which is also on lockdown, Spain has the second most cases in Europe and now has 6,391 cases and 195 deaths, according to RTVE, the country’s public broadcasting network. The country’s main hot spots are Madrid, Catalonia, the Basque country, and Andalusia.
Meanwhile, France, stopping short of a lockdown, announced sweeping new measures today, temporarily shuttering all public places except for food stores, pharmacies, and gas stations, and urging people to stay indoors as much as possible, France 24 reported. The country has now reported nearly 4,500 cases, 91 of them fatal.
Elsewhere, Italy’s health ministry today reported 3,497 more cases and 175 more deaths, raising its respective totals to 21,157 cases, 1,441 of them fatal. Germany now has 3,795 cases and 8 deaths, according to the latest numbers from the Robert Koch Institute.
In the United Kingdom, a group of 229 scientists wrote a letter to the government, urging it to take tougher measures to control the spread of the virus, the BBC reported, noting that UK officials were hesitant to take strong steps too early over worries about public frustrations. The scientists are pressing for more social distancing measures, but some government health officials have said the existing approach factors in some herd immunity benefits. Reuters reported today that the government will ban mass gatherings next week.
The second article in this series at c21st left “Interesting Advice” was just speculative and confuses incubation period with infectious period. Unfortunately people may not notice the main article as later articles are displayed first. Be sure to send direct link as above, not just a link to this blog.
BTW some support for my speculation can be found in this paper, which estimates that 48% or more of the infectious period is before symptoms occurred. However it is just a preliminary unreviewed technical report based on studies at two locations and I am not competent to judge its accuracy or to make speculative remarks based on it.
The proportion of pre-symptomatic transmission was 48% (95%CI 32-67%) for Singapore and 62% (95%CI 50-76%) for Tianjin, China. Estimates of the reproduction number based on the generation interval distribution were slightly higher than those based on the serial interval distribution. Conclusions: Estimating generation and serial interval distributions from outbreak data requires careful investigation of the underlying transmission network. Detailed contact tracing information is essential for correctly estimating these quantities.
It will be interesting to see whether this advice is correct:
Mr Dutton remains in a Brisbane hospital on Saturday after announcing he had tested positive for the virus on Friday.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office said cabinet ministers who met with Mr Dutton on Tuesday would not be required to self-isolate.
“In advice provided to the Prime Minister this evening, the deputy Chief Medical Officer has reiterated that only people who had close contact with the minister in the preceding 24 hours before he became symptomatic need to self-isolate,” Mr Morrison’s office said.
“That does not include the Prime Minister or any other members of the cabinet.”
BTW if you read my post by email, look at the original as the NYT link is not visible in the email.
The Lancet study estimates an infectious incubation period of 5 to 6 days before symptoms and a typical delay between symptoms and isolation of 2 to 7 days. (see appendices).
Dutton reported symptoms promptly and was isolated more quickly after only 1 day of symptoms. But that does not imply he must also have had an usually short incubation period. I don’t see why he could not have been infectious 6 days before. Tuesday to Friday is not 6 days.
It is interesting that a US cabinet member who had contact with Dutton a week earlier is not following similar advice:
US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and US Attorney General William Barr are working from home a week after meeting with Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who on Friday revealed he had tested positive for COVID-19.
The White House said that given Mr Dutton was not showing any symptoms during his US trip Ms Trump and Mr Barr did not need to self-quarantine, but they are working from home “out of an abundance of caution”.
“The Attorney General is feeling great and not showing any symptoms,” a US Department of Justice spokeswoman told Nine newspapers.
Perhaps the US government is more aware of how seriously the medical profession regards politicians as a biosecurity hazard that need to be prevented from interfering with management of pandemic emergencies by any means necessary. The more cabinet Ministers unable to work, the safer the rest of us will be.
It is reasonably certain that Australian governments will take measures for “social distancing” fairly soon.
It is difficult to determine the optimum time as such measures are extremely disruptive and cannot be maintained for very long. The aim is not to contain the outbreak but to spread out the peak to reduce the number of people who die because intensive care such as mechanical ventilators are unavailable during the peak case load.
Italy moved too late according to this article for GPs from their main professional organization, dated 11 March:
6.2% case fatality rate
Italy is now one of the worst-affected nations, with a high elderly population where the virus spread undetected for several weeks.
The entire nation has now been placed into quarantine in an effort to get on top of the virus. All public gatherings are banned, restaurants and bars have restricted hours, and cinemas, theatres, libraries and museums have been ordered to close. Schools, daycare and universities have also been closed.
The national quarantine may be effective, as it was in China, but it will take time to have an effect.
In the interim, large numbers of serious or critical cases have swamped hospitals, leading to top Italian health official Professor Giacomo Grasselli to dub the virus ‘worse than a bomb’.
Dr Daniele Macchini, an intensivist in Lombardy, has described the impact of the virus as an ‘epidemiological disaster’ and a ‘tsunami’ that is threatening the ability of the hospital to offer care.
‘Suddenly the E.R. is collapsing … Every ventilator becomes like gold: those in operating theatres that have now suspended their non-urgent activity become intensive care places that did not exist before,’ he wrote on a Facebook post that has been translated.
The concerning account is echoed by another anonymous Lombardy intensivist, whose comments were posted by UK doctor Jason Van Schoor on Twitter.
The intensivist said that despite Lombardy’s wealth and excellent healthcare system, the virus has overwhelmed hospitals.
‘The current situation is difficult to imagine and numbers do not explain things at all. Our hospitals are overwhelmed by COVID-19, they are running 200% capacity,’ the intensivist wrote.
‘There are hundreds of [patients] with severe [respiratory] failure and many of them do not have access to anything above a reservoir mask.’
Due to the shortage of ventilators – which are essential to keeping critical patients alive through the severe pneumonia – China has now offered to send Italy 1000 ventilators, as well as large supplies of personal protective equipment and testing kits.
The RACGP has more information on coronavirus available on its website.
Going too early might perhaps be as bad as going too late if it merely delays the peak rather than widening it. But the idea of Australian governments moving too rapidly seems implausible.
Here’s a simple journalistic explanation about “flattening the curve”, same date:
China sending ventilators to Italy confirms that social distancing in China has been successful. This is confirmed in a detailed statistical analysis published in British medical journal, The Lancet on the same date:
The absurd delay resulting in the Grand Prix being cancelled only at the last minute suggests that Australian governments will not act too early.
That means the public needs to be mobilized to shut down social contacts and self isolate before official announcements and publicity campaigns.
In particular the more older people self isolate now the more that will surive the shortage of intensive care for severe cases at the peak.
Inevitably triage for access to Intensive Care Units must allocate them to severe cases among younger people more likely to survive than among older people less likely to survive a severe case.
Pretty well everybody will eventually get the flu when it becomes endemic. There is no chance of vaccines being developed quickly enough to prevent this and little likelihood of effective anti-viral drugs being available to help soon. What matters is whether the small minority of mainly older people who get a severe case needing intensive treatment such as mechanical ventilators, need such treatment during the peak or more slowly after the main peak has subsided.
Detailed advice on hygiene, social distancing, self isolation etc has been available from US and EU Centers for Disease Control for some time, although that availability of advice has not been matched by implementation. The Australian equivalent has not yet fully caught up even on advice:
I got absorbed in following Brexit around then and have not followed US news on Trump in any detail since. I am not planning to resume following Trump again now.
This note is mainly to suggest a possible solution to the puzzle of why Pelosi agreed to an absurd impeachment of Trump after successfully resisting the Democrat clamour for so long.
Given the alternatives of a conspiracy or a stuff up its usually safe to bet on a stuff up. But this one seems unusually absurd.
The official Republican theory is that the Democrats are trying to reverse the results of losing the last elections. That is obviously absurd. Not even the most deranged Democrat could possibly imagine that the result would be a two-third majority of a Republican dominated Senate to replace Trump, even if they would actually prefer to hand Trup that ammunition for re-election, just to enjoy a year or so under Commander in Chief Pence.
Here’s Biden’s theory, answering the following question:
Q. “Isn’t the President going to be stronger and harder to beat if (!) he survives this?” A. “Yes, probably. But congress has no choice.”
That absurdity is also the official Democrat position. Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanours so threaten the Constitution that they had no choice but to help make him stronger and harder to beat.
Given the extremes to which Democrats appear to be willing to go to help Trump win, perhaps such grotesque stupidity really is the explanation.
But here’s another one (purely speculative) suggested by the emergence of Bloomberg as a potential candidate to replace Biden as the candidate of Pelosi’s wing of the Democrats. What if Pelosi’s target is Biden, just as Trump’s target was Biden?
As far as I can make out the Democrat tactics have set things up for Biden to be called as a witness by the Republican majority in the Senate. That could be just more Democrat blundering. Impeaching Trump for obstructing them for trying to impeach him is what they were rather more than merely itching to do over “the Russia thing”. That desperate obsession still needs scratching. But they didn’t even try to issue an arrest warrant, or persuade a Court to do so, for the witnesses that Trump prevented from testifying by claiming the usual Executive privilege.
Here’s the official argument for demanding that the Senate call witnesses from Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer:
“this is not a fair trial … because there are no witnesses and documents”
One might expect that argument from the defence rather than the prosecution, if there was some dispute about the facts. Only an idiot could regard the prosecution’s lack of witnesses or documents as a point to be highlighted by the prosecutor.
Is Chuck Schumer really that stupid? Quite possibly. But it does set things up for Republicans to allow witnesses on both sides, with Democrats neither surprising nor impressing anybody by indignantly demanding that the only witnesses called be hostile Republican witnesses called by Democrats and no hostile Democrat witnesses called by Republicans since that would be even more unfair than acquitting Trump in the absence of witnesses or documentary evidence.
Even succeeding in preventing Biden being cross examined damages Biden as a candidate by helping Trump hammer home that he got impeached for trying to get Biden’s corruption investigated. Failing to prevent Biden’s cross examination won’t shed any light on his or his son’s corruption or corruption in the Ukraine or on Trump, but it will spotlight Biden’s inability to defeat Trump.
Biden does badly in debates, let alone under cross examination. That could be the point.
Warren is already playing the loser’s card by pretending Sanders had told her privately that “no woman can win”. That echoes exactly what the Clinton camp did say publicly about the impossibility of a black candidate winning in 2016. It backfired because Obama’s threat that blacks would stop turning out to vote Democrat was very real and serious from a real and serious contender. Warren has no such stature and had to pitch her lack of credibility against Sanders who is now well ahead. Once she drops out there is a very real chance Sanders could beat Biden in the primaries.
Bloomberg could be the only realistic hope for Pelosi’s wing of the Democrats. Openly buying a primary does not strike me as a very promising hope. But I still prefer speculating about possible rational motives rather than simply accepting they are all utterly clueless.
The end of last year seemed an appropriate time to summarize a couple of conclusions after a very quick glance. I gave up, but here are the notes I made then.
Trump is still polling very well at nearly 50% among those believed likely to vote:
The bias towards smaller states in the US electoral college means Trump needs far less than that to win another 4 years. The campaign has not yet started and the Democrats have not yet picked a candidate and anything could happen with the economy, but I see no reason not to expect another four years of Trump.
In particular I see no sign that liberals/Democrats have learnt anything. In number 46 I thought Pelosi had successfully avoided the impeachment trap after the Mueller report spectacularly demonstrated the bankruptcy of their “Russia” conspiracy theories. Impeaching Trump for trying to get Ukraine to investigate Biden may be the best she could do to get the obsession dealt with as soon as possible rather than dragging on into the election. It could also be the result of tactical maneuvers either to rally the party around Biden as the one Trump wanted to stop, or highlighting his vulnerability to Trump’s accusations of corruption (or, perhaps, since both wings of the party have united on the current idiocy, each wing supports it for the opposite idiotic reason). I wouldn’t know and could not even guess. (But have now speculated above).
What everybody does know is that the Democrats are reduced to purely symbolic gesturing against Trump, knowing full well that they are only uniting the Republican party around him and that the Senate trial will not help them win any votes. The idea that is it is an impeachable “high crime” for the President to conduct foreign policy with a view to maximizing his chance of re-election appeals only to the US foreign policy establishment which is no more popular in the US than elsewhere. The US constitution explicitly puts foreign policy under the direction of an elected President, precisely so that it will be conducted that way, and it always has been.
4When I say “everybody knows”, I do not mean the liberal media. Here’s a quick sample of today’s (December) Google news items on “Trump”.
Here’s CNN comforting its readers with the thought that the absolutely certain outcome of a resounding acquittal by the Senate is bothering Trump:
“(CNN)President Donald Trump is showing signs of increasing frustration with the uncertainty surrounding his Senate trial …”
Explaining that Trump has basically reversed traditional GOP economic poliy to win voters away from Democrats.
On trade protectionism and isolationism Trump still cannot outdo the Democratsin bad populist policies except that he actually does what they only posture about. But on anything to create a temporary economic climate suitable for winning the 2020 election he has surpassed Democrat demands (which they chalk up as victories for their policies).
Bret Stephens also has an opinion piece at the NYT with some insight:
“In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styled saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk might just win….
… Too much of today’s left is too busy pointing out the ugliness of the Trumpian right to notice its own ugliness: its censoriousness, nastiness and complacent self-righteousness. But millions of ordinary Americans see it, and they won’t vote for a candidate who emboldens and empowers woke culture.”
But of course the bizarre antidote proposed is a return to the old Democrat establishment with a candidate like Bloomberg or Biden – exactly what Trump demolished last time.
Here’s a psychiatrist explaining that Peolosi should get rid of Trump by compulsory psychiatric examination:
” In this context, almost anyone who actively takes the side of the president is likely to have some degree of the “shared psychosis.” If you were unaffected, you would be repelled. And this is why we often see a clear split, much like the binary division in our country.”
8. If a third party candidate was going to emerge from the GOP that could cost Trump victory I think there would have been some sign of it by now. There is likewise no sign of a split on the Democrat side. The electoral college is unlikely to be deadlocked. But if it was, the House would resolve the deadlock voting by state delegations and that would also be likely to favour Trump due to the concentration of Democrats in larger States.
9. I take comfort that in the US as in Britain the collapse is in illusions about “progressives”. Voters are staying home rather than backing them against the other side. It isn’t a right-wing resurgence so much as a collapse of the fake left. That still has bad consequences as the fake left merely postured against globalism while their opponents actually have the capacity to raise barriers against developing global solidarity. Nevertheless “the future is bright, the road is tortuous”.
Here’s a series of items from just one issue of The Guardian confirming that the complete inability of liberals to learn anything is not confined to the USA.
“The Guardian Weekly” v201 n2 2019-12-20
(p3) Introduces “The big story page 10” on UK general election:
“Two months ago Boris Johnson was penned in … and didn’t even have the numbers to call an election. Then, after three attempts, Johnson won out – with Labour and the Liberal Democrats confident they could do the PM more damage. Instead Johnson won the Tories their biggest majority since the Thatcher era…”
Simon Tisdall’s year in review has part 1 “Reasons to be fearful” (chaos everywhere, situation dreadful) and part 2 “Reasons to be cheerful”. (Greta Thunberg, Denmark did not sell Greenland, surge to far-right in Europe did not happen, Finland elected a 34 year old PM). By p25 we had a sub-head “America resists Trump” with this gem:
“…. the most serious damage was inflicted in Washington. First came the highly critical, albeit inconclusive, report by Robert Mueller into an alleged Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. Mueller refused to exonerate Trump and later testified the president had told untruths to his investigation.
“Then came the impeachment inquiry … suggested Trump tried to induce a foreign state, Ukraine, to help smear Biden, a potential re-election rival. House Democrats advanced articles of impeachment alleging abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. With the public divided and the Senate unlikely to convict, it remains unclear how badly Trump has been hurt.
“The year was encouraging for what did not happen as well as what did… (No US war with Iran, John Bolton sacked for opposing Trump’s “irresponsible” Afghanistan peace deal (!). No war with North Korea. No war between India and Pakistan.)
p9 “Reach ‘peak meat’ by 2030 to tackle crisis, say scientists”
“The world’s scientists agree… Production of meat, milk and eggs has increased from 758m tonnes in 1990 to 1,247, tonnes in 2017, research shows.”
This is so obviously a VERY BAD THING THAT MUST BE STOPPED that there is no need to even provide a citation to the “scientists” who have “warned” about it.
p10-19 cover the election
p32 “Less than an hour after she accused Trump of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’, Pelosi said that congressional negotiators had reached a trade agreement with the administration, a top campaign promise for the President…..’If [Trump] has collateral benefits, so be it’.
Privately, she crowed to her caucus ; ‘We ate their lunch'”.
p33 “The climate crisis is the most urgent threat of our time”. “Planting and protecting trees is a positive way that we can help…..give generously and help protect the planet we share.”
p58 An opinion piece from columnist Aditya Chakrabotty:
what “made me almost sure Labour was going to lose, … and in precise those areas … called its heartlands”. Briefly trends streched back decades, inherited not not created by Corbyn. Working class in heartlands marginalised politically and destroyed economically while patronised into apathy by careerist bureaucrats. “Meanwhile the big gap in the electoral market that opened up was for a party offering a welfare state with reactionary social policy. That was Nigel Farage; now it’s Boris Johnson. Some in Labour might well think they can win back seats by beating up on immigrants and tacking to the right: Johnson’s party can do both with far more gusto.”
“Corbynism … started as an anti-austerity movement… is now a melange of ideas, most of which look and sound utterly absurd on a doorstep on a rainy morning… Corbyn offered yet more direction from Westminster, with utilities run from the centre and hundreds of billions disbursed from remove state institutions…”
But solution offered is the classic Labourism that failed and died many decades ago:
“… providing advice to those whose benefits are being slashed, legal support to tenants under the cosh from their landlords. haggling with the utilities to provide better deals. Add to that: teaching political and economic literacy to voters, not just activists, and asking constituents what issues Labour should be battling on…. Labout needs to renew its contract with its base. The big question is whether it wants to.”
A more typical columnist is Rebecca Solnit from the US on “The young will save us”:
“We must expand our imaginations and act on that bigger understanding of our place in the world and our impact on the future. That means making radical changes like [wait for it!]
our homes and transit being powered by renewables, our governments not plotting more extractivism. It means leaving fossil fuels in the ground. We need to remind ourselves why these changes are necessary: that the earth is finite ;;;
“We must make sweeping changes by the end of the coming decade, (by all bowing down before the very Reverand Parson Malthus and joining in prayer to the almighty).
Ok I made up the last bit. The youth will indeed eventual rise up against this reactionary bilge but at present it is driving them into the arms of conservatives less virulently hostile to all human progress, such as Trump.
p60-1 Andrew Rawnsley considers what Johnson will do in power and wisely decides not to even hazard a guess.
p61 “The existential crisis that confronts Labour has no simple solution” (no byline).
“The coalition between middle-class professionals, often working in the public sector, and the traditional working-class communities fell apart last Thursday. Without it, the party has no route to power.”
“A rush to premature conclusions should be avoided at all costs.”
Conclusion (rushed and randomly inserted in the last para):
“A more subtle politics of place, in which the revival of local democracy is championed, will help Labour begin to reconnect in the years to come… This was once Labour’s natural terrain. It can be so again.”
Not sure what that means. Best guess is running for local councils since nothing to say about national, let alone global politics.
10. So much for the Guardian weekly. Back to other random items.
11. Cartoon John Spooner, The Australian 2019-12-24 p11 “Unimpeachable” shows Speaker Pelosi having tea with another Democrat politician in a suit:
“We funded a fake dossier so that we could fool the FISA court so that we could spy on Americans so that we could…”
With families coming together at the end of one of the most divisive years in recent memory, President Donald Trump‘s campaign has created what is intended to be a gift for supporters who might talk politics with a “snowflake” relative this Christmas.
Trump’s reelection campaign launched a new website Christmas Eve designed to help the president’s backers “win an argument” with liberal friends and family members.
“Nothing says Merry Christmas like hurling insults at relatives,” responded former DNC spokesman Mo Elleithee.
A 2018 Pew Research Center study found that more than half — 53 percent — of Americans thought it was “stressful and frustrating” to discuss politics with people they don’t agree with. That number was up from 46 percent in 2016.
Specifically:
“The change in opinions has come largely among Democrats: 57% now say that talking about politics with people they disagree with is stressful and frustrating, up from 45% two years ago.
By contrast, Republicans’ feelings about political conversations with people they disagree have changed very little. About half (49%) continue to find such conversations stressful and frustrating.”
The more liberal you are, the more stressful and frustrating it is to converse with people you disagree with.
“Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 63% of liberals say such conversations are stressful and frustrating, compared with 51% of conservatives and moderates.”
“As was the case in late 2016, Trump is a more frequent topic of conversation for liberal Democrats than for other Democrats or among Republicans. Currently, 42% of liberal Democrats say Trump’s presidency comes up in conversations very often; that is double the share of conservatives and moderates who say this.
Among Republicans, Trump comes up more in conversation among conservatives (23% very often) than among GOP moderates and liberals (15%). The share of conservative Republicans who say Trump comes up very often in conversation has slipped since 2016, from 30% then to 23% now.”
13. China signing a trade deal now rather than after November might indicate they don’t hope for Trump to lose. More likely they don’t expect anybody else to be any less protectionist. They could be wrong either way if Bloomberg can buy the Democrat nomination. But I suspect that would drive large numbers of Democrat voters to stay home.
In short last year defies caricature, let alone summary or analysis.
Monash University was Australia’s hot-bed of radical student politics in the 1960s and early 1970s, notable for its communist leadership and effective mobilization of very large numbers. The struggle there was a model in many ways, and an inspiration to others.
Here’s the book, edited by Mike Hyde and published in 1972, about that struggle.
