COVID-19 – From a Drama into a Crisis!

We have as a nation endured for nine weeks now, an unprecedented period of social and political disruption which has had and still threatens, the most far reaching and serious consequences for the future well-being of our people.

As we all know a viral pandemic has swept the world in the way that viral pandemics have since humans and our pre-human ancestors first walked this earth. Unlike most previous pandemics however, this pandemic — the spread of COVID-19 — has not only caused widespread deaths, it has brought us to a state of social, economic and political paralysis, which now threatens catastrophic political and economic consequences, the like of which few people alive today can fully envision.

There have of course been previous infectious diseases that have wrought devastation upon the peoples affected by them: Small Pox, the Great Pox, and the Bubonic Plague; and there have been a number of modern viral infections that are regarded with dread, not the least of which are HIV and the Ebola virus, but the most devastating aspect of COVID-19 has not been the direct impact it has had on our health, so much as the impact it has had in shaping the political decisions implemented in an effort to contain its spread.

COVID-19 is a coronavirus, of which there are many and the coronaviruses are a family of viruses, which like the closely related rhinoviruses and influenza viruses have been responsible over millennia for causing the Common Cold. Altogether there are over 200 coronaviruses, rhinoviruses and influenza viruses that circulate the Earth every year causing the Common Cold, but once every so often a particular strain of one of these viruses mutates in such a way that makes it rather more infectious than the others, or rather more virulent and therefore deadly than the others, and it is on these occasions that we take notice of it and label it’s spread as a ‘pandemic’.

The common symptoms of one of these viruses is that infected individuals suffer from a head ache, sometimes muscular aches and pains, sometimes a runny nose, sneezing,coughing and in extreme cases, difficulty breathing, which can in the most extreme cases lead on to pneumonia and cause the sufferers to die.

When a strain of one of these viruses is new, it causes more people to suffer the more extreme symptoms and deaths can be alarmingly high. However once a particular viral strain has been around for a few years, a significant proportion of the human population will have suffered it and recovered and built up immunity to its effects – this is what has been referred to as ‘herd immunity’ — and thereafter it poses very little threat to the vast majority of people.

Despite most ‘Common Cold’ viruses being around for many years now, and despite the vast majority of people being protected by ‘herd immunity’, there have none-the-less, every year been significant numbers of people dying, having suffered the more extreme symptoms. In the UK, in an average year, between 10,000 and 30,000 people die of pneumonia induced by one of the ‘Common Cold’ viruses and in the vast majority of years this goes almost unnoticed. This is not to say that no-one cares, but a certain number of deaths each year caused by pneumonia triggered by influenza etc., has in the past been regarded as commonplace and quite unremarkable.

Possibly the earliest recorded influenza pandemic within living memory is the Spanish Flu of 1917-19, in which the H1N1 influenza virus swept the Earth causing deaths estimated to be in the order of 50 million people worldwide. This compares with, to date, c. 330,000 deaths worldwide from COVID-19 and so we can see clearly that our current pandemic is therefore much less deadly than the Spanish Flu pandemic. Indeed, even if this first wave of COVID-19 eventually kills 500,000 in total, it will still be only one hundredth as deadly as was the Spanish Flu.

With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection in 1917, and with no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, the use of disinfectants, and upon restrictions placed on public gatherings. Consequently, a second wave of infection swept the world in 1918, and a third in 1919 and despite the pandemic subsiding thereafter due to herd immunity, H1N1 continued to circulate seasonally thereafter for 38 years.

During World War 2 it was established that the original H1N1 virus had mutated into two separate strains; Influenza A and Influenza B and then in February 1957, a new influenza A virus, the H2N2 virus emerged in East Asia, triggering the ‘Asian Flu’ pandemic, which eventually killed an estimated 1.1 million people worldwide. Again it can be seen that the Asian Flu of 1957 was approximately three times as deadly as the current COVID-19 virus, and the H3N2 influenza virus that emerged to trigger another pandemic in 1968, resulting in roughly 1 million deaths worldwide.

The reason I have recounted these earlier pandemics is to illustrate that COVID-19, while it is a new and ‘novel’ form of coronavirus, it is not quite as ‘unprecedented’ as we have been led to believe. What is unprecedented as far as the current pandemic is concerned, is not either the lethality or infectiousness of the virus, but our governments over-reaction to it.

For most people alive today, the COVID-19 pandemic and the world’s hysterical reaction to it, is an entirely new experience, however for someone as old as the present author, the COVID-19 pandemic is merely one of several such pandemics I have experienced. In fact it is the fourth such pandemic I have lived through and it is the second such pandemic that most people alive today, over the age of eleven will have lived through.

Do you remember the H1N1 pandemic of 2009? … No?

That is probably because you were distracted at the time by the far more pressing threat posed by the Credit Crunch!

So distracted were we all by the Credit Crunch that we almost totally ignored the H1N1 ‘Swine Flu’ pandemic of 2009 that killed approximately 300,000 people worldwide, almost as many as have died from COVID-19!

Did we go into total lockdown in 1957, in response to the H2N2 Asian Flu pandemic? … No!

Did we go into total lockdown in 1968, in response to the H3N2 influenza pandemic? … No!

And as we all know, we didn’t go into lockdown in 2009 in response to the H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic. So why, when all of these previous pandemics were potentially just as lethal as COVID-19, have we panicked in the way we have in response to COVID-19?

In most previous pandemics there were public health warnings to ‘social distance’, to maintain good hygiene standards and to avoid large gatherings of people, and we quarantined the most vulnerable members of society, but we didn’t go into lockdown and shut all the schools, and shut down most of our economy. In previous decades any suggestion that we should do so would have been regarded as a ludicrously dangerous overreaction and one in which the economic consequences of such measures would have immediately been recognised as ‘the cure being worse than the illness’.

As a result of the draconian lockdown we have been subjected to, we have actually saved very few lives. If we look at excess deaths for this time of year, we can see that the proportion of excess deaths recorded in Britain, France, Italy and Spain, all of which resorted to lockdown, are higher than those experienced in Sweden where there was no lockdown.

The damage that has been done to our economy is only now beginning to be realised by the mass media and our political class. I pointed out almost two months ago that the financial cost of lockdown would be to increase public borrowing this year to approximately £815 billion, thereby increasing our national debt to approximately £2,636 billion, a figure that is higher than our Gross Domestic Product! Such a state of public indebtedness has not been seen in this country since the early 1950s when we had to rebuild Britain after the ravages of World War 2.

An economy is a living thing in that you need to feed and nourish and take care of, if it is to survive, and if you shut it down completely, it is the equivalent of stopping someone’s heart beating, and while that may not cause economic problems for a short period, during a national holiday for example, bringing the economy back to life after an extended period of lockdown is rather like attempting to jump-start someone’s heart after they have been left lifeless on a trolley in A&E for several minutes – not an impossibility, but something that will be incredibly difficult and fraught with danger.

Someone revived after being technically dead for several minutes will often suffer long-term ill-effects as a result of their period of lifelessness, not the least of which might be permanent damage to their brain and other vital organs. And so it is with an economy, and as we are now beginning to learn, many companies have become insolvent during lock down; many small companies; many medium-sized companies; and many large companies, and jobs that have been furloughed during lockdown may no longer exist when lockdown is lifted.

Some commentators are already predicting an extended recession with very high levels of unemployment lasting several years as a result of the handling of this crisis. In other words an economic depression on a par with that suffered in the 1930s. We have suffered approximately 55,000 excess deaths this year, some of which will be directly due to COVID-19, but many of them will have been caused as a result of medical facilities being diverted from their normal functions to provide emergency COVID-19 wards. It is now being recognised that many people have died as a result of heart operations and cancer treatments being indefinitely postponed. These latter deaths will have been wholly avoidable and should be regarded as a consequence of the political decision to lockdown rather than a consequence of the pandemic.

The economic consequences of lockdown were wholly avoidable. If we had followed the lead of Sweden for example, we would have suffered fewer deaths and would still have a functioning economy. Wholesale closures, liquidations and bankruptcies could have been avoided as could the high levels of unemployment that will surely follow and the hikes in personal taxation needed if we are to service the massively increased public debt that we have unnecessarily incurred. In the months and years to come there will most likely be a return to austerity measures in our governments efforts to balance the national budget and it is clear now why despite the praise that has justifiably been heaped upon National Health Service workers for their heroic achievements in barrier nursing the sick, the government has shied away from committing to pay rises to reward NHS workers for the bravery they have shown.

Many public services will be closed or cut back as a result of the calamitous handling of this crisis. Indeed the emergence of COVID-19 need not have prompted a crisis at all, we could have been handled it in the same way we handled previous pandemics in 1957, 1968 and 2009 – and as time passes we will come to realise that this crisis was caused by almost inexplicably crass political decisions.

Having introduced lockdown, our government needed to be seen to be enforcing the measures implemented and the Coronavirus Act 2020 was introduced granting the government wide ranging police state powers. No-one could protest about these draconian measures however in any meaningfully effective way, because the holding of public meetings and mass demonstration was banned under the legislation and the mass media were complicit, becoming the propaganda arm of government by supporting these measures that deprived us of our democratic rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

For the last nine weeks we have as a nation existed in a state of suspended animation in which we have become socially isolated in a way that we have never been ever before. We have existed under house arrest while: our economy has been seriously damaged; while government has run up almost unprecedented levels of public debt; while our children have been deprived of education; while our elderly and infirm have been deprived of normal health facilities; while tens of thousands of the most vulnerable people in our society have died; and we have been neutered as an electorate, unable to hold government to account and unable to even attend the funerals of the loved ones who have died. Furthermore, throughout all of this, while we have been forbidden to go out, thousands of immigrants have continued to pour into Britain via airports, sea ports and illegally travelling in dinghies across the the English Channel under Royal Navy escort.

We have as a nation suffered massive damage as a result of the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has been handled. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a way in which it could have been handled worse, and there can be no doubt that as far as the British people are concerned, the cure has been far worse than the disease.

By Max Musson © 2020