Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain*
THE C WORD
Overview
o A Good News roundup appears as the first article below.
o Around the world, some odd things are declared to be 'essential' during the respective lockdowns. See the BBC on this here. Guns in the USA, of course.
Spain
o You have to pity the poor Spanish Prime Minister. At the best of times, this is a fissiparous nation, riven by politics that approach the tribal. And these are not the best of times. At the head of a weak coalition government, the PM has to contend not only with vicious right-wing opposition - most notably from the egregious Vox party - but also with the strong regional governments of a de facto federal state, some of which are instinctively opposed to Madrid on just about everything. Why anyone would want that job is well beyond me.
o As the New York Times puts it: No country is really sure how many people it has lost to the pandemic. But in Spain, it has become bitterly political. Particularly around the issue of the extent to which nursing homes have been decimated behind closed doors. One interesting factor is that many/most homes are run by the Catholic church, meaning mass attendance at, well, Mass.
o This is one view of what Spain needs to do before the (draconian) lockdown is lifted.
Germany: By doing things right from the start, the government there has succeeded in the key challenge of reducing the Ro rate from 3-4% to only 0.7%.
Sweden: In contrast, there seems to be growing evidence that the government there got it wrong with the herd immunity strategy and is now fighting to save face. The country's death per million rate is now well above that of its Scandinavian neighbours and is also above that of Ireland and the USA, for example.
The UK: Richard North is not a man to pull his punches. In today's post he goes to town on the Department of Health and Public Health for embarking on exactly the programme the Chinese had already abandoned, stuffing district general hospitals with staff and equipment, ready to take in thousands of infected people off the streets and put them precisely where they should not be - institutional incompetence of galactic proportions. As he points out: Both patients and staff are paying the price for what is an episode of monumental stupidity that almost beggars description. Not quite Germany, then. [If you find that post article of interest, go to the link to Jonathan Tipper on the subject of how to deal with the virus properly]
Life in the Time of Something Like Cholera
- A valid case for being let out of confinement?
- Non-valid cases . . .
- Growing public weariness here.
- And how the Spanish are compensating.
- Don't know how but I missed one of Maria's posts. So, here and here are days 32 and 33.
- See the second article for a caustic view of our draconian lockdown from an Englishman in Jimena de la Frontera. [I confess to having to look up 'Elmo underwear'.]
- And click here for a plaintive comment on the realties of the lockdown in Sitges, by another Englishman.
Spanish
- Words of the Day:- Plaintive;: Lastimero; Quejumbroso:
- It's emerged that Spanish doctors noticed an unusual level of pneumonia cases and deaths in hospitals here throughout February but didn't start attributing the latter to Covid-19 until very late in the month. My close friend, Peter Missler/Alfie Mittington, died at the end of January, after I'd spent several days at his bedside in the pulmonary ward of Santiago hospital. It's salutary to note that, if his passing had been delayed a month, he could well have succumbed to the virus. And me too.
- Happier news is of a 99 year old British chap cited in the first article below has now raised £15 MILLION pounds from public donations. The internet does have its value.
1. Coronavirus positive: good news round-up - a glimpse of normality returning: A compendium of positive coronavirus news stories from around the world.
Over in world-beating corona-stomping Germany there are plans to reopen shops from next week, and while the news comes with a side-order of recommended mask-wearing there is pleasingly little talk of having to use tongs to pick up items.
Meanwhile Easyjet is thinking about how to get its fleet up and running again, with a suggestion that it will leave its middle seats empty. Great news for everyone who would prefer an aisle or window seat! That is to say, everyone.
Great news too that a return to budget air travel is even being thought about. A sign, perhaps, that we’re edging closer towards the resumption of our previous lives.
Captain Tom Moore, the 99-year-old army veteran who set out to raise £1,000 for the NHS Charities Together, had raised over £12.4 million by Thursday morning. He walked 100 laps of his garden and was given a guard of honour on the last lap.
A 102-year-old Italian woman called Pierina Quagliati is celebrating her recovery from coronavirus – on the same day that her two-year old grandson was also given the all-clear. “Finally we can now go back to eating together at the same table, thank goodness,” she said.
Data from the Office for National Statistics has revealed that more than half of UK adults feel an increased sense of belonging with their neighbours. Ninety seven per cent said they had avoided physical contact following social-distancing guidelines.
Hospital staff at University Hospital Southampton are delivering patients laminated messages emailed in from their family and friends. It allows the messages to be delivered without risk of contamination.
Weddings have resumed in Wuhan, China, with couples rushing to register their marriages and have their wedding photos taken.
Divers in the North Sea who work on the rigs have been photographed 110 metres under with a poster reading “thank you to the NHS”.
China has sent 24 more medical experts to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia to share their anti-epidemic experience, and provide guidance and technical advice.
A Dutch company that normally supplies portable cabins to festivals is sending them to nursing homes instead. The cabins are separated into two rooms by plexiglass windows, meaning residents can safely speak to their loved ones on the other side.
A new ventilator has been approved in Britain, developed by medical company Penlon. It comes as countries around the world frantically attempt to source the machines to help patients breathe in intensive care.
Weddings have resumed in Wuhan, China, with couples rushing to register their marriages and have their wedding photos taken.
Pret a Manger stores have partially reopened near London hospitals. The company is offering NHS workers a 50 discount and pledged to donate 7,000 meals a week to homeless charities.
2. It doesn't feel like lockdown has been eased here in Spain when armed police still stop you at every turn: Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Daily Telegraph.
We wake today in our village of Jimena de la Frontera – a full month into lockdown – to the news that the social democrat Prime Minister is planning to extend confinement by another month, while his hard socialist deputy has called for nationalisation of everything up to the coronavirus itself. We live, as the Chinese like to curse, in interesting times.
That same deputy’s criticisms of the Spanish Head of State, King Philip VI, for wearing military uniform in his rather dignified public appearances as Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces were ill-advised, though, with even left-wing allies pointing out that their own communist heroes – Che Guavara, Castro, Chavez and Maduro – were wont to adopt the same fashion, although normally to a far darker purpose than Spain’s constitutional monarch.
Along with the announcement of prolongation, they spoke of a loosening of the lock-down. For example, one can now exit one’s habitation to purchase a “necessary” pizza from the takeaway, rather than just its equally “necessary” frozen cousin from the supermarket. Personally, this writer finds this hardly a loosening of the manacles. And if anyone doubts the reality of those restraints, the view from the balcony of the Spanish Marines questioning anyone leaving buildings on my street is quite clear.
The unnecessary presence of these armed servants of state, and the unnecessarily rude and confrontational manner of their interrogations of perfectly legal movements, is a misguided burden to both them and the populace they serve.
My fiancée Klarina has been questioned every single day of this quarantine, by the police, the paramilitary or the military, about where she is going, and gets a tired nod in answer to her statement of “to prevent my 12 horses from starving to death.”
When she had to go three times in one night to visit a gravely ill polo pony, Estellar, whose colic from a displaced intestine was at critical levels, they tried to refuse her passage at 2am. Luckily, she did not back down and managed to keep the poor horse walking until by some divine intervention, in the veterinarian’s words, the animal pulled through.
However, Klarina’s heavily pregnant mare, Marilyn, often unwatched since all other staff were sent home and we live 20 minutes from the corrals, did not fare so well and was horribly maimed and almost killed by a brutal birthing. The eagerly awaited foal was not so lucky. Nor was another, also born in the dead of night, who was found cold and starving in the morning.
Our new charitable fund, Equine Oprhans, has not yet been activated as we cannot collect new horses, but has never been more necessary. The British newspapers may be saying this could be the worst crisis since 1709, but in Spain the comparison is with the 1650s, when economic collapse and plague – another one – reduced the population through death and emigration by 12.5% to a mere 7 million.
Of course, we do not spend all our time moaning about our chosen life in Spain. The rest of the time is spent reading, playing poker, backgammon and chess and, when that wears thin, watching Netflix and Amazon Prime. Although nothing lasts long before the yoke is felt once again.
While watching Kenneth Branagh’s excellent adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel, Murder On The Orient Express, Willem Dafoe’s character, an Austrian professor of engineering, was overheard by my Austrian better half saying, “It is science that will win back for Germany her pride.” Which led to an yet another conversation about the peculiar goings-on here in Andalusia. Recently, in Seville, the Army had to be sent in to break up gypsy gatherings where a quasi-Christian black magic cult was praying in the street to hold the contagion at bay.
Just as Spain is refining its knee-jerk reaction to popular fears, Europe’s only research scientist-led country, Germany – Angela Merkel was a physicist – is looking to remove lock-down measures altogether. At the same time that German virologists publish in the most epidemiologically complete case study, the town of Heinsberg, that all infections came from prolonged contact in enclosed spaces, especially where dancing and singing occurred – direct exchanges of firm touch and heightened breath, rather than sharing table-surfaces, glasses or door-handles – Spanish veterinarians were telling people to wash the paws of their dogs after they walk them in the street.
What will months without sunlight and exercise do to our immune systems? Credit: getty
If ever proof were needed that trained medics are not scientists, there it is, and, one suspects, in the mass deployment of face masks that become impregnated with virions for later reuse and reinfection and are also completely permeable to Covid-19 when sodden with the sweat or rain that alternate here in sequence.
It is those same German studies which have given the one true ray of hope, which is that the mortality of the virus is around 0.37%, less than a tenth of the 4% figure people like to bounce around on social and traditional media, citing the deeply questionable WHO. Why aren’t British journalists looking to our own per-review medical journals, like The Lancet and British Medical Journal, whose overview articles conclude it is less than 0.99% at the most?
Anyway, extrapolating up from deaths with that rate, if around 12% of Spain already have or have had the virus, perhaps an end is in sight. Although what that end will be is a more profound question, for this Spanish government is performing, if unwittingly, one grand piece of scientific enquiry.
For what will be the largest medical experiment in the social history of Spain, they have taken 47 million people of whom 80% were practically immune to the disease, then deprived them of all exercise, sunlight, normal healthy variety of nutrition, and to top it off added the immunosuppressive effect of massive stress due to loss of livelihood. Soon they will be forced by lack of money or out-and-out rebellion to re-release them back into the wild.
Let us see how they fare against the disease then.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.
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