Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain*
COVID-19 ROUND-UPGeneral
o There's an interestingly optimistic view of the future below as the first article.
o Home-made facemasks slow coronavirus spread, say scientists
o I'm guessing that everyone's heard the crazy conspiracy theory that Bill Gates is pushing for a vaccine so that a chip can be inserted in everyone. To revise a famous quote: When people stop believing in science, it's not that they believe in nothing: it's that they'll believe in anything.
Spain
o Kids: In response to widespread criticism, the government has relaxed rules on children aged 14 and under. The requirement for the trip to be for 'essential purchases or errands' has now been lifted.
o For the rest of us, the ferocious lockdown has been extended until May 10. Though . . .
o We will return(?) to a new normal in the 2nd half of May, our PM assures us.
o Meanwhile:-
- The numbers continue to improve. Though not markedly so this week. A plateau?
- The July Pamplona bull-running has been cancelled.
- Ditto Valencia's August Tomatina, the world'd largest tomato fight.
The USA: A top health official has warned of a second wave that could be worse than the first. Not that their President cares much about this. And won't until he realises it'll affect his re-election chances.
Sweden: Deaths are occurring there at a higher rate than in Switzerland, which Sweden has now overtaken in the table of per capita deaths, to become 7th, after the Netherlands.
Life in Spain in the Time of Something Like Cholera
- María's Day 39. Faking it.
- The maximum price for face-masks has been set at 96 centimos, if you can find somewhere with stocks of them. Run by folk prepared to take a loss on products they were charged far more for by the wholesalers. Who, in turn , . . . .
- 15 survival tips for 'seniors' stuck at home. Don't expect anything groundbreaking.
- I must have passed the exit to it on the A8 dozens - if not more than a hundred - times but always thought the 'Asturias' airport in those parts was to the south, near Oviedo. But it ain't; it's 9km WNW of Avilés. You survive and learn.
- This sort of thing seems to happen far too often with people in positions of authority here in Spain. But, of course, it pales beside the massive corruption of really senior politicians.
- Another great impression
- And 2 marvellous songs, here and here.
- Anyone surprised? President Trump's warning to Iran that he had ordered the US navy to destroy any gunboats that threaten American warships in the Gulf came in a tweet that appeared to take the Pentagon and US navy chiefs alike by surprise,
- We all know that, in these insane times, the internet has given a megaphone to the world's cretins. But that's only words. Far worse is that imbeciles in power are exhorting these same people to actions. Which are usually louder than mere words.
- My elder daughter and I laughed when her 15m old son, after looking at a picture of a chicken, went and got his chicken-sized model dinosaur to continue 'reading'. But then she discovered that one evolved from the other. Smarter than us, then.
We’ll be free to enjoy the Roaring 2020s: The decade of creative change that followed the Great War and Spanish flu can be repeated once the lockdown ends: David Aaronovitch, The Times
Here’s a dilemma. Refusing to think about the post-pandemic world can drive you mad, but any such thoughts are almost absurdly speculative. At the weekend my brain hopped on a logic-train and imagined society divided into people who’ve had Covid-19 and whose immunity makes them free and valuable, and a majority in semi-permanent lockdown.
Crazy, right? There is, however, a consistent strand of thought among sensible people about how things will change. This can be summarised as “distance is here to stay”. Anthony Fauci, the chief US immunologist, says that handshaking should stop for ever. And if you’re not going to touch hands, why on earth would you hug or kiss anyone other than close relatives?
According to this theory, we can bid farewell to the cinema, the theatre, the pub, the nightclub, the race meet, the economy flight, the open-plan office — in fact anywhere and anything that will bring you into close physical contact with strangers. We won’t be forbidden these things but many of us will no longer want to do them. Whatever we do, we’ll do online.
I want to offer you a different, more hopeful vision of the future. And it’s based on how people behaved after the Spanish flu.
The worst pandemic of the 20th century erupted at the end of the Great War and killed between two and three times as many as that appalling conflict. In Britain, it claimed nearly 230,000 lives in a year. These victims did not die in public, however, but in their homes, and not together but separately. A historian of the flu disaster, Laura Spinney, points out that for the pandemic dead “there is no cenotaph, no monument in London, Moscow, or Washington, DC. The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively”.
So the people of 1920 had just emerged from the acknowledged trauma of world war and the more subterranean one of the pandemic. And unlike the coronavirus, deaths from Spanish flu were highest in the 20 to 40 age group.
You might expect then the 1920s to have been a decade of painful reconstruction, caution and cultural conservatism. Instead we got what became known as “The Roaring 20s”. In America and in Europe the postwar, post-pandemic reaction was an explosion of cultural and artistic innovation and a revolution in social attitudes.
Among writers, the people who Gertrude Stein in 1921 called the “lost generation”, were young men like F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who had gone to war and come back as existentialists, believers that life had no higher purpose. This outlook enabled them to distance themselves from the intellectual and moral constraints of their parents, and create work that was often cynical but usually honest and vivid.
And it wasn’t just writers. Fitzgerald himself invented the term “The Jazz Age” for this period. In the 1920s rural southern blacks migrated to the cities in their millions and helped intensify a new urban culture. In 1924 Duke Ellington opened the Cotton Club in Harlem in New York. Within weeks of jazz records being pressed in the States they were being played by young people all over the world.
There were new architectural movements — Art Deco (anyone else think that the Chrysler Building is one of the most beautiful in the world?) and Bauhaus. In defeated Germany, in what they later called the Golden Age, Expressionism revolutionised visual art from paintings to cinema to cabaret. In France, home to Surrealism, it was known as Les Années folles.
Here in Britain the “Bright Young Things” satirised by Evelyn Waugh in his 1930 novel Vile Bodies, included several leading writers, described by one historian as possessing “a restless rootlessness …” having “a feeling, because ultimately they survived the war, of being both chosen and undeserving”. One of Waugh’s main characters describes “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties … almost naked parties in St John’s Wood”. Condom sales grew exponentially. The diaphragm began to be mass produced.
If the privileged partied, then at least the less well-off danced — the Charleston, the Lindy-hop and in dance marathons. And if women authors displayed a new candour, then ordinary women displayed a new independence. Or had it displayed to them. Suddenly adverts showed women driving cars, flying aeroplanes and even smoking. The historian Lucy Moore tells us that in the US in 1929 the ban on women smoking in railway dining cars was lifted. As were hems. During the 1920s the amount of fabric used to dress a woman fell from over 19 yards to seven. Coco Chanel launched herself into a business traditionally dominated by men — women’s clothing — and dressed women in fabrics usually reserved for the chaps, broadening what it meant to be feminine. In 1921 “the Fashion Queen” launched Chanel No 5. The glamour world of the film star became available for everyone.
All these phenomena were contested. As young people rejected parental values, as the mores of the city clashed with those of the small towns, there was a “cultural civil war” to match anything we have going on now. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the emergence from the straitened, anxious, death-laden times of the Great War and the Great Pandemic created a cultural and social dynamism, as the life force reasserted itself.
In 1918, American cinemas and theatres were closed in flu-hit cities and towns, and mass events were banned. Masks were worn. And, given that the transmission from person to person of the flu was well understood even then, there must have been a reluctance to press up too closely against other bodies. Yet not only did the closest form of mass entertainment — cinema — survive, it thrived. Within a matter of months huge picture palaces seating 1,200 people were being constructed. By 1930, in a US population of 123 million, weekly movie attendance was 90 million. In close social proximity the pandemic survivors watched Buster Keaton, the “It girl” Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino.
My reasoned hope is that the same will happen this time. That the lid put on our collective lives will come flying off as younger generations of play-goers, cinephiles, festival fans, art-lovers and their heroes, together, turn the world upside down again. Get ready for the Roaring 2020s.
2. What Germany got right in the fight against coronavirus
Many in the UK looked on in envy this week as Germany began to lift some of its coronavirus lockdown measures and shops reopened around the country. Car dealerships and furniture stores are back in business. Even Berlin’s two zoos are set to reopen by the end of this month.
While it remains to be seen whether the German authorities have got it right or acted too soon in easing the pressure, it is clear the country has done better than most of its European neighbours in tackling the virus so far.
Germany has one of the lowest case fatality rates in the world, with 4,869 deaths for 147,593 detected infections, according to Johns Hopkins University in the US. That’s a case fatality rate of just over 3 per cent, compared to around 13 per cent in the UK, France and Italy.
What's more, German scientists announced last week they had succeeded in bringing the reproduction factor — the number of people each person with the virus passes the infection to — under 1 for the first time.
Whatever happens next, right now Germany is as close to a coronavirus success story as Europe has. The story of that success comes down to three things: preparedness, a decentralised system that lets doctors make the calls, and a generous slice of luck.
Intensive care beds
Germany was better prepared for the coronavirus than anywhere else in Europe for one key reason: it had more intensive care beds.
At the start of the outbreak Germany had 28,000 ICU beds, far more than any other European country. The UK had just 4,000. Relative to the size of its population, Germany had 29.2 intensive care beds per 100,000 people, compared to 12.5 in Italy, 11.6 in France, and just 6.6 in the UK.
And since the crisis began Germany has ramped its total number of ICU beds up even further, to 40,000 — meaning its health system has never been overloaded.
“One thing Germany got right was increasing the intensive care beds,” Prof Alexander Kekulé, a leading German epidemiologist and virologist said. “As we saw in Italy, it’s when the intensive care units are full that the death rate really begins to rise.”
Test, test, test
German government scientists say the reason the country’s fatality rate is so much lower than in other countries is simply that they are detecting more of the cases that don't make it to hospital.
“The reason e have so few deaths is because we do a lot of tests,” Prof Christian Drosten, the virologist in charge of the national response has said.
“Test, test, test,” has been the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s mantra for tackling the virus, and if one country has taken that to heart it is Germany.
So far, Germany has carried out over 1.73m coronavirus tests at a rate of 350,000 a week, according to Jens Spahn, the health minister.
German scientists believe their figures are closer to the real death rate for the virus, because they're recording more of the cases where patients recover.
Chasing the infection chains
But thorough testing doesn't just give more reliable numbers. It has also allowed Germany to stem the spread of the virus by tracing infection chains and isolating people before they can pass it on to others.
The classic example is the town of Gangelt in Heinsberg district, the epicentre of Germany’s first major outbreak.
On February 25, a 47-year-old resident of the town tested positive for the coronavirus. He and his wife were immediately placed in isolation. But the German authorities didn’t stop there.
Within days, they had traced everyone the couple could have been in contact with during the previous two weeks. That was a lot of people: the couple had spent ten days at packed carnival celebrations and could have passed the infection to hundreds.
But health authorities were able to contact everyone who had been at the carnival and test them. The result was that the outbreak was confined. Heinsberg is over the worst, and the district's shops were allowed to reopen this week.
Decentralisation
Part of Germany’s preparedness lies in the fact it spends a higher proportion of its GDP on healthcare than most countries — 11.2 per cent, compared to 9.6 per cent in the UK.
But the US spends even more, and has struggled to contain the virus. The answer lies in Germany’s decentralised public health system.
It is the oldest publicly funded healthcare system in Europe, dating back to when Prince Otto von Bismarck was chancellor.
But unlike in the UK, there is no central authority like the NHS. Hospitals and clinics are independent, and healthcare is funded by compulsory public insurance.
The debate on which system is better is endless, but in this case the German set-up proved more suited to tackling the coronavirus.
While Public Health England was still arguing over testing regimes and retaining control, in Germany individual GPs were able to order tests for their patients.
And while the NHS tried to boost capacity at a handful of centralised superlabs, in Germany GPs could send samples to a network of 176 public and private laboratories across the country for analysis. The costs were fixed and the bill was picked up by the public insurance funds.
“We have a culture here in Germany that is not supporting a centralised diagnostic system,” Prof Drosten told NPR radio. “So Germany does not have a public health laboratory that would restrict other labs from doing the tests.”
Test kits
All that testing depended on Germany having enough test kits to go around, and that’s where preparedness comes in again. It helped that Germany has a lot of biotech companies able to produce virus tests — but so does the UK.
The difference, put simply, is that Germany just got its act together quicker. In January, before the WHO had even declared that the coronavirus was transmissible from one person to another, German scientists had developed a test.
They were able to act so fast because doctors and academics worked together with the private sector without waiting for the government to act.
Olfert Landt, a German biotech entrepreneur, set his company TIB Molbiol to work alongside Berlin’s Charite teaching hospital to develop a test, and the public insurance funds agreed to pay for testing in February.
Luck
As the German authorities have been the first to acknowledge, all the preparedness in the world wouldn’t have got them to where they are were it not for a crucial slice of luck at the outset.
The major outbreak of the virus was introduced to Germany by a very specific path — via skiers returning from winter breaks in the resorts of Austria and Italy. That meant initial infections were confined to the young and fit, who had the best chance of surviving the virus.
And that gave Germany a vital window to start its programme of testing and tracking infection chains before it could spread to the most vulnerable groups, those over 70 or with pre-existing health conditions.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.
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