Dawn

Dawn

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 13.5.20

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.   
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*
Life in Spain in the Time of Something Like Cholera
  • Good to read of a 113 year old woman getting over the virus. The second time she's survived a pandemic, of course.
  • Large cities such as Madrid and Barcelona have seen a sudden surge in the number of new upmarket, centrally located flats being advertised on real estate agency websites. In many cases, the property owners are only after a short-term fix, in the hope that international tourism will pick up early next year. Rather than offering long-term leases of 5 to 7 years, they're offering short leases of up to a year.
  • Thinking of travelling to Spain this year? Then read this. It seems that none of my relatives or friends would be allowed to come and stay (locked down) with me for 2 weeks or more. But they could come - rather pointlessly - to spend that time in a hotel. Assuming they can find one open. IGIMSTS.
  • I drove to and from Santiago rail station yesterday, maybe breaking the law. To avoid possible roadblocks of submachine-gun-toting Guardia Civil officers at the Pontevedra-La Coruña provincial border, I opted to pay the sky-high tolls on the AP9, rather than run risks on the N-550. Sure enough, no police in sight, even at the pay booths.
  • María's Come-back Chronicle Day 2.
Real Life in Spain 
  • Dirty work at the political crossroads, from the far right.
  • Not everyone in Spain supports the 'cultural art form' of bullfighting. By any means. See here for details of a petition against financial help for the industry.
  • I need a new (mica) plaque for my microwave. To my surprise, I got a reply to my email of Monday to the importers, politely referring me to their nearest technical agent. In Zarandona, Murcia. Just over 1,000km from my home. So a visit is out of the question. Perhaps they, too, will respond to my email and sell me one.
The UK 
  • The government’s handling of Covid-19 is a very British disaster, says Ambrose Evans Pritchard, citing a cardiologist at a top London hospital, who declares that: "Basically, every mistake that could have been made, was made". But Britain is not alone in this, AEP adds - Belgium, France and The Netherlands are on the bad boy list. And the USA, of course. Full article below, with far more criticisms of  the UK government.
The EU
  • Ryanair goes to war against the coronavirus bailouts. CEO Michael O’Leary denounces ‘nakedly political, corrupt decisions’ by the Commission to approve bailouts. He has a point.
China/The Way of the world
  • China is using the Covid crisis to bully Europe. The EU’s failure to confront Beijing over its blatant propaganda activities will only encourage its communist rulers.  . . . Twice in recent weeks EU officials have been on the verge of criticising China’s conduct, only to back down at the last minute because of pressure from Beijing. . . .The EU’s excuse for kowtowing is that it needs to preserve trade ties - estimated at around £1.3 billion a day before the pandemic - which Brussels believes will be vital to rebuilding Europe’s post-pandemic economy. Yet, at a time when Beijing is actively seeking to increase its influence in Europe, the EU’s failure to confront Beijing over its blatant propaganda activities will only encourage China’s communist rulers to think they can meddle in Europe’s affairs with impunity. .
The USA  
Finally . . .
  • You have to hand it to theists for their inventiveness in interpreting the Bible. Did you know that birthday celebrations are forbidden by it? Some Christians - perhaps those who regard all other alleged Christians as part of the Anti-Christ - insist that cakes and candles are an act of idolatry, originating in the Ancient Greek practice of making a round cake to represent the moon, in honour of the moon goddess, Artemis. And then putting candles on it to represent moonlight. 
  • I don't like magpies, so was pleased - and surprised - just now to see a collared dove and a (male) blackbird joining forces to drive one from my garden.
THE ARTICLE  

Government’s handling of Covid-19 is a very British disaster; Ambrose Evans Pritchard

The Tory party knows that there will be an almighty reckoning when the political post mortem comes.

British exceptionalism has brought an exceptional outcome. We have both an eye-watering number of avoidable deaths and a staggering amount of avoidable economic damage. The purported trade-off between lives and jobs – always a false choice – has instead spared neither. It is the worst of both.

Boris Johnson is in a sense right to resist calls for a premature lifting of containment measures. The fissures within the four nations of the union would become dangerous if he did otherwise. This determination to see it through is becoming his Churchillian test but it is not the fight he expected and it does not obscure the long list of errors that led to this unhappy pass. There should never have been a lockdown in the first place.

The British public have been remarkably forgiving. Emmanuel Macron has on balance done slightly better yet faces a blizzard of abuse and reproach. The Tory party knows full well that indulgence in this country cannot last and that there will be an almighty reckoning when the political post mortem comes.

Just how bad that will be depends on how far we have progressed towards national immunity – and therefore whether the case fatality rate is at the higher or lower end of the scale – if we ever get antibody tests worth using.

Personally, I have been a “Koreanist” from the start. (Perhaps because my only grand-child is a Korean citizen, is safely in Seoul now, and I am biased). They had the advantage of the SARS epidemic as a trial run. Even so, they had to mobilise their testing, tracing, and isolating regime without warning in the middle of a storm yet never lost more than nine people in a single day.

The Koreans have never had a lockdown. They have suffered a big economic shock but not the sort of deep freeze seen in Europe. But leaving aside the East Asian success stories, there were other options for Western states that lacked the testing/tracing infrastructure.

Prostrate Greece has done better than this country by orders of magnitude despite a decade of economic depression and deep austerity cuts to health care, hospitals, and the social welfare system, as well as having to cope with the burden of seething migrant camps on the Aegean islands.

Greece has had 151 deaths linked to coronavirus. That is 14 deaths per million. The UK has just hit 472. The Greeks pulled this off by recognising the danger immediately and acting. Their lockdown was enforced by roadblocks and document checks. They are now well on their way back to commercial normality.

I have been silent on Covid-19 for a while. There was little to be gained from harrying the Government once it had abandoned the misadventure of herd immunity and was at least trying to get a grip. Much of the belated media onslaught is reflexive gotcha-journalism (where were they in February when the mistakes were made?), or hides an ideological agenda.

But claims by both Downing Street and Public Health England that they “got it right” cannot be allowed to stand. Nor can the pretence that each stage of the containment policy is being fed out at just right time and at just the right calibration under the Jupiterian guidance of behavioural theorists.

There was never anything to be gained from delaying the lockdown once the brushfire had slipped control due to lack of testing/tracing. Each three days of prevarication meant a doubling of the infection case load. It was to sink deeper into the quagmire. Nor did the SAGE committee ever have a sufficient grasp of the basic facts to fine-tune the timing, let alone to play God.

The facts will out but it is hard to escape the conclusion that this secretive body – neither institutional fish nor fowl, with opaque responsibilities – gravely misjudged the speed of contagion long after the danger was obvious to virologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists across the world, and indeed to anybody paying attention.

Why does it make sense to impose a two-week quarantine on foreign arrivals at this late stage (excluding Ireland and France), rather than having done so when imported cases were first causing an explosion of infections in a virgin host community?

All visitors to Britain will be ordered to isolate for 14 days in a bid to prevent a second wave of coronavirus Credit: Victoria Jones  /PA

A Covid cardiologist at a top London hospital – friendly to Boris – has been so incensed by the daily charade of bogus omniscience that he vented his spleen in an email to me on Sunday night. It is a poignant indictment, so I pass along a few snippets.

Basically, every mistake that could have been made, was made. He likened the care home policy to the Siege of Caffa in 1346, that grim chapter of the Black Death when a Mongol army catapulted plague-ridden bodies over the walls.

“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did. We discharged known, suspected, and unknown cases into care homes which were unprepared, with no formal warning that the patients were infected, no testing available, and no PPE to prevent transmission. We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable.

“We let these people die without palliation. The official policy was not to visit care homes – and they didn’t (and still don’t). So, after infecting them with a disease that causes an unpleasant ending, we denied our elders access to a doctor – denied GP visits – and denied admission to hospital. Simple things like fluids, withheld. Effective palliation like syringe drivers, withheld.”

The public has yet to realise that the great quest for ventilators was worse than a red herring. The overuse of ventilators was itself killing people at a terrifying ratio and behind that lies another institutional failure.

“When the inquiry comes, it will show that many people died for lack of oxygen supply in hospitals, and this led to early intubation,” writes the doctor. “Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”

By all means let us clap our NHS staff but are we implicitly also being asked to clap the managerial and bureaucratic structure responsible for these policies? Is it henceforth taboo to raise a whisper of criticism against the edifice?

Downing Street has now gone “Korean” with apparent gusto, belatedly switching to testing/tracing/isolation. But when it pulls the policy levers, precious little seems to be happening. Bureaucratic inertia seems to thwart action.

“Where is the testing and contact tracing capacity we should have built?” asks my cardiologist friend. “Are there mass sampling systems to give daily infection figures in every ward of the country? No. Is there an army of contact tracers to act on the results? No. The advert to recruit tracers only went out today, incredibly. And only 15,000. At minimum wage.”

Yes, the R0 reproduction number has fallen to 0.6 or 0.7. Hurrah. But that in itself is not enough. The stock of infections must also be whittled down to a manageable level and the tracing apparatus must be in place.

We are not yet close to achieving a viable suppression strategy. That is why the Prime Minister could offer no more than partial and unsatisfying liberation on Sunday night.

“The striking thing is how consistently the government failed, in every single element of the response, everywhere you turn (the Army excepted),” writes the doctor. “This is probably the most expensive series of errors in the country’s history.”

Britain could have been in a low-death club with Greece, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, or Germany – countries of greatly different wealth and different health defences – but instead it languishes in a lockdown limbo that is nearing the threshold of structural economic damage. The longer it lasts beyond six weeks or so, the greater the threat.

Other Western countries have failed too. Belgium is in the same boat. The Dutch don’t fully count care homes and community deaths. Thousands of Italian Covid-19 deaths slipped through the cracks and have not been recorded. Turmoil in New York matches London. Every nation faces the constant risk of a second wave.

Yet the UK is moving uncomfortably close to special status, with excess deaths above the seasonal average topping 42,000 up to April 24. It has undoubtedly surpassed 50,000 since then. We will breach 1,000 deaths per million before long, yet without reaching the safe uplands of herd immunity.

There is not much company – if any – at this Tibetan altitude. They are not all Covid deaths but they are all part of the Covid drama, all dating from the same original sin in February when the Government was asleep and temptress voices of behavioural theory went unchallenged.

These deaths could have been held to at 1,000 or thereabouts, ideally by Korean methods, or failing that at least by sheer Greek determination. All the other deaths are in essence a policy failure.


 *A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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