Deft analysis. Positive infection salutory to
clear out senior royal and political and
governmental and military and finance and spies
and media and intellectual and celebrities and
predators and environmental damagers and drug
pushers, allowing angelic ethical fair-minded
under-60s to take over the reliquaries in hazmat
gear without guillotining, merely shovel the
disinfected carcasses into the Thames to be
encased in plastic waste and frozen into revived
icelands. Until boarded by circumnavigating polar
bears with plastic sails sniffing fresh meat down south.
At 09:29 AM 3/14/2020, you wrote:
2- It's an Ill Wind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XRc389TvG8
So now we know: first, that the UK government is
actually deliberately trying to infect over 40
million UK citizens, and in doing so expecting,
on their figures, 400,000 deaths.
The reason given for this is to develop "herd
immunity", where there are so many people who
have had the virus that there is nobody for
someone who later contracts it to give it to, as
everybody has already had it and is immune.
But the Chinese didn't do that. They implemented
strong containment and stopped the virus dead.
They didn't "lessen the peak", they obliterated the peak.
There is no reason why we can't do that too.
But the Government insists on buying herd
immunity at the cost of at least 400,000 (more
likely a million [1]) deaths. Why?
The question arises, what good would herd
immunity, bought at such a terrible cost in deaths, do?
The reason given is that the Government believes
that COVID-19 will turn into a seasonal disease,
and herd immunity might protect us from it's return next year.
There are three big problems with that - First,
we don't know that it will return at all.
Second, if it does return next year, it will
have mutated - and like flu, it is likely that
the herd immunity, so dearly bought, will not be
effective against next year's version, if it happens.
There is also concern about people in China who
seem to have gotten the disease twice. We don't
know why that is, whether it is two different
strains of the virus (there are several hundred
known varieties of the COVID-19 virus, it
mutates fairly rapidly) or people getting the
disease twice - however in either case that
would lower the usefulness of any herd immunity.
So, I don't see why the UK Government are killing 400,000 people.
Apparently it isn't because the UK has a large
proportion of older people. Older people who
need extensive healthcare, expensive pensions,
who tie up a lot of wealth and property - of the
predicted 400,000 (million) deaths the vast majority would be of older people.
This clearing away of unproductive and expensive
(and wealthy) older population would more than
balance the budget, releasing £10 billion per
year in state pensions, £20 billion per year in heathcare costs, and so on.
It would stop the disease in the UK fairly
quickly, and it would be the cheapest option
(ignoring the actuarial but not-real-pounds cost of the deaths).
It would release several hundred thousand
badly-needed homes (and cause a property price
crash; the UK needs about 1 million homes, which
is why UK property is so expensive) and would
provide a more balanced population pyramid.
So for the UK as a nation it would not be a bad
thing (ignoring the deaths), and I fear some
politicians may think "Hey, it's just the useless oldies, who cares?".
But no. There is probably a sensible reason we
don't implement strong confinement and stop the
virus in its tracks, rather than letting it have
its way. Unfortunately I don't know what that reason is.
Peter Fairbrother
[1] I calculate around a million deaths, but
that is a bit of a back-of-the envelope
calculation based on known death rates elsewhere
and comparative population age spreads. Exact
figures also depend on some assumptions about
things we do not know about the disease. I have
made what I think are reasonable assumptions. I
don't know how reasonable the Goverment's
assumptions are, or how they came up with the 400,000 figure.
