Monthly Archives: April 2020

Pandemic 2 – Where do we go from here?

Posted on by
Reply

Today the UK enters its sixth week of what is being termed “lockdown”, although that term to my mind over dramatises the situation as the restrictions, whilst they have a basis in law (The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 and corresponding legislation in Wales and Scotland), are being enforced primarily through a combination of personal behaviour change reinforced by peer pressure, and relatively light-touch policing rather than by troops on the streets and checkpoints with uniformed officials demanding “papers please”. Whatever we call it, the past six weeks and the threat that hangs over them have had a profound impact on our national psyche.

Following a burst of panic buying in the early stages, primarily it seemed of pasta and toilet rolls, when retailers and their supply chains struggled to keep up, life in Lockdown Britain seems to have adjusted remarkably quickly and smoothly to the new normal. Of course, the impacts are not shared evenly by everyone, no matter how much it might seem that this time we really are all in it together. The experience in affluent commuter villages where furloughed executives enjoy 6pm “quarantinis” over the fence with neighbours whilst their children play happily in large gardens following a day of enriching educational activities and home baking sessions, is a far more easy and pleasant one than the very real hardship being experienced by many cooped up in cramped and inadequate accommodation, trying to juggle work and caring responsibilities, manage their own or a partner’s mental health issues or living in the shadow of abuse, all whilst trying to cope on 80% (if they are lucky) of an income that was never enough in the first place.

Increasingly, the national conversation is beginning to turn to when we might expect to see the restrictions eased and some semblance of normal life restored. There have been media reports that, during the Prime Minister’s absence recovering from what seems to have been a serious illness as a result of Covid-19 infection, the Cabinet is split between those Ministers who are advocating a swift return to normality in order to save the economy and those who counsel caution and remaining in lockdown until the medical and scientific advice points unequivocally towards a lifting of controls. Those media commentators hoping for a bullish response from the PM on his return must have been disappointed by the cautious and measured Boris Johnson who appeared in front of the cameras in Downing Street on the morning of his first day back at work https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52439348

However fast or slow the exit from lockdown may be, the latest figures from the Department of Health do seem to suggest that both recorded new cases and deaths have passed the peak, even if there is no sign of a rapid descent down the curve.

Chart showing number of new confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK has dipped below 5,000 for 5 of the last six days

It is clear that at some point, and possibly sooner rather than later if pressure continues to mount on the Prime Minister from business leaders and their parliamentary champions, the country will begin the transition back to normality, even this proves to be a slow process rather than a binary switch https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/uk-will-need-social-distancing-until-at-least-end-of-year-says-whitty

This is an appropriate time to reflect on what are the lessons and experiences from the past six weeks that we can take with us into the future.

One thing that is abundantly clear is that what has been referred to as the “global pause” is just that: nothing has fundamentally changed as a result of Covid-19, there has just been a temporary interruption to normal life. The world remains on track towards a disastrous level of global heating and the sixth mass extinction that has seen species and their habitats around the world vanish at an unprecedented rate continues unabated.

What this hiatus has done is give us a moment of enforced reflection to consider what is really important and how certain some of the old certainties are after all. Recent opinion polls in the UK show that the public want to see the Government tackle climate change with the same urgency as has been seen in its response to the coronavirus. This means that any recovery needs to be kickstarted by some form of green stimulus package – a nationwide programme of retrofitting the millions of homes that currently lack decent insulation, thus reducing carbon emissions and tackling fuel poverty would be a good start – rather than bailing out the oil companies and airlines. Certainly, having spent billions of pounds in propping up the economy, any return to the “there is no magic money tree” narrative will lack a certain amount of credibility, even if we have yet to see the obvious and almost inevitable corollary to increased levels of public spending, which is higher levels of taxation, being presented to the British public by a Conservative Chancellor. The switch of large amounts of manufacturing capacity over to making PPE and ventilators for the NHS, demonstrates how a comparable re-tooling and re-skilling could switch capacity in “dirty” industries to the products that will be needed for any Green New Deal – wind turbines, heat pumps and insulation, for example.   The pandemic and the resulting global pause has brought us to a point where we can reassess what we want the future to look like. We can either opt for a return to business as usual or we can choose a path towards a different future, one in which nurses, delivery drivers and fruit pickers continue to be seen as key workers and valued accordingly; a future in which the working day does not need to be preceded and followed by an hour or more stuck in traffic or crammed into a standing room-only commuter train; a future in which our worth is determined by who we are rather than by what we own and one in which we value community and human contact all the more for having been forcibly deprived of them.

On the other hand, we can allow a Government, spurred on by the vested interests and corporate lobbyists, to repeat the mistakes of the “recovery” that followed the 2008 financial crash when the banks and other institutions whose mistakes a wrongdoing had caused the crisis were handed a bailout that was paid for by a decade of austerity inflicted on the most vulnerable in society and a freeze in public sector pay that slashed the living standards of the same people who are now being hailed as national heroes.

There is no getting away from the awfulness of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on people’s lives and livelihoods as well as the appalling number of lives lost. The challenge we now face as a society is how to construct a future that is a fitting memorial to those we have lost so that 2020 goes down in history as a key turning point in the history of humanity.

 

 

Pandemic 1 – How Did We Get Here?

Posted on by
Reply

The past few weeks have been like nothing any of us could have ever imagined. When reports began to come out of China in January of a new virus that had apparently jumped species from animals to humans and was spreading rapidly through the population of Wuhan, few people in the West took more than a passing interest. For those of us of a certain age, this is the fourth potential pandemic to emerge from China in the past twenty years – SARS, Swine Flu and Avian Flu were all suppose to be about to bring the UK to its knees but the most serious impact that I can recall is having to place our small backyard poultry flock under lockdown for a few months when Avian Flu threatened. This meant that, although being no stranger to the pandemic planning process stood me in good stead when it came to formulating a response to Covid-19 in both my personal and professional lives, there was undoubtedly a part of me that did not take the threat entirely seriously. After all, we hadn’t we been here before: much ado about nothing for a while and then back to normal?

That misplaced optimism soon evaporated as, along with the rest of the country, I watched, transfixed with a mixture of horror and disbelief, as the virus spread across the globe, aided and abetted by the highly connected world in which we live today. This global connectivity and the ability of the virus to cross continents within a matter of hours, hitching a ride with its human hosts via long-haul air travel, is one of many reasons why the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 is potentially several orders of magnitude more deadly than the oft-quoted comparator of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which claimed more lives than the industrial-scale slaughter of the Great War.

The first documented case of Covid-19 infection was recorded in the UK on 31st January and exactly four weeks later on 28th February the first case not involving a patient who had travelled to an infected area overseas was recorded. By 1st March, cases had been confirmed in all four constituent parts of the United Kingdom. The UK Government announced a four-pronged strategy to tackle the outbreak: contain, delay, research and mitigate, which was explained to the public by the man who became an unexpected public figure, and one who inspired more public confidence than the politicians as people turned to the experts for reassurance, Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Witty. Unfortunately, the ruling Conservative Party’s instinctive support for the liberty of the individual and congenital distrust of state intervention in people’s lives led to the Government’s clinging to the now-discredited strategy of allowing the virus to spread to encourage ‘herd immunity’ just at the time when the window when the “Contain” element of their response was briefly open and an early adoption of a policy of enforced social distancing might have been succesful in more or less stopping the incipient pandemic in its tracks. As it was, by the time the Government eventually announced the closure of schools on 18th March, it was effectively playing catch-up with what many institutions were already doing off their own bats. It was not until 20th March that all pubs, clubs, restaurants and indoor leisure facilities were ordered to close and tighter, legally enforceable measures to encourage social distancing were not introduced until 23rd March, a full week after the Government first began encouraging people to take these steps voluntarily. If, as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics, it is an eternity in a pandemic and we will probably never know how many lives have been lost as a result of that week when political ideology was yet again allowed to triumph over expert advice.

However, proving that principle in politics is an infinitely flexible concept, new Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a £12 billion package of measures in his Budget of 12th March to mitigate the damage caused to the economy by the Covid-19 outbreak. This was followed on 17th March by an announcement of loans and grants to support businesses, on 20th March by the potentially uncapped Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and on 26th March by support for the self-employed, taking the total value of support measures to nearly 3% of GDP. This is dwarfed by the £330 billion of loan guarantes underwritten by the government as part of its support to business. This represents the very type of Keynesian state intervention in the economy that the Conservatives and their allies in the right-wing press greeted with howls of derision when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party proposed them in their 2019 General Election manifesto and which were subsequently roundly rejected by the electorate. Had a Labour Chancellor introduced these measures, and a Labour Government sought to curtail people’s liberty in the way that we are currently seeing in Lockdown Britain, the Conservative opposition and the press would have been shouting about socialism and whipping up public unrest and civil disobedience to thwart the Government’s “Soviet” intentions. As it is, a Conservative Chancellor and a Conservative Government have been able to introduce these measures to almost universal support from all sides of the House of Commons and the media. Politics in the UK has truly passed through the looking glass in recent weeks and it seems at times that we are living in a bizarre alternative reality where all the old certainties have been turned on their heads.