Earlier in the Covid catastrophe, way back in April, May, I kept a blog on the Covid thing, sharing the numbers and the headline news, watching keenly as the scale mushroomed exponentially – from thousands to tens of thousands, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, ever onwards and upwards. I stopped when it got close to a million. I feel there is an apposite quote, probably mis-attributed to a high-ranking Nazi, along the lines that killing one person is a serious crime, a 100 an unspeakable crime, and a million an inconvenient statistic.
The numbers on my old friend, world monitor, are coronavirus cases: 37,748,234; deaths: 1,081,443; recovered: 28,350,523. It’s fatiging to write those 7 and 8 digit numbers. I want to give rough numbers, 1.08 million is so much easier to write that one million, eighty-one thousand, four hundred and forty-three. What difference does 443 make, when it increased by 5,162 on October 10 alone. And do we really believe that the statistics collections globally are correct down to a single digit? Wouldn’t it be less inaccurate to recognize the approximate nature of these statistics by using numbers rounded up or down, rather than the faux exactitude of official statistics?
Yet we are talking about human lives, each one as precious in the abstract as our own to us are precious in reality, for without our life we are dead, void of existence and relevance. Each death, not just Covid – which opens a whole other can of moral relativity, for the question gets asked, is the focus on this new virus and the pandemic it has caused distracting from the focus on other life erasing illnesses, your garden variety cancers, heart dieseases and the like, each death… is a personal tragedy first and foremost. A life extinguished. A life extinguised due to a new virus, the first human instance of which they now think was sometime in 2019, earlier that its first reported detection in January, 2020.
Humans respond to new and established challenges very differently. An established challenge, such as grocery shopping, we pay scant critical attention to, relying on the accumulated knowledge and experience that we embed in the practice we call habits. Whether our shopping technique is as good as it could be, or whether the food we purchase is as cost effective or as healthy as it shoud be, are not things we consider on a habitual basis, we just go do our business like we did last week, motivated by the same desires, impulses, fears, subject to the same temporal constraint like proximity and parking.
A new challenge on the other hand engages our attention very differently for something new is something scary. Novelty stimulates us. It frees us from the chains of stupor, the habits that freeing out mind of anxiety anesthetise our daily lives and starve our soul of stimulus. When we discover a new lump on our breast or a new rash on our skin, we move into high panic mode. It consumes us. We become hyper-active, researching and catastrophising, examining the guilty part of our body and scheduling medical appointments. Every mini-step fraught with anxiety and self-doubt. It is exhausting. Still, this phase, despite its (fever) pitch, does not last. Panic consultations in time give way to diagnosis and the slow grind of treatment. The practice of our illness itself becomes a habit, one so frequently disagreeably mundane that final death is sometimes more deliverance than despair.
Our response to Covid was in the days of Spring usabashedly that of something new. We responded with panic to the threat and an abundance of caution to the risks. The chief benefit of this initial period was solidarity as the world reacted in a common human way to a novel, threatening impact. The chief downside was panic, an over excited state, typified by a loss of self-control and a capacitor-like discharge of mental and emotional energy, resulting in the inevitable come-down, a psychological crash which leads to waves of recrimination and self-loathing lapping at our shores.
The initial wave of covid darkness: images on our TV of container trucks tucked innocuously in the corner of New York hospital parking lots…makeshift morques the presenter informed us, in a voice rolling with self-importanance from the breaking of real new news, and carrying also an undertone, a high octane e mix of incredulity laced with contempt, for a wee virus, an ancient foe, had laid mighty America low. That mix of contempt and incredulity had become ingrained even by that early stage, originating from earlier images from Italy where footage of patients on ventilators in crowded wards and interviews with harried doctors speaking with compassion and resignation, had at one point seemed destined to be the high-water mark of the pandemic’s impact. Newspaper articles on Italy’s unique problems proliferated for a few weeks, its economic failings, its lack of rule keeping, the hugging and kissing, it’s sheer Italian-ness. Little did we know that there would be other countries to pity, the UK and Brazil, with their comedy political leaders, and others to envy, the `Germans and the Japanese, those old reliable exemplars of well functioning society, before the virus struck here and our fixations once again found their natural home, ourselves.
Now 9 months into the pandemic the argument flops backward and flips forwards between those who retain the panic and those already half-bored wanting to go back shopping.
Public health is a tough business to be in. On paper, it is in the business of saving lives. but in reality, it is in the business of putting a price of life. On paper, professional sport is in the business of nurturing sport to the highest level, but in reality, it is monetising a sporting experience in the most efficient way possible. It is this pragmatic reality, grubby and normal, at the core of public health, one understood and both supported and resented by its users and taxpaying enablers, that induces a low-level distrust among those very same users and enablers in its mission and messages, a distrust that is induced by self-awareness of their own contradictory impulses of ‘yes for me, but less for thee’. In short, we want the best for ourselves but don’t want to pay for the best for others.
Public health talks passionately about what we should do as individuals and stays silent about its targets for acceptable fatalities. Each life is unique and precious, and 100 deaths is a number.
Public health organisations expended a lof of resources in panic mode fighting the new threat. Now that we are nine months in, facing winter, with nothing resolved, no vaccine, no wonder treatment – so the debate goes, should we continue with the panic mode, all hands on deck to save lives, massive expenditures or energy, or, or should we allow it to slip from the headlines, from page one in the newspapers, just let it and the five thousand fatalities a day slip gently below the surface of our consciousness, into a room down the long corridor where our habits are found, like hobbits, living a life in the shire of small pleasures, unconcerned about the world outside, even as the clouds form and darkness grows over the mountains of Mordor.
Oct 27, 2020
Global 43,800,644 Deaths: 1,164,784
Ireland 58,067 Deaths 1,885
As of last week, we are once again in lockdown, in a nether zone somewhere between level 4 and 5. We are not alone; Ireland is nestled, as is its wont, in the middle of European countries in the severity of Covid-19 infection rate resurgence. It is only October and the dreaded second wave is here.
Shops are closed, 5km limit to travel reimposed, restaurants shut…the methods are primitive, invasive and desperate. We are medieval walled cities, grubby with fear and pestilence, represented by suspicious and anxious guards at our gates, drawn inwards by the awfulness that surrounds us, a malign state of impoverished terror that we contribute to by our regressively negative thoughts, if it’s this dangerous here, imagine how bad it is out there, we think, as we scurry in the shadows like rats, avoiding humans like the plague.
The preferred statistic of comparison at this point in the pandemic is number of cases per 100,000 people, and the national number in Ireland is above 300. Cavan has the highest country incident rate at over 900. Andalusia, in Spain, home to Sevilla, a flight destination for us next month should we choose to break the chains of lockdown and avail of the 2 for 1 Ryanair tickets I purchased in a fit of optimism while sprawled on a single bed in Tokyo back in September, has an incident rate of over 1,000, which is pretty high; however, within Spain, it is one of the lowest. Madrid, at the top, has an incident rate of over 4,000 per 100,000. That is 4% of residents have Covid now. With those kinds of numbers herd immunity won’t be long coming, you might think, but in research results reported in newspapers this morning, it was found that post infection immunity to Covid does not last long. Not good information for those of us ‘following the science’ and hoping for some kind of rational exit ramp.
There are demonstrations in Italy against the new restrictions. All over the shop, that section of the population, found in almost every country, that fears the New World Order, whatever that is, has picked up freedom’s cudgel to protest the imposition of mask wearing, a new symbol it seems of oppression to place, alongside vaccinations, 5G and micro-chipping, on the altar of evil dedicated to the 21st century Beezlebub himself, globalism.
Funnily enough, the most prominent and ineluctable purveyors of the new world order, one in which the globe is spanned (and spammed) by the same tropes and herded by the same information, are the gi-normous IT companies, your Facebooks, Googles and Apples, your Microsofts, Netflixs and AliBabas. Yet our anti-vaxxer friends have no beef with this unholy crew of mind-share stealing, revenue sucking, behaviour shaping and agenda setting set of digital overlords. What gives?
Guess they like Facebook. Helps them organise their rallies and share their memes. The powerlessness they feel in their slavery to big tech, a powerlessness they cannot do anything about, due to their dependence on said same, causes psychological trauma as it infantilises and inculcates dependency. This trauma generates anger, which unable to focus on the root cause of their dependency, big tech, due to their own complicity in the development of that dependency, they project onto other areas of modern existence that have some of the same attributes – global in reach, technology driven, and with a controlling capability. Hence vaccination programs and 5G and the like.
