The fleet in view, he twanged his deadly bow,
And hissing fly the feathered fates below.
On mules and dogs the infection first began;
And last, the vengeful arrows fixed in man.
How has everyone enjoyed their plague year? I myself can’t say I liked it much; living in fear for elderly relatives was one thing, living in boredom was quite another. Worst has been the third, most energetic leg of the arse-kicking triskeles: living in a volcanic bloody rage. Such has been my not-entirely-commendable reaction to the sheer incompetence of those people who, once having volunteered to lead us through this crisis (somehow having risen to the airy summits of their respective professions – but then vultures fly as high as eagles), surrendered their wits to group-think and credentialism and, worst of all, wishful thinking, getting tens-of-thousands of people dead in the UK alone. Whitty, Vallance, Johnson, Hancock: these are the people who have seen us through this nightmare, and have no doubt halfway killed themselves working appallingly hard on our behalves – anyone falling short of sincerest gratitude towards them is frankly not decent. So, thank you for your service, chaps. Knighthoods all round. Now, off you pop - you’ve all earned nice, early retirements. I look forward to your memoirs.
Fear, boredom, rage: well, that’s life, as all the people say – but too much of it lately. I’m keen to avoid a repeat. How? It was not in fact Robert Conquest but his friend Kingsley Amis who suggested that the revised edition of The Great Terror ought to be retitled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. The last year has given many of us cause to reflect that, being led by fucking fools, the right to say “I told you so” is the best one can hope for – I therefore offer to the fucking fools of the world the following advice, in the bone-deep certainty that it will go unheeded:
1) Abjure foolish memes
In the early days of coronavirus, the phrase “once-in-a-century event” functioned as an existence-proof; there were those who thought this-sort-of-thing didn’t happen, therefore couldn’t be happening to us, and belonged more to the distant realms of science fiction than to our quotidian existence; every reaction, for this sort of person, was necessarily an over-reaction. But a century ago, it happened; Spanish flu was a plague, miserable and murderous and real — the most recent of many plagues which have beset mankind since before we could first bend tongue to say, “Why is this happening to me?” In the early days, it was important to make clear that this wasn’t just a story or hallucination of over-excitable minds; that it could happen, and happen to us – as a turn of phrase, “once-in-a-century” contained a seed of truth. Well, the plague happened, has happened, we all lived through it happening (except those who died – sorry); now, to say “once-in-a-century event” is dangerous, as it will no doubt lead the wishful-thinkers of the world in their countless legions to believe that it couldn’t happen again in, say, 2028 (put it in your diaries). Do not hope that having overcome the coronavirus we will have some decades free from the worry of plagues; not only because dice have no memory, but also because there are a number of reasons to think this sort of event is more likely now than it has ever been in human history.
Even as I write the Associated Press reports that “[a] man in eastern China has contracted what might be the world’s first human case of the H10N3 strain of bird flu” – a now familiar story of aitches and ens taking their chances. The apparent increase in such events will be attributed by some to the undoubted increase in mankind’s ability to detect them. That’s part of the story, but not all of it. More humans live now (hooray) than have ever lived at one time; with this increased population comes a concomitant increase in the numbers of our livestock; and, at the same time, the world has become much more densely connected. Each additional infected critter is another chance for some virus to make that novel mutational leap which will make it more transmissible; each additional instance of human-animal contact is an opportunity for a virus to cross the gap between species; each additional plane journey is a chance for an up-and-coming pathogen to begin infecting the world — and each of these things only needs to happen once. What a hundred years ago might have been a once-in-a-century plague could well now be a once-in-a-decade plague. The first thing to do is to not live in denial; assume the next one will be along soon, and resolve to be ready for it.
2) Be paranoid
The problem with fire alarms is that they’re usually not about fires. They’re about over-crisped bacon, neglected lasagna, smouldering incense. Who has not lived through a dozen fire alarms for every fire they’ve experienced? One suspects that for most people, the ratio is infinite. People get used to them, and when they happen, formally and indifferently follow the relevant procedures, evacuating the premises and standing about for a little while in the carpark while the guy who knows how to turn the alarm off does so — or, they don’t. Some get so used to the idea of a fire-alarm as a no-fire-alarm that they happily carry on with whatever they were doing — in most cases to no cost. But it remains the case: those who fail to respond to false alarms will also fail to respond to real alarm, the two categories being indistinguishable.
Ask yourself this: if we had gone hard on border restrictions for every one of SARS, MERS, Swine flu, Bird flu and Ebola, is it possible — supposing even that restrictions were so severe as to bring air travel to a halt in every case — is it possible that the total cost of all these restrictions would come within an order of magnitude of the cost of the coronavirus? Seems unlikely. Better then to respond to the false alarms and the real alarms the same way, and err on the side of caution. Begin from the premise that this happened, that it will happen again, and that therefore when we hear of a novel pathogen spreading in some foreign country (let’s not guess which) we should, rather than waiting to act until we’ve proven that this is the one — a point which is guaranteed to come too late — we ought to act, close the borders, keep it out — and then discover our folly when it turns out: it’s just a cold. This will be the first test of whether we’ve learnt our lessons: if before 2030 we haven’t at least once closed the borders over some piddling case of the sniffles (how embarrassing, red faces all round), we won’t have done so.
3) Over-react.
Naturally, we will fail at the critical moment, and some new plague will get into the country — and, indeed, there is the possibility that it begins here. Britain might not replicate China’s zooculture problems, but how confident are we in the security of our biological research centres? So it’s underway, and the first handful of cases has become the first handful of clusters, some of which our energetic contact-tracers are at a loss to explain. What now? Stomp on its miserable little pathogen head. Lock. Down.
The arguments that lockdowns don’t work verge on denial of the germ theory of disease (“it’s coming through the walls”). Diseases spread from person to person, or else from some non-human reservoir to a person. If the latter doesn’t exist, and the former can’t happen because people are not spending time in close contact, they can’t spread. There are no doubt very interesting questions to be asked about why “lockdown” didn’t work in Peru, for example, but the answer can only take some form of “people were still having close contact with one another”. That the UK’s lockdowns achieved their aims is beyond dispute for a serious person. Consider:
This shows daily hopitalisations for the coronavirus against the total number of beds occupied by coronavirus patients. You’ll see that, during periods when the incidence of coronavirus was growing, points tend towards the top right: bad. A couple of weeks after the start of both the first and third lockdowns, the points turn back to the left: good, fewer people are being hospitalised with the coronavirus. But the “lockdowns work” smoking gun is just above the label reading “Nov 1”. The trend turns back; hospitals begin to empty, and then - the November lockdown ends, and growth resumes. That loop proves that, at least in the UK, lockdowns worked. Which, of course, as we know from first principles, they must.
Whatever level of incidence of a pathogen you consider acceptable will be reached faster if you enter lockdown with a lower level of incidence than a higher one. If you don’t hesitate, not only do fewer people die — you also don’t have to lock down for so long. Go fast, go hard, don’t hesitate. Kill it in the cradle.
4) Stop It.
On 11th August 1978, Janet Parker, a medical photographer at the University of Birmingham’s Medical School, came down ill. She had headaches, muscle pains — and spots, which were first thought to be chicken pox. By the 20th August she was so ill she was admitted to hospital. She was diagnosed with smallpox. On the 11th September, Parker died — the last person (so far) to ever die of variola major.
Parker’s darkroom at the Medical School was above a lab where a strain of smallpox was being investigated — there is no doubt that she was infected at work. However, nobody is quite sure how. The Shooter Inquiry concluded that transmission most likely occurred through an air duct, but a later court case concluded that this was not certain (the University of Birmingham was found not guilty of causing Parker’s death).
My point is: it happens. I don’t know, nor have any particular opinion on whether COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab, or made the zoonotic leap in the wet markets. But it seems to me completely mad that these labs are engaged in “gain-of-function” research in the first place; that is, the creation in a supposedly safe lab setting of pathogens with precisely those capabilities we most fear. Like a person, afraid of heights who, seeing below his feet a vertiginous drop, feels the compulsion to jump, we manufacture our own ruin. Whatever insights are gained therein surely cannot be worth the risk of another University of Birmingham-style lab-escape, this time with a pathogen that deliberately embodies our greatest fears. Stop it.
You may have identified the assumption behind this essay: that coronavirus is essentially over, and so it’s time to worry about the next thing. The latter part may be true but there’s no certainty that the first part is. Wishful thinking remains king; while coronavirus, flush with the opportunities for mutation that mass infection provides it, climbs the local fitness gradients, hoovering up that lovely low-hanging fruit to become ever more transmissible, we have decided, as far as I can tell, to rely on hope. Big Pharma have provided us a miracle in the form of vaccines, and our attitude to this is to gamble with that miracle, and dare the coronavirus to do its worse. Why close the borders and attain vaccine-induced herd immunity when you can rather let in every new variant — and keep your fingers crossed?
We come back to the question of leadership. There is something about our political and media environment — and let’s not forget to blame the electorate, who in a democracy must take at least some responsibility — that selects for trivial minds. How to elect better leaders? Beats me. One can imagine a world where instead of being led by social butterflies with humanities degrees and the self-assurance that comes with being perfectly in-step with the conventional wisdom, we were led by minds the equal of those mathematicians and rocket engineers responsible for the other silver arrows of Apollo… but who’s thinking wishfully now?