“There must logically be a point at which the cost of the containment measures, in terms of human welfare and even of fatalities, outweighs the cost of the virus.”
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The ‘conservative’ Spanish newspaper/site abc.es. has a report about the food situation in Italy (in Spanish) which indicates the following, something our media seems to ignore, per my translation:
There’s a 10% uplift there, as the report gives a breakdown with more details.
There is much discussion of raids on pharmacies and supermarkets, with police guarding them. This might be Southern politicians screaming for ‘pork’. Or perhaps the economy collapses when the State imposes lockdowns. The Italian State has responded (to the problem it created)
Or is this about something else? This paragraph caught my eye:
And how long here before our food supply chains might disintegrate, when people have to laboriously shop 2 meters apart, queueing to get in, queueing to pay, as the capacity of the shops to serve customers is throttled, whether or not the products are limited or in short supply. Is there any modelling of how long this can go on, never mind if it should at all? March 30th, 2020 | 28 comments
 Drones are fun. I understand that. But people do need to use them responsibly. The BBC reports: Coronavirus: Peak District drone police criticised for ‘lockdown shaming’
In pairs. Not mobs, pairs.
But travelling to remote areas and flying your drones there, that’s essential.
Here is the tweet in question. I am glad there was some pushback. This response from “miroirdufou” was polite but effective:
March 28th, 2020 | 27 comments
March 26th, 2020 | 40 comments
You could pay now for a session with a business such as a hairdresser, gym or restaurant that has been forced to shut during the quarantine, the voucher to be redeemed whenever the establishment re-opens. The appointment could be for your own use, or as a gift for someone else. It might be a way that someone who has been in isolation can thank whoever did their shopping, while helping the proprietors of the business get some cash coming in when they need it most. March 25th, 2020 | 11 comments
Ross Clark, Spectator (behind paywall). A couple more:
The more I read, the more it seems to me that randomised testing, as Clark writes, is crucial, not least in reducing hysteria and the effects that hysteria is having, and will continue to have, on our society and business. The costs, in terms of stress, the destruction of businesses and so much effort, needs to be weighed. I have come across a few comments on social media, of the passive/aggressive sort, that “it is so amusing to see all these experts all over social media on epidemics” – the implication being that the mass public should shut up, “stay in your lane” and let the men/women in white coats take charge. The problem with this however is what happens if the experts disagree, or if their policy advice causes so much damage, including to the liberties and welfare of the citizenry, that a democratically elected politician has to make a judgement call? We don’t, rightly, outsource vast coercive powers to everyone who claims to be an expert on something. That’s not how it is supposed to work. March 23rd, 2020 | 28 comments
Washing your hands must be done properly, and technique matters. Observe… You are welcome. March 20th, 2020 | 15 comments
This is probably one of the few places in the internet, never mind the regular media, where people can get to debate the wonders of socialised medicine without being under the burden of proving that they are not evil. In the UK, we have had since the late 1940s a healthcare system that dominates the field, with a relatively small private sector. The National Health Service, funded from tax and run as a monopoly, with politicians and civil servants allocating resources, was modeled, as so many post-war institutions were, on the idea of state central planning. The narrative of the time was that planning was the way to go, unlike all that messy, chaotic “laissez faire” that had been associated, however wrongly, with the Great Depression and so on. (Here is a good paper on the NHS by the Institute of Economic Affairs.) I can also recommend this book, by James Bartholomew on the many problems with the UK welfare state. The NHS, like many of the other socialised medical systems in much of the developed world, faces the monstrous coronavirus. And so much of the current policy approach – the UK is going into more of a lockdown as of this weekend – is designed, so it is said, to flatten the potential surge of infections and deaths, so that the NHS and other systems don’t collapse. The cost/benefit calculation is being made that it is better to smash the world economy, to force millions into idleness, possibly for months, and tide them over with cash payments funded from vast amounts of debt, than it is to allow the NHS/other to be forced into a nightmare of running out of resources. In some ways I can see the merits of preventing a horrendous surge in deaths; I also think that saving the NHS and other models of healthcare is a sort of virility test of today’s Welfare States. Nothing can be done to admit they have limits, even if that means economic damage on a major scale. That cost/benefit calculation may look just about defensible now, but what about in two months’ time, particularly if there is no real sign of a deceleration in the virus, but if the struggle to buy even basic household necessities leaves a lot of people in real hardship? I assume that farmers and others in the food production business are not being told to stay at home, but such is the level of madness about this situation that I wonder. I’d like to know how locking people in their homes for months is going to be enforced. There are also health considerations to be taken into account by such a lock-down, particularly if it goes on for months on end. Humanity is not designed for prison, and those of us in relatively free societies (“relatively” being the operative word) will move from being restless to downright homicidal of this goes on into the summer and beyond. There aren’t enough police to keep everyone cooped up in their homes. Those bastards in the Chinese Communist Party have a lot to answer for. And yes, COVID-19 began there, and it shows how derelict some of our media/political class has become that is frowned upon to point that out. (The anger is rising, and will have major consequences for our geopolitics.) It would be rather ironic to think that something unleashed by a Communist state, whether by accident or whatever, has put such pressure on Welfare State societies in the West. Final point: I was due to give a talk tonight at Brian Micklethwait’s place about the recent calls for anti-trust assaults on the Big Techs such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, and I was going to look at parallels with the campaign to break up J D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil more than a century ago. One thing you can say about Rockefeller, was that as well as being a brilliant businessman, and philanthropist in the area of healthcare, among others, he also understood the importance of integrated supply chains in commerce. He’d have looked at our current predicament with interest. March 20th, 2020 | 40 comments
There are no limits to our commitment to the euro. – Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank. The linked Guardian article in which I found the quote is titled “ECB U-turn shows it fears coronavirus could destroy eurozone project”. March 19th, 2020 | 38 comments
At first I thought this was une blague pratique. Apparently not, unless Tim Worstall’s denial is merely evidence that he is in on the joke. He writes in today’s Times:
A similar restriction is being applied in Italy, according to The Local.it:
But what if you do not have access to the internet?
March 19th, 2020 | 74 comments
Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Be embraced, Millions! – Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy, Beethoven’s setting of which is the Anthem of Europe. Sing all the way through this while washing your hands to help avoid the spread of coronavirus. Other songs recommended for this purpose include Stairway to Heaven and Another One Bites the Dust. March 13th, 2020 | 10 comments
The English Football Premier League is one of the world’s great sporting tournaments, and as the current season now nears its end, Liverpool have a huge lead of over twenty points over their nearest rival club. This is, despite a recent stumble in Liverpool’s form, an amazing achievement. (Our own Patrick Crozier, a Watford supporter, might enjoy commenting on that stumble.) This all comes after Liverpool, last season, won the European Championship. All football fans, whether paid or unpaid, are now inclined to regard everything that Liverpool’s hugely engaging and obviously very smart manager Jurgen Klopp says or does as evidence of his all-round human wonderfulness. Personally, I greatly prefer following football on television and on the internet to actually going to games, which are too noisy, expensive and time-consuming for my tastes and for my fading eyesight. I prefer classical concerts at the Wigmore Hall. (I recently attended this concert there. Stu – I’m now deploying a verbal device that Americans often like to use when they really want to ram their point home, often by swearing at this point – pendous.) Nevertheless, from a virtual distance, I too am a football fan, and so I share the general admiration for Jurgen Klopp. The above explains why Klopp is getting so much admiring attention for what he recently said about the coronavirus. Klopp was, MarketWatch reports:
Here is how Klopp responded to this question:
Cue an orgy of admiration for what a stellar human being Klopp is, for saying something so very, very wise. What a guy! But, perhaps because I only admire people like Klopp from a virtual distance, I am able to dissent. I think that this was an excellent answer by Klopp, to a question that he wasn’t actually asked. He wasn’t asked what he thinks will be the future progress of the coronavirus. He was merely being asked whether he was worried about it. Any conscientious football club manager must now be anxious about how the coronavirus might affect his club in the weeks and months to come, and to be listening out carefully to learn what derangements look like being imposed upon the world and the country in general, and upon professional football in particular. Klopp doesn’t have to be an expert on infectious diseases to be worried about the spread of one of these devilish things while it is still spreading and still killing people, and more to the point while it is causing sporting authorities to ponder doing things like cancelling all heavily-attended sports events for the duration of the coronavirus problem. He just has to be a semi-intelligent person who is keeping half an eye on the news. To the actual question that Klopp was asked, a simple Yes would have sufficed. Yes, he is worried, as are most other people, and worried precisely because he, Jurgen Klopp, does indeed not know what the coronavirus will do next. He might then have added a few words to the effect that he was already thinking about how future games might be affected, and about what he would be telling his players if cancellations and general disruption of sport in the UK, along the lines of what is already happening in Italy, do shortly ensue. The comments Klopp made on the habit of regarding people who are celebrated in one field as experts in other fields are very sensible, or would have been had that been what he had been asked about. But I also dissent somewhat from that. Not in the sense that I regard successful football managers as experts on all other things. It’s more that I reckon you can also overdo the reverence for the pronouncements of “experts“. Experts can often be very right, but they are often wrong. The rest of us ought at least to be willing to question the supposed experts, and then ask ourselves if their answers make as much sense as they are claiming. March 5th, 2020 | 11 comments
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