Category Archives: Coronavirus

Sunday 29 March, 2020

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England’s green and pleasant land

As seen on our permitted ‘exercise walk’ yesterday.

Who needs a government when you’ve got Amazon to keep things running?

This morning’s Observer column:

This pandemic will radically transform the industrial and commercial landscape of western societies. Lots of companies – large and small – will go to the wall, no matter how fervent government promises of support are. But when the smoke clears and some kind of normality returns, a small number of corporations – ones that have played a central role in keeping things going – will emerge strengthened and more dominant. And chief among them will be Jeff Bezos’s everything store.

What we will then have to come to terms with is that Amazon is becoming part of the critical infrastructure of western states. So too perhaps are Google and Microsoft. (Apple is more like a luxury good – nice but not essential, and the only reason for keeping Facebook is WhatsApp.) In which case, one of the big questions to be answered as societies rebuild once the virus has finally been tamed will be a really difficult one: how should Amazon be regulated?

Why the US now has a health crisis, an economic crisis and a democratic crisis — simultaneously

From this weekend’s Financial Times.

How an actual virus should make one chary of celebrating ‘Going Viral’

Lovely essay by Lee Siegel on the irony that it seems only yesterday when “going viral” was a sign of contemporary online success.

Consider what is now surely the quaint abomination of going “viral.” It was never really clear what was so great about a viral phenomenon anyway, except for the uncertain benefits briefly bestowed on some of those who went viral. If you are swept along with a viral event, then you are robbed of your free will every bit as much as if you were sick.

But so smitten were we by the personal gratification and commercial rewards of going “viral” that we allowed the blithe use of the term to dull our alertness to its dire scientific origins, as well as to what turned out to be the political consequences.

For much of the populace, any proud possessor of viral status was king or queen for at least a day. The eerie images of the virus now stalking humanity, its spikes resembling a crown, are like a deliberate, malevolent mockery of our viral internet royalty.

Writing in “The Tipping Point,” published in 2000 and the bible of viral culture, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how what he calls “emotional contagion” can be a powerful tool for the world’s influencers. He then goes on to make an analogy between the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 — a nightmare long unspeakable, suddenly oft-cited — and his concept of “stickiness,” a precious quality of persuasion that fastens people’s attention on whatever you are trying to sell.

And now? The only way of avoiding ‘going viral’ is to hide away and cut yourself off from society. Suddenly, Siegel writes, “slow the spread” and “flatten the curve” has made “going viral” and “trending” sound like “telephone” and “typewriter.”

Great essay. Worth reading in full.

Quarantine diary — Day 8

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Saturday 28 March, 2020

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Quote of the day

Facts are stubborn things. Statistics are pliable.

  • Mark Twain

Spring in a time of contagion

In our garden this afternoon.

What our contagion fables are really about

Like me, the historian Jill Lepore has also been reading the literature of pandemics. Unlike me, she is genuinely erudite. “The literature of contagion is vile”, she writes in the New Yorker.

A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal. “Farewell to the giant powers of man,” Mary Shelley wrote in “The Last Man,” in 1826, after a disease has ravaged the world. “Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence.” Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute.

Lepore is one of those annoying academics who seems to have read everything. The list of plague-centred works she surveys is striking (and most of it was new to me). It includes: Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death (1842); Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912); Albert Camus’s the Plague (1947); José Saramago’s Blindness (1995); and Stephen King’s Stand (2011).

But the big thing I learned is that Mary Shelley wrote an astonishingly prescient novel, The Last Man which was published in 1826 (not 1862, as I originally wrote). The story is set in the twenty-first century, and

is the first major novel to imagine the extinction of the human race by way of a global pandemic. Shelley published it at the age of twenty-nine, after nearly everyone she loved had died, leaving her, as she put it, “the last relic of a beloved race, my companions, extinct before me.” The book’s narrator begins as a poor and uneducated English shepherd: primitive man, violent and lawless, even monstrous. Cultivated by a nobleman and awakened to learning—“An earnest love of knowledge . . . caused me to pass days and nights in reading and study”—he is elevated by the Enlightenment and becomes a scholar, a defender of liberty, a republican, and a citizen of the world.

Then, in the year 2092, the plague arrives, ravaging first Constantinople. Year after year, the pestilence dies away every winter (“a general and never-failing physician”), and returns every spring, more virulent, more widespread. It reaches across mountains, it spreads over oceans. The sun rises, black: a sign of doom. “Through Asia, from the banks of the Nile to the shores of the Caspian, from the Hellespont even to the sea of Oman, a sudden panic was driven,” Shelley wrote. “The men filled the mosques; the women, veiled, hastened to the tombs, and carried offerings to the dead, thus to preserve the living.” The nature of the pestilence remains mysterious. “It was called an epidemic. But the grand question was still unsettled of how this epidemic was generated and increased.” Not understanding its operation and full of false confidence, legislators hesitate to act. “England was still secure. France, Germany, Italy and Spain, were interposed, walls yet without a breach, between us and the plague.” Then come reports of entire nations, destroyed and depopulated. “The vast cities of America, the fertile plains of Hindostan, the crowded abodes of the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin.” The fearful turn to history too late, and find in its pages, even in the pages of the Decameron, the wrong lesson: “We called to mind the plague of 1348, when it was calculated that a third of mankind had been destroyed. As yet western Europe was uninfected; would it always be so?” It would not always be so. Inevitably, the plague comes, at last, to England, but by then the healthy have nowhere left to go, because, in the final terror of pandemic, there is “no refuge on earth”: “All the world has the plague!”

Just like Coronavirus, in a way. The great thing about being an historian is that you know that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Parliamentary sovereignty = parliamentary dictatorship

The LRB has a thoughtful review by Neal Ascherson of Richard Norton-Taylor’s The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain, which opens with a succinct summary of the UK’s ramshackle ‘constitution’:

The structure of the ‘British’ state is still essentially monarchical. Constitutionally, the rest of the democratic world has moved on, adopting variants of the Enlightenment notion of popular sovereignty. Power resides in theory with the people, whose communities lease upwards only those functions they cannot exercise themselves. But in Britain, its archaisms only lightly reformed, power still flows downwards. The absurd doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – that weird English scrap of parchment – in effect means parliamentary absolutism, a hasty 1689 transfer from the divine right of kings. We don’t have ‘inalienable rights’, but are allowed to vote and speak freely only because the government, through Parliament, generously lends some of its power to its subjects.

Richard Norton-Taylor has spent a lifetime (much of it as the Guardian‘s National-Security editor) poking holes in the obsessive secrecy that characterizes the British state, and Ascherson does a good job of surveying the battles of the mid-20th century and the early 21st. The story, he says,

is all part of a momentous contest over constitutional liberty, a battle only now reaching full intensity. It’s a generation since judicial review began to pierce moth holes in government decisions. But the worn tweed blanket of parliamentary sovereignty – better described as Cabinet absolutism – developed a large rent last year when the Supreme Court struck down Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament. Panic broke out on the authoritarian right. The law had forgotten its place, they cried, and was advancing uninvited into politics. It must at all costs be pushed back. Suella Braverman, the new Brexiteer attorney general previously known for her hatred of the Human Rights Act, now proclaims that ‘we must take back control not only from the EU but from the judiciary … the political has been captured by the legal.’

This is the language of a pre-Enlightenment government intolerant of opposition, refusing to acknowledge that power can reside and be legitimate outside the executive. It is, in short, monarchy-speak. And as the war begins between divine-right concepts of authority and the notion – now increasingly implied by English jurists – of the supremacy of the law to which prime ministers and parliaments must answer, the control of information will become a decisive battlefield. As Norton-Taylor warns, this government will fight hard to protect the secrecy of its members, spy agencies and special forces, and it will fight dirty.

Yep. And a Johnson government will have few scruples about cracking down as a newly-‘liberated’ UK goes broke.

Quarantine Diary — Day 7

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Friday 27 March, 2020

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Quote of the day

The sole function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

  • John Kenneth Galbraith

Why Coronavirus testing is taking so long and is not widespread enough

Turns out that making the test kits is more complicated than most commentators appreciate. Good [explainer] by Robert Baird in the New Yorker. Sample:

The current trouble is a critical shortage of the physical components needed to carry out tests of any variety. Among these components are so-called viral transport media, which are used to stabilize a specimen as it travels from patient to lab; extraction kits, which isolate viral RNA from specimens once they reach the lab; and the reagents that do the actual work of determining whether the coronavirus that causes COVID19 is present in the sample. Perhaps the most prosaic shortage, but also the most crucial, is a lack of test swabs, which look like glorified Q-tips. Specially designed to preserve viral specimens, they’re what a doctor sticks up your nose or down your throat to collect the necessary biological material.

The swab shortage is happening for the same reason that all the other test components are limited—namely, a global pandemic has created a global demand for them—but it is subject to a further complication. Copan, one of the major manufacturers of the sort of swabs needed for COVID-19 tests, has its headquarters and manufacturing facilities in Lombardy, Italy, which has been hit particularly hard by the disease. A spokesperson for the company says that the national lockdown in Italy has not affected production at its factories, but last week the U.S. Air National Guard had to use one of its C-17 cargo planes to bring an order of eight hundred thousand swabs back to the U.S. According to Defense One, the plane flew on Monday from the Aviano Air Base, in Italy, not far from the headquarters of Copan, to Memphis, where a FedEx distribution center is situated; the Times later reported that the airlift had been arranged by Peter Navarro, a Presidential trade adviser, and that the Administration hoped similar efforts would bring 1.5 million swabs into the country every week. On Saturday, a company spokesperson told me that Copan did not make “special deals” with governments but was “shipping to the U.S.A. the maximum amount that we are capable of, on a best effort basis” through its usual distributors.

Among other things, it’s a lesson in the complexity of global supply chains.

That mask problem — solved!

Funniest bit of photoshopping I’ve seen all week.

Premium mediocre: or why you should hide that fake Hermes bag

Another primer in contemporary culture.

It was 2017, and Venkatesh Rao, a writer and management consultant, was having lunch at a fast-casual vegan chain restaurant in Seattle when the phrase premium mediocre popped into his head. It described the sensation he was having as he tucked into his meal—one of a not-unpleasant artificial gloss (airline seating with extra legroom; “healthy” chickpea chips that taste like Doritos; $40 scented candles) on an otherwise thoroughly unspecial experience. I had a similar eureka moment in early 2018, when the portmanteau premiocre came to me while I was trying to parse the discriminating features among mid-priced bed linens from several start-up brands. I found Rao’s observation while checking to see whether, against all odds, I had come up with an original idea. Instead, I’d noticed something that many others also saw wherever they looked, once they had heard the idea articulated.

When Rao mentioned “premium mediocre” to his wife, who was eating with him that day, she immediately got it. So did his Facebook friends and Twitter followers. “People had started noticing a pervasive pattern in everything from groceries to clothing, and entire styles of architecture in gentrifying neighborhoods,” he told me. Premium mediocrity, by his definition, is a fancy tile backsplash in an apartment’s tiny, nearly nonfunctional kitchen, or french fries doused in truffle oil, which contains no actual truffles. It’s Uber Pool, which makes the luxury of being chauffeured around town financially accessible, yet requires that you brush thighs with strangers sharing the back seat.

Quarantine diary — Day 6

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Thursday 26 March, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither.”

  • Benjamin Franklin

Should we cross the privacy Rubicon? Will we?

Maciej Ceglowski, a great privacy campaigner and one of the best online essayists around, (and also proprietor of Pinboard.in the best bookmarking site on the Internet) uses the Franklin quote above in a sobering reflection on the Coronavirus pandemic. His essay is prompted by the ongoing (and intensifying) debate about whether the current ‘lockdown+isolation’ strategy for ‘flattening the curve’ of infections) is economically, psychologically and politically sustainable.

Everybody knows that even when we’re through the initial crisis the disease will not have been eliminated. It’ll be back in waves, hopefully of lesser intensity and reach, and each wave may necessitate a briefer return to another lockdown regime. So the economic and other consequences could continue, perhaps for 18 months or more.

What should we do, therefore, after the initial outbreak is contained — or at least rendered manageable in terms of health-service capacity? Ideally, we should have a managed return to work with people who have had the virus and recovered from it (and thereby acquired immunity) able to work normally. But we can’t do that safely unless we have a vaccine (months away at best, a year at worst) or a way of identifying who is infectious and capable of infecting others.

There’s already a strategy for doing the latter task: test extensively and track contacts of those who are infections. That’s what South Korea, Taiwan and China seem to have been able to do. But in the UK we’re still ages away from being able to roll out a large-scale testing programme. (Getting testing up and running at scale is pretty challenging.) We will get there eventually, though, and when we do the next task will be to track the contacts of every infected person.

Trouble is: that kind of tracking is incredibly labour-intensive. But, says Ceglowski,

we could automate large parts of it with the technical infrastructure of the surveillance economy. It would not take a great deal to turn the ubiquitous tracking tools that follow us around online into a sophisticated public health alert system.

Every one of us now carries a mobile tracking device that leaves a permanent trail of location data. This data is individually identifiable, precise to within a few meters, and is harvested by a remarkable variety of devices and corporations, including the large tech companies, internet service providers, handset manufacturers, mobile companies, retail stores.

Anyone who has this data can retroactively reconstruct the movements of a person of interest, and track who they have been in proximity to over the past several days. Such a data set, combined with aggressive testing, offers the potential to trace entire chains of transmission in real time, and give early warning to those at highest risk.

So it’s possible to do it. Doing so will probably enable a return to some kind of economic normality. But if we use the technology for this purpose we will have crossed the Rubicon into nightmare territory. And if we do cross, there’s unlikely to be a way back — because once states have acquired access to this technology, they rarely give it up. So will we do it?

Ceglowski thinks that we should. After all, he says,

This proposal doesn’t require us to give up any liberty that we didn’t already sacrifice long ago, on the altar of convenience. The terrifying surveillance infrastructure this project requires exists and is maintained in good working order in the hands of private industry, where it is entirely unregulated and is currently being used to try to sell people skin cream. Why not use it to save lives?

The most troubling change this project entails is giving access to sensitive location data across the entire population to a government agency. Of course that is scary, especially given the track record of the Trump administration. The data collection would also need to be coercive (that is, no one should be able to opt out of it, short of refusing to carry a cell phone). As with any government surveillance program, there would be the danger of a ratchet effect, where what is intended as an emergency measure becomes the permanent state of affairs, like happened in the United States in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

“I am a privacy activist”, Ceglowski writes, “typing this through gritted teeth”.

But I am also a human being like you, watching a global calamity unfold around us. What is the point of building this surveillance architecture if we can’t use it to save lives in a scary emergency like this one?

Great essay. Worth reading in full.

Quarantine diary — Day 5

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Wednesday 25 March, 2020

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Why America is so bad at Covid-19.

It’s our attitude, there are never consequences for Americans. That’s for other people. We have wars and tax cuts at the same time. We don’t see the coffins of our returning dead. Nothing happens to us. We can’t imagine things not being normal. The generation that grew up during World War II, who experienced the Holocaust, the advent of nuclear weapons, that generation is gone now. Everyone alive today, not just boomers, have been spoiled. We’re all coming awake now from a life-long trance. For the first time in our lives, we have to deal with the mortality of our country. Don’t cry for America. It’s time to grow up, again. Couldn’t have a more perfect person as president. It’s easy to see he is our past. Now how do we move beyond that?

Dave Winer

The Real Pandemic Danger Is Social Collapse

Branko Milanovic: “As the Global Economy Comes Apart, Societies May, Too”.

Sobering essay in Foreign Affairs. Sample:

The world faces the prospect of a profound shift: a return to natural—which is to say, self-sufficient—economy. That shift is the very opposite of globalization. While globalization entails a division of labor among disparate economies, a return to natural economy means that nations would move toward self-sufficiency. That movement is not inevitable. If national governments can control or overcome the current crisis within the next six months or a year, the world would likely return to the path of globalization, even if some of the assumptions that undergirded it (for example, very taut production chains with just-in-time deliveries) might have to be revised.

But if the crisis continues, globalization could unravel. The longer the crisis lasts, and the longer obstacles to the free flow of people, goods, and capital are in place, the more that state of affairs will come to seem normal. Special interests will form to sustain it, and the continuing fear of another epidemic may motivate calls for national self-sufficiency. In this sense, economic interests and legitimate health worries could dovetail. Even a seemingly small requirement—for instance, that everyone who enters a country needs to present, in addition to a passport and a visa, a health certificate—would constitute an obstacle to the return to the old globalized way, given how many millions of people would normally travel.

If de-globalisation does indeed start to happen, then that will produce — in Arnold Kling’s terms — “losers and bigger losers (it won’t produce many winners)”. What matters in a de-globalised world is how self-sufficient you are. Kling cites Peter Zeihan’s view that the U.S. is one of the few countries that produces enough food and energy for itself. China, on the other hand, needs to import both. That would lead one to predict that China will be in the “bigger loser” category.

Hmmmm…

Quarantine FM

My son Pete is a talented podcast producer. He’s currently hunkered down on his narrow boat in London and had the idea of creating something that would provide pleasure to people stuck in the self-isolation zone. This is the first episode. Subscribe using whatever you use to catch podcasts.

The last global crisis didn’t change the world. But this one could

Typically insightful essay by the incomparable Will Davies. He addresses a question that has always puzzled me, namely why the 2008 banking crisis didn’t provoke a radical rethink of how we run our societies. It did, of course, eventually produce a populist backlash against the ‘austerity’ imposed on ordinary citizens in order to ensure that banks would be rescued while no bankers went to gaol. But in most ways, the system continued as it had before, except with slightly better financed banks (outside of Italy, perhaps). So in that sense the 2008 cataclysm wasn’t a real crisis — i.e. an event that leads to structural and ideological change.

“The decade that shapes our contemporary imagination of crises”, he writes,

is the 1970s, which exemplified the way a historic rupture can set an economy and a society on a new path. This period marked the collapse of the postwar system of fixed exchange rates, capital controls and wage policies, which were perceived to have led to uncontrollable inflation. It also created the conditions in which the new right of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could ride to the rescue, offering a novel medicine of tax cuts, interest rate hikes and attacks on organised labour.

Oddly, the 1970s inspired a vision of crisis as a wide-ranging shift in ideology, which has retained its hold over much of the left ever since.

For over 40 years after Thatcher first took office, many people on the left have waited impatiently for a successor to the 1970s, in the hope that a similar ideological transition might occur in reverse. But despite considerable upheaval and social pain, the global financial crisis of 2008 failed to provoke a fundamental shift in policy orthodoxy. In fact, after the initial burst of public spending that rescued the banks, the free-market Thatcherite worldview became even more dominant in Britain and the eurozone. The political upheavals of 2016 took aim at the status quo, but with little sense of a coherent alternative to it. But both these crises now appear as mere forerunners to the big one that emerged in Wuhan at the close of last year.

So the question now is whether COVID-19 is really a pivotal moment? Davies thinks that it might be.

Great essay. Worth reading in full.

Herd immunity redux

Remember the ‘herd immunity’ strategy for dealing with Coronavirus? That’s the strategy that was kyboshed by the Imperial College model. Well now a modelling team at Oxford is suggesting that the virus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to a report in yesterday’s Financial Times.

If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

The research, observes the FT,

presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta.

(Experts in the conventions of academic warfare will be able to decode that genteel observation.)

But Prof Gupta was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will still reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.

Let the war of the models begin. We will only know the truth when the UK has a large-scale programme for testing in the population at large. At the moment we’re still flying blind.

Quarantine diary — Day 4

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Tuesday 24 March, 2020

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Update: the link to yesterday’s Quarantine Diary was duff. It should have been https://memex.naughtons.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Day-2-edited.mp3 Humble apologies to anyone who tried to follow it.

What tech companies are doing to tackle CV mis/disinformation

From a newsletter I get from article19.org

The gist: AI is doing some good, but making lots of errors too.

Last week, Twitter announced that it will temporarily start relying more on technology and that its automated systems will start removing some content without human review. However, it would not be permanently suspending accounts based solely on the automated enforcement systems. They would also be broadening their definition of ‘harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information”.

YouTube has said that it will increase its use of automated content takedowns as there will be less staff available to review content, and that this may lead to “increased video removals, including some videos that may not violate policies”. While the company says that users can appeal content takedowns, it admits that “workforce precautions will also result in delayed appeal reviews”.

Facebook has said that with “a reduced and remote workforce, we will now rely more on our automated systems to detect and remove violating content and disable accounts”. Last Tuesday, Facebook incorrectly removed a large number of posts, many of which were reported to have been about the coronavirus. Guy Rosen, Vice President of Integrity, later tweeted: “We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics – not just those related to coronavirus. This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too.”

How to correctly use a computer

Lovely spoof from Apple.

Link

I notice, though, that the new keyboard for the iPad Pro isn’t going to be available until May. That might turn out to be an ambitious forecast.

Taiwan’s new ‘electronic fence’ for quarantines

Graphic Reuters report illustrating the quandary we’re in. Smartphones can provide useful tools for managing the CV crisis. But using them for this purpose creates a surveillance and privacy nightmare further down the line. Taiwan is deploying the technology to enforce quarantines that require people who have been exposed to the virus.

The system monitors phone signals to alert police and local officials if those in home quarantine move away from their address or turn off their phones. Jyan said authorities will contact or visit those who trigger an alert within 15 minutes. Officials also call twice a day to ensure people don’t avoid tracking by leaving their phones at home.

The technology is being deployed all over the place. In Hong Kong, location-tracking wristbands are given to those put under quarantine. In Singapore, the government uses text messages to contact people, who must click on a link to prove they are at home. Thailand has rolled out a mobile app that anyone arriving at an airport must download to help monitor where they have been in the event that they test positive for the virus. Other countries, including South Korea and Israel, are using satellite-based phone tracking for so-called contact tracing to see where infected individuals might have passed SARS-CoV-2 to others.to stay in their homes. And so on.

“In emergencies”, wrote John Thornhill in yesterday’s Financial Times,

it is always tempting for security officials to argue that the ends justify the means, but such logic is often self-defeating. As the writer Aldous Huxley once said: “The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.”

Yep. Besides, history tells us that states which have acquired such surveillance powers are often reluctant to let them lapse, even when the crisis which originally justified them has passed. That is one of the lessons of 9/11 — as Edward Snowden eventually revealed.

Awkward questions that are impolitic to ask just now

Like: how are states going to pay for the colossal support they are promising to companies and workers?

According to Politico.eu, there is one European politician who is willing to go where none of his peers will yet venture.

“It is French President Emmanuel Macron who has most starkly expressed the challenges of balancing measures like self-isolation and social distancing against the imperative to keep the economy running.

“It is impossible to live — even in self-isolation — and to cure people, if we do not continue the economic activity that, quite simply, permits us to live in this country,” he said while chairing an “economy task force” dealing with the outbreak.

Macron is also the most prominent voice to warn people that a vaccine is not imminent, and probably won’t arrive until the end of 2021. The message is clear: It won’t be possible for people to stay at home until then.”

What’s likely to happen,I suspect, is that the epidemic will continue in waves after the first big attempt at supression (via the major lockdown we have at the moment). In each wave, some elements of ‘normal’ economic life will be resumed once the load on intensive care units (ICU) becomes manageable; and when the caseload starts to rise again, lockdown will be resumed. This, at any rate, is my reading of the critical diagram in the Imperial College study which changed the government’s mind.

This represents a way of trying to balance some restoration of economic life with keeping the ICU load within manageable limits.

Quarantine Diary – Day 3

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Saturday 22 March, 2020

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The American Cemetery, Madingley this morning. Click on the image for a larger size.

Solitude vs loneliness

As the world struggles to adjust to lockdown, quarantine and social-distancing there’s an interesting and timely book on the horizon. It’s A History of Solitude by my friend and colleague David Vincent, who is one of Britain’s most distinguished social historians. It comes out on April 24. The timing is fortuitous but accidental: David has been working on the book for several years, starting on it after he had finished his previous book, Privacy: A Short History. I haven’t seen it yet, but Terry Eagleton, the literary critic, has and he’s written an interesting review for the Guardian. Snippet:

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. Lonely people feel the need for company, while solitary types seek to escape it. The neatest definition of loneliness, David Vincent writes in his superb new study, is “failed solitude”. Another difference between the two groups is that hermits, anglers, Trappist monks and Romantic poets choose to be alone, whereas nobody chooses to feel abandoned and bereft. Calling yourself “self-partnering”, meaning that you sit in the cinema (should they be open) holding your own hand, may be either a genuine desire for solitude or a way of rationalising the stigma of isolation. The greatest difference of all, however, is that solitude has rarely killed anyone, whereas loneliness can drive you to the grave. As the coronavirus rampages, some of us might now face a choice between physical infection and mental breakdown…

Thank God for experts

Link

Producing vaccines under intense political pressure poses serious risks

How anti-vaxxers win — If any eventual vaccine harms even a tiny percentage of those who get it, “the anti-vaxxers can set back not only this vaccine but all vaccines,” said Barry Bloom, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. The anti-vaccine movement has been growing in the United States, and contributed to the country’s worst measles epidemic in 27 years in 2019. (From Politico’s nightly summary.)

This is yet one more reason why Trump is a menace. He keeps talking nonsense and stoking unrealistic expectations. This makes him the second biggest public health risk to the American public. And while we’re on that topic, here’s Larry Lessig:

If in January, Trump had “declared war” on this virus with the resolve of FDR, or Churchill, or even President Thomas J. Whitmore (Independence Day), he would have united the world against this common foe, and for once, the world could wage a war as one, without hesitation, and without regret.

Yet so tiny is the mind of our Idiot King that he could not even glimpse this extraordinary gift. His single focus was on the single indicator that seemed to say that he was, indeed, a genius — the stock market. And so he dissembled and obstructed to the end of faking the market out. Who knows if the man is really stupid enough to have believed that a virus that had brought China to its knees, once discovered to have infected 15 Americans, would “within a couple days go down to close to zero.” It doesn’t matter. The political system had taught Trump that he had the power to distort reality. The economic system has now taught Trump that he can’t distort economic reality. America’s economy — and the worlds’ economy— will now collapse. The election in November will be in midst of a great recession, compounded by unimaginable loss of human life. No President gets re-elected in times like that. Not the good ones. Not even the buffoons.

Remote conferencing with Zoom

Some of my research colleagues and I had a key meeting scheduled for this week and planned some weeks ago. As the University (Cambridge) went into lockdown we obviously couldn’t meet fate-to-face but were reluctant to cancel the discussion. Previously, we would have used conventional phone-conferencing, but I have become so pissed-off with the inadequacies of that medium that I suggested we used Zoom instead.

It was MUCH better. Two things in particular made all the difference: firstly one could see all the participants (as live images in small frames at the top of the screen); and secondly, whenever anyone started to speak, the software foregrounded them. This latter feature wasn’t perfect, but it was generally very effective. And the audio quality was sometimes a bit harsh, but still perfectly comprehensible.

My conclusion: the tech isn’t perfect, but I never want to go back to phone conferences again.

Why modelling is the rational way to make policy in a complex system

The Economist has an excellent explanation of the Imperial College epidemiological model That persuaded the UK government to change tack (though not quickly enough). The modellers

assigned covid-19 a “basic reproduction number” of 2.4. This means that in a population not taking any precautions, and where no one is immune, each case leads, on average, to 2.4 secondary cases.

Under those conditions the model showed the disease infecting 80% of the British population in three to four months. If 4.4% of the people infected became ill enough to be hospitalised and 30% of those deteriorated to the point of needing intensive care, then by mid-April demand for beds in intensive-care units (icus) would outstrip the health service’s “surge” capacity. In May the number of critical patients would be more than 30 times the number of icu beds available. Estimates of the fatality rate in China range from 0.5% to 1.5% of infections. Using a conservative 0.9% for Britain, the model put the death toll by the end of the summer at over half a million.

The Italian tragedy

One of the tragedies of this pandemic is the way it shows how social structures that we generally think of as embodying sociality and stability — extended families with several generations living closely together, for example — can be especially vulnerable. It turns out that Italy has a higher percentage of elderly people than most European countries, and about two-thirds of adults aged 18-35 live with their parents, with many houses containing three generations — which meant they were sitting ducks for Covid-19.

Friday 21 March, 2020

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It’s the Spring Equinox!

Boris Johnson’s fianceé is pregnant and they’re living in the same house. So shouldn’t Johnson be in quarantine too?

After all, the government’s advice is that pregnant women should self-quarantine (even though there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that they are more at risk). Concealing him from public view would at least stop us being subjected to the Bertie Wooster nonsense he talked yesterday about getting this virus blighter beaten in 12 weeks. He sometimes seems incapable of engaging his brain before opening his mouth.

The Net is now vital infrastructure. So it must be protected during this crisis

As more and more people have to stay — or work from — home, the Internet is is now really part of society’s critical infrastructure. So we need to make sure that it can continue to carry the increased load that’s heading its way. That means that, in the end, some uses will have to take priority over others. I’ve been ranting for weeks that HD streaming of entertainment content should be de-prioritised, and was relieved to see that the EU has come round to that view. So it’s good to see that Netflix and YouTube announce that they will reduce streaming quality in Europe for at least the next month to prevent the internet collapsing under the strain of unprecedented usage due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Sky News reports both companies saying that the measures will affect all video streams for 30 days. “We estimate that this will reduce Netflix traffic on European networks by around 25% while also ensuring a good quality service for our members,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement. A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, said: “We will continue working with member state governments and network operators to minimize stress on the system, while also delivering a good user experience.”

The Financial Times reports that in Italy, the first country to enact a full lockdown, there has been a three-fold increase in the use of video conferencing, which, alongside streaming and gaming, drove a 75 per cent rise in residential data traffic across broadband and mobile networks during the weekend, according to Telecom Italia. And the Spanish telecoms industry issued a warning at the start of the week to urge consumers to ration their internet usage by streaming and downloading more in off-peak hours.

This is going to get worse. What’s happening — predictably — is that whereas Internet use tended to spike in the evenings, now it’s higher (sometimes much higher) throughout the day. So we now have another curve that we need to “flatten”. And it’s possible, therefore, that the EU will have to revisit its Net Neutrality rules as a consequence.

How to Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer

Recipes from Wired magazine. I think I’ll stick to soap and water.

How will we know when we’re through this?

A question that Steven Levy asked during his interview of Larry Brilliant. (That’s the Larry Brilliant of eradicating smallpox and the famous TED talk about how to deal with pandemics.) His mantra: detect early, and respond early.

Here’s his answer to Levy’s question:

The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we’re only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease because we’re not testing enough, and we’re just blind to it, then we’re in a world of hurt. Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral. And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen, firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested them to know that they are not infectious any longer. And we have a system that identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.

The interview is well worth reading in full.

And when you’ve done that, watch his 2006 TED talk. You won’t regret it.

Wednesday 18 March, 2020

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What we’re dealing with

It’s as if we had the Spanish flu and the Great Depression simultaneously. There’s no good outcome from this.

Why aren’t share buybacks outlawed?

Allowing companies to buy their own shares is one of the most outrageous abuses of corporate power. Yesterday, Tim Wu revealed the extent to which American Airlines had abused the loophole as it minted money over recent years. It wasn’t just American, though. Other airlines were doing it too: according to Bloomberg they spent 96% of free cash flow on it. Buybacks were illegal throughout most of the 20th century because they were considered a form of stock market manipulation. But in 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission passed rule 10b-18, which created a legal process for buybacks and opened the floodgates for companies to start repurchasing their stock en masse.

And guess who was president at the time? Why, Ronald Reagan — the “sunshine in America guy”. The guy who led the bonfire of the regulations.

The scientist who saw COVID-19 coming

Interesting profile of Dennis Carroll.

For decades, Carroll has been a leading voice about the threat of zoonotic spillover, the transmission of pathogens from nonhuman animals to us. Scientists are confident the current outbreak, which began in Wuhan, China, stemmed from a virus inherent in bats. In 2009, after years of studying infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Carroll formed a USAID program called PREDICT, where he guided trailblazing research into viruses hiding, and waiting to emerge, in animals around the world.

Federal funding for his PREDICT project was withdrawn in 2019. Guess who was president then?

There’s an emerging theme here…

Why liberals shouldn’t count their chickens

“The initial mishandling of the coronavirus by the government doesn’t mean voters will penalize Trump in November,” said Michael Ceraso, who worked for Sanders in 2016 and was Pete Buttigieg’s New Hampshire director before leaving his campaign last year. “We know we have two candidates who can pivot this generation’s largest health crisis to their policy strengths. But history tells us that an incumbent who steers us through a challenging time, a la Bush and 9/11 and Obama and the Great Recession, are rewarded with a second term.”

(from Politico’s nightly newsletter)

What professional journalists should be doing in this crisis

Terrific piece by Jeff Jarvis from NYU. The main takeaway IMHO is: if you’re not adding value to the viewer’s/listener’s/reader’s understanding then what the hell are you doing?

Some snippets:

we should, for starters, get rid of the meaningless TV location shot. I saw a poor sod standing in Times Square for 11 hours yesterday, reporting for MSNBC, telling us that, well, there were still people there, just not as many as usual. Why? How did that improve my chances of surviving the pandemic? What information did that add to my decision-making? What did the reporter gather that a static webcam could not have? Nothing. And how much did it endanger him and his crew? We can’t know.

Yep. If I see another BBC reporter standing in front of 10 Downing Street I will scream.

I see print reporters going out to ask people how they feel standing in line for toilet paper. And photographers are sent out to get pictures that tell us there are lines of people waiting for that toilet paper. Same question: Why? What does that tell me that affects my decisions? So stop. The world is not a stage and journalists are not set designers. Stop treating the public as a background. Do only those things that inform. (And if you want those images to tell me what I already know about toilet paper being gone, you can ask nicely of many people on Instagram and use their pictures, perhaps paying them.)

And

Many years ago, my children, I helped pioneer cable news use of the remote webcam when a blizzard prevented me from making it into MSNBC’s studios for a blog report. I set up a cam at home. The video was jumpy, but then-network-head Rick Kaplan thought it looked edgy and so webcams were all the vogue for a few months, until they weren’t. Such is TV.

Well, technology has advanced much since then. Skype is good. There are countless experts who can be brought on the air from their homes and offices anywhere in the world to expand the perspectives offered to the public without endangering them. That should be the standard — not the exception. It will substantively improve TV. There is no reason for radio and print reporters to have to be face-to-face with every source to get useful information. For that, we always had the phone. Now we have the net.

It’s great stuff. Well reading in full.

Monday 16 March, 2020

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Quarantine reading

If (as seems possible) some of us are going to be confined to barracks for a substantial period, it would make sense to lay in a stock of useful reading material. There’s always the final volume of Hillary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, of course. But for non-fiction addicts here’s a list of some books that, in one way or another, shed light on our current crisis. It’s worth remembering that (a) we’ve been here before, and (b) that pandemics hold up a mirror to human nature — and to society.

Albert Camus, The Plague
Published in 1947, this modern classic tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to holidaymakers to fugitives, all show the effects the plague has on a populace. Though set in the 1940s, the book is believed to be based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran’s population in 1849 following French colonisation.

I was struck by a Guardian essay about the book by my Observer colleague, Ed Vulliamy, in 2015 during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. “Most of us read The Plague as teenagers”, he wrote,

and we should all read it again. And again: for not only are all humankind’s responses to death represented in it, but now – with the advent of Ebola – the book works on the literal as well as metaphorical level.

Camus’s story is that of a group of men, defined by their gathering around and against the plague. In it we encounter the courage, fear and calculation that we read or hear in every story about West Africa’s efforts to curtail and confront Ebola; through its narrator, Dr Rieux, we can identify with the hundreds of Cuban doctors who went immediately to the plague’s Ground Zero, and those such as the Scottish nurse currently fighting for her life at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread and Why They Stop. Published earlier this year. The author is a mathematician who works at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he works on the mathematical analysis of infectious disease outbreaks. The book uncovers the underlying principles that drive contagion, from infectious diseases and online misinformation to gun violence and financial crises. It explains what makes things spread, why outbreaks look like they do, and how we can change what happens in future. It’s beautifully — and clearly — written (I’m reading it at the moment and can testify to that.) Funnily enough, I ordered it before COVID-19 hit the news, because I’m interested in the way that memes and conspiracy theories spread virally online. Serendipity rules OK.

Frank Snowden: Epidemics and Society: from the Black Death to the present, Yale, 2016. A real big-picture, long-view work of historical scholarship. examines the ways in which disease outbreaks have altered the societies through which they have spread — shaping politics, crushing revolutions, and entrenching racial and economic discrimination, affecting personal relationships, the work of artists and intellectuals, and the man-made and natural environments. Gigantic in scope, stretching across centuries and continents, Snowden’s account also seeks to explain the ways in which social structures have allowed diseases to flourish. “Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning,” he writes. “On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities”. The New Yorker recently published an interview with Snowden which explores these questions. One passage in the conversation particularly stood out for me:

Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today.

If you’re settling down for a long quarantine, this book will keep you absorbed for quite a while.

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, Souvenir Press, 2011. A masterpiece of investigative reporting. Shilts covered the AIDS epidemic from 1982 for The San Francisco Chronicle, the only US newspaper willing to give its full attention to the epidemic. He traced the roots of AIDS beginning in 1976 to two events and focussing on the mysterious illness of a Danish physician working in Africa. Before the virus even had a name, it had leapt across continents and destroyed communities, while the world stood idly by. It was, after all, a disease that affected ‘only’ gay men. There are lots of echoes of the Trump Administration in Stilts’s account. Like the present President, Ronald Reagan’s budget cuts affected the programs that needed funding for the necessary research. His Administration also dismissed scientists, thereby delaying the discovery of pharmacological defences. Remind you of anyone? Other culprits include: the businesses whose decisions to keep blood banks unaccountable and bathhouses liberated helped to spread the disease; mainstream media, for its reluctance to report AIDS; and the blasé attitudes of political officials, public health authorities, and community leaders. There are heroes in this story too, of course. But somehow it’s the villains we remember. Will it be any different this time?

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year. Although a novel published in 1722, it’s really an early example of imaginative journalistic reportage. It’s an account of one man’s experiences of the year 1665, in which the bubonic plague struck the city of London. It’s presented as an eyewitness account of the events at the time, but Defoe was only five years old in 1665, and the book itself was published under the initials H. F. and is probably based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe, who lived in London and survived the plague. It’s still a vivid read.

Dorothy Crawford, The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses Published in 2000, this is an overview of the viruses that have wreaked havoc in the past. She looks at the havoc viruses have caused in the past, where they have come from, and the detective work involved in uncovering them. Finally, she considers whether a new virus could potentially wipe out the human race. It’s informative and readable. James Meek wrote an informative review of it for the London Review of Books in 2001.

Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg – Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910 A terrific study by a formidable historian of the way Hamburg reacted when it was hit in 1892 by cholera.

Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet – a social history of venereal disease in the United States since 1880 In a way, this book has echoes of the story told in Randy Shilts’s book on AIDS. Brandt demonstrates that Americans’ concerns about venereal disease have centered around a set of social and cultural values related to sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and class. At the heart of our efforts to combat these infections, he argues, has been the tendency to view venereal disease as both a punishment for sexual misconduct and an index of social decay. This tension between medical and moral approaches has significantly impeded efforts to develop “magic bullets”–drugs that would rid us of the disease–as well as effective policies for controlling the infections’ spread.

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