I don’t seem to get around to this blog (and I have got quite a bit of the Hemingway words done already, though I must fight the tendency to re-write and hone stuff I’ve already written instead of writing new stuff). There is one question, though, which has brought me back to this blog and it has — so bloody inevitably — to do with the global coronavirus pandemic.
I’ve long thought (as, I’m sure, have many others, although I haven’t yet heard much on TV and the radio or read much in the papers) that the true danger from the pandemic is not to our health, but to various global economies. It will damage them enormously, and after folk have stopped catching the virus and often dying from it, the effects of the pandemic will long be felt.
In short, in order to counter the spread of the virus many countries in the northern hemisphere have simply closed down, insisting everyone isolate themselves at home unless it is absolutely necessary that they go out. Don’t go to work, everyone has been told, and only go out briefly if you have to go shopping or pick up a prescription.
As for thus having no income, there are various government guaranteeing wages (somehow — I’m very unclear as to the details or how the schemes will work). Here in Britain it is even trying to find some way of guaranteeing that the self-employed don’t lose out either, a far trickier task. Businesses, who must also shut up shop, have been told that they, too, will get ‘government help’.
It all sounds fine and dandy, and even this grubby little cynic is impressed who, broadly, everyone is coming together for the sake of everyone else. Yesterday, I went out for the first time in several days — I am now retired and have not had to worry about income as my pension should not be affected — to the St Breward Store and Post Office (at the top of the village by the church and next to the Old Inn if you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods) and was puzzled to find six individuals standing alone in the pub car park, randomly in no particular order. They were, or seemed to be, just standing about. It turned out that only one customer was allowed into the shop at a time, and this was ‘the queue’, though as all were at least eight feet from anyone else it looked bugger all like any queue I have ever seen (and joined).
Quite whether that measure — keeping our distance in a pub car on the very rural North Cornwall Moor — is as useful as not travelling by crowded tube, commuter train or bus in a busy city, is a moot point. But as Tesco say
It is March 26, 2020, today, and we have been assured that the pandemic will not be over soon and could last until well into June (Wimbledon will decide by next week whether to postpone this year’s tournament). So I have no rational reason for saying this and shan’t pretend I do: but I have a gut feeling the emergency will be over sooner rather than later. I might, of course, look very silly indeed to someone reading this in six months or a year’s time. All I am saying is that is my gut feeling, for better or worse and for what it’s worth. The knock-on effects, though, I suspect will be felt for month and possibly years. But, fingers crossed, there might even be some positive developments.
Ever since, first Wuhan, then Lombardy, now most all European countries have been in lockdown and folk are not going out (and, crucially, not commuting), air pollution has fallen dramatically as have CO2 levels. Now you might be a ‘man-made climate change’ freak or you might be an out-and-out denier, but that fact, the fall in air pollution and CO2 levels cannot be denied and has to be pertinent. The obvious conclusion is for us all to carry on ‘not commuting’. That, though, is not possible. Or might it be? Might this now not be an opportunity, given such dramatic evidence of how we can drastically cut air pollution and CO2 levels, for wholesale reassessment of how our economies are set up? Of course, it is, but it’s easier said than done.
My former employer, the Daily Mail, operates from Northcliffe House in Kensington, West London, and I should imagine that what with all the other departments involved in the operation of producing a newspaper — folk usually think in terms of ‘writer and reporters’ but, in fact, not only are there sub-editors busying themselves on the editorial side, but their work would simply not be possible if it weren’t for a range of other departments: advertising and marketing, promotions, personnel, finance and — not least — the IT department.
IT must get an especial mention: like every other pen-pushing industry in the 21st century, IT keep the show on the road. Any glitch has to be sorted out in minutes. And it always is. But over these past few weeks they have (former colleagues tell me) excelled themselves. Why? Because Northcliffe House is now completely empty and will be for the duration. Everyone is working from home (as I did when I was still placing the puzzles). Logging on remotely to the system is straightforward, but when I was doing it just a few did it regularly, certainly not more than 1,000 bods. So the system had and has to be robust and IT have to be on top of it 24/7. And they were and are.
But the Mail is, in a sense, lucky. Newspapers, in a way, operate on the fringes to mainstream pen-pushing companies. By the nature of their industry and what they do, they are accustomed and usually prepared to adopt and adapt to changing circumstances almost overnight (the paper is largely printed in East London, but they have an identical twin operation ready to take over at a moments notice for the paper to be printed in Didcot, just under 100 miles to the west).
I don’t think other industries are as flexible and, getting back to the bad knock-on effects of the pandemic, smaller companies, of which there are thousands throughout Europe simply can’t afford to shut down for a month or two. Once they shut down and have no cashflow they go bust and thousand, quite possibly millions, of jobs are lost.
I have seen warnings that we might be in for a worldwide recession: a ‘global economy’ smug economists boasted about 20 years ago which would, and has, distribute ever more prosperity to ever more people in ever more countries has a downside: problems travel equally as fast. If — and it can only be an ‘if’ — there is such a recession it will be deeper and last longer than anything since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
There are also claims that because of the social effects of widespread unemployment, it might have been better to let the pandemic take its course. And catastrophic economic conditions invariably play out in politics. Just how keen will Europe’s liberally minded folk be to look on the camps of several thousand migrants to the EU from
North Africa and the Middle East if they are out of a job with little prospect of getting another, falling into debt and are forced to sell their homes for less then they are worth? Rather less than they were last year, and last year they were rather less inclined to brotherly love than they were 15 years ago. In the context of the EU, it is also worth considering just what effect on the euro — the always rather flakey euro which has never quite found its feet — a collapse in the economies of Spain and Italy would have.
Naturally, on that and other questions there can only be opinions. There cannot be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. Similarly, the prognostications of various ‘health bodies’ as how the pandemic will pan out are, at the end of the day, less copper-bottomed than they might be (and their supporters claim).
All are based on ‘computer modelling’ — ‘if this, then what?’ — and it depends upon what data you start with, for which read, to put it more brutally, what assumptions you make. So the results will vary, and, for example, just a few days ago ‘Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group’ suggested (here is one report) that perhaps things weren’t quite as bad as they seemed. It’s ‘model’ suggested that more than half of Britain’s population had been infected by the Covid-19 with no serious effects, in many quite mild effect.
If true, that suggested coronavirus was not half as dangerous or lethal as had so far been feared. This conclusion from one ‘health body’, though, is at odds with previous conclusions from other ‘health bodies’ and has been criticised and downplayed. So who is right? I don’t know, I can’t know, and nor do you or can you. At the end of the day you pays your money and you makes your choice. And that is all a tad pointless.
As for what effects the universal closing down of the economy will have in the coming months and years, who knows. (As I’ve recorded in this blog before: one definition of an economist is someone who can utterly convincingly explain this week why what he had utterly convincingly predicted last week didn’t actually happen.) But as I began this blog entry, I’ll end it: I suspect the future has less to fear from coronavirus medically than it does from the effects socially and economically of measures taken to counter its spread.
. . .
And just for good measure . . .
This one has got bugger all to do with what I am writing about, but I like it. It is just a screenshot I took while watchign a documentary and which I then dicked around with briefly in Photoshop.
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