September 2020 Blog

After the relief of early summer there has been a rising number of Covid cases in many European countries including both Spain and the United Kingdom. The hope that Covid 19 was "defeated" like an enemy army has turned out to be a vain one. To extend the metaphor a little: the battle was lost. As the number of cases has gone up, governments have been compelled by their own macho "defeat covid" rhetoric to go into battle again. Of course, much of this was predicted back in May when restrictions were being lifted. The war like narrative of people uniting in struggle and defeating the virus was always going to clash with the reality of how pandemics work. That reality means Covid 19 is now present in our societies and we will not drive it away with exhortations to "stick to the rules" or by locking up people in their homes.

As the new rules begin to take effect we are likely to see some push-back in effected communities. In Spain restrictions in working class barrios have seen low level demonstrations . The government as always threatens with repression but there is a sense that they are running out of options and likely to loose control against any determined opposition . The left in both Spain and the UK has been silent on the effects of Covid 19 on the poor. In fact they have been largely supportive of restrictions and in Spain's case the governing POSE socialist party is in government with the Brahmin Left Podemos party. The situation could begin to deteriorate rapidly if a populist party began to exploit peoples frustrations at the failure of the Governments policies. In the UK despite the rhetoric there may be a policy to encourage wider infections by stealth. The measures introduced so far do little more than close pubs at 10 and force face masks onto people working in the service industries. Lock downs are threatened but not implemented. It remains to be seen what the true policy is.

There is now an urgent need to find a new response to the situation we are in. Progressive left parties in all countries have been supportive of oppressive quarantine measures the consequences of which are becoming clearer everyday. As well as a growing crises of untreated illnesses it is becoming clear that school closures are having negative effects on young people especially those that live in working class communities. The elite policy has been to keep "everyone" safe, but this has deliberately ignored poor peoples experience of lock down conditions. In the words of Harvard biostatistian Martin Kulldorff "the lock down is the worst assault on the working class in half a century, and especially on the urban working class." The West's Social Democratic parties failure to respond to this has left a dangerous gap for right populist to move into.

We must now learn to live with Covid 19 by adapting to it. We cannot eliminate it or hold it back by ever more restrictive measures. By adapting and responding in a way that accepts this new reality we will make our societies stronger. There is also a need for a new metaphors to replace those linked to the war on Covid narrative. Co-operation and justice should be words that get used more often. It's also not enough to say that the goal is to defeat Covid 19. A more nuanced response, explaining how the virus stops being a threat only when a population becomes immune is necessary. We also need to explain how that can happen. The most important thing to acknowledge is that this virus will always be present in society and that only so called herd immunity will give us the necessary protection to ensure it poses only a minor threat to public health. That immunity will be achieved either by having an effective vaccine or by allowing younger and less vulnerable people to be exposed to the virus. By building up a society wide immunity it becomes easier to protect older and more vulnerable citizens. The question is how to get to herd immunity with the minimum of casualties.

The way to deliver such a policy is by explaining that this is not a "do nothing" course of action. It is not a policy where we allow the virus moves like a forrest fire through society. There will be no Covid parties. Herd immunity is an established and fundamental public health principle but we need to work towards it. We should move the focus away from individual cases and towards protecting those in society who are vulnerable. At the same time we can allow the virus to spread in a controlled way through the rest of the population. Preventative measures should be directed towards older people who we know are more vulnerable to dying from the effects of Covid 19. The aim should be to move away from the simplistic policy of stopping every citizen from being infected whatever the cost. Instead we should use the patterns and features of the disease to try and limit the number of severe cases and deaths in the long run. The narrative of total protection for all and firm action to achieve it, is rewarding for politicians who often use simple rhetoric to encourage sacrifice by the majority and promise punishments for those who break the rules. This simplistic response then makes it easy to transfer the blame of the failure to defeat Covid from the political and scientific establishment to those who have broken the community's trust.

I am reading "The Hapsburgs" by Martyn Rady. It's a fantastic book , full of interesting stories and with a clear narrative drive that helps the reader to understand the Hapsburgs' place in European history. The author uses sources from a number of European languages and helps English speakers access a treasure house of details that would normally be neglected in anglophone countries. One of the best of these concerns the Queen- Empress Maria Theresa 1717-1780. Rady holds the Empress up as someone fully engaged in the enlightenment project of bringing rational thought to the masses. One of the examples he uses concerns an outbreak of Vampire activity around Olomouc , Moravia in 1755. A woman's corpse was to be exhumed and burnt on the grounds that it had been attacking villages at night. In Rady's words "Maria Theresa sent two doctors to investigate, but the terms of their commission left in no doubt what the empress expected of them. As she explained, it would be of ‘great service to mankind’ if their report could wean ‘credulous people’ from their misbelief."

The Doctor's report was sent to Gerhard van Swieten who was Maria Theresa's court librarian, personal physician, and censor. As an educated man of his times, van Swieten found that the reports were the products of rumour and superstition. On reading his report Maria Theresa banned the exhumation of corpses on the grounds of ‘posthumous magic.’ She also banned the lottery numbers prediction trade. It's a measure of the quality of Rady's book that he gives us some background to the appearance of Vampires in C18 th central Europe. He quotes Voltaire claiming that ‘between 1730 and 1735 nothing was spoken of more than vampires—how they were hunted down, their hearts torn out, and their bodies burnt. They were like the martyrs of old; the more of them that were burnt, the more they found."

He also brings to our attention one Michael Ranft, authur of a book I would dearly love to have on my bookshelves." Michael Ranft, whose sober treatise on whether corpses munched through their shrouds was first published in 1725, reworked his account a decade later to include a graphic account of the Serbian vampires, which he published in his compendious Treatise on the Chewing and Gnawing of the Dead in Their Graves, in Which Is Revealed the True Nature of the Hungarian Vampires and Bloodsuckers." The illustration below is taken from the German original .