David Theobald
As we enter Day 7 of the current minor inconvenience, how are things going?
On a selfish front, short term, I can report that the only thing I am really brassed off about is the inability to see my grandchildren; and no, Skype/Facetime/DUO or whatever is not a substitute for the real thing. But apart from that, it’s no big deal. I am lucky that I am retired, live in the country and am adequately provisioned for at least a month. I have plenty to do at home and can even take my thrice weekly country walks without flouting Obergruppenfuhrer Bush’s diktats.
Widening my horizon a little to use the NZ MSM to see how things are tracking, one would think that, because we have such an inspirational leader guiding us through these troubled times, things are also going swimmingly. We have a world first this and world’s best that, to shut down the country, and we have a daily act of worship at 1300 to tell us how all this is going using numbers that look pretty good – as long as you don’t look too hard. This is followed by a few minutes of kindness carrots and ‘the police have powers’ sticks. What’s not to like? We are all in this together and we’ve got this.
But even if you don’t leave Pravda 1 there are worries, are there not? The daily increasing number of methods of narking on a neighbour, (an extra jog per day, 5c on the chocolate afghans at P&S), has come just a few days after the government telling us that they are the only source of the truth. Do those two hand in glove ring any bells from history?
But if you bother to look further than the end of your nose to overseas facts (hard to come by) and opinions (thick on the ground), then things start to get a lot murkier. I will readily admit that my thinking on this is changing pretty rapidly. I still think that our borders were closed too late and the closure is, even now, too porous. However, the rest of the measures to counter this virus are starting to get me very worried.
That this virus is serious and that it is a different animal from common or garden seasonal influenza is pretty apparent. But the reaction to it worldwide, a reaction that is bordering on hysteria, has turned a serious health problem into a social and economic disaster. This has been fuelled by a ghoulish, clickbait driven media and weak politicians who are willing to be led by ‘experts’. In many cases, I am unsure as to what process was used to select these experts who find themselves with powers they were never trained to have.
I now think that the damage to our country in the medium term will be huge but most of the carnage will come from the cure and not the illness. We also need a proper investigation when this is all over, that the measures currently being taken actually resulted in the outcome we end up getting. The small scale corollary to this is that we need (and need it now), the current mortality figures to be reported as death from coronavirus separated from death with coronovirus. Peter Hitchens tells a good parable here.
A man goes to a doctor with pneumonia. The doctor tells him this is very serious and in order to cure the pneumonia he will have to amputate his leg. The man recovers from his pneumonia but now has only one leg. I will not try to plagiarise Hitchens further but urge you to listen to him.
I hope that the draconian powers vested in the Police in the short term are removed as swiftly as they were installed when the acute phase of this is all over, but my level of confidence here is low. I hope the man-made climate change nutters will not use this current downturn in emissions/pollution as evidence that living in caves wearing animal skins is the way of the future; my expectations here are zero.
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