Cassandra Voices

Tag: lockdown

  • Lockdown Gallery 2020

     

  • Liking Lockdown

    The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
    Martin Amis, in an interview with The Paris Review (1998)

    The empty streets, quiet from dawn to dusk and beyond. No noisy, polluting rush hour traffic, or at any other time of the day. No shuffling, stifling crowds of commuters on packed public transport, or gaga revellers in sweaty pubs and clubs. Not having to go to work, and feeling okay about it because most everyone else was not obliged to either (there’s social solidarity, if ever I saw it). Getting a modest stipend from the government for staying at home. Being able to do whatever you wanted to all day long (within the law, and a five kilometre radius of your residence). If you were living alone or parenting alone you could even pair with one other household as part of a support bubble, and two households could meet outdoors within the travel limit. If you were a renter, no threat of imminent eviction by a rapacious or capricious landlord; if you had a mortgage, a temporary freeze on payments. In short, what utter bliss.

    I was alive during lockdown, and I was alone – and although maybe ‘most alive’ is a stretch, I grew to love the sequestered state, to the extent that I still have not fully readjusted to things being ‘back to normal’. But it troubles me that perhaps ‘most alive’ is not quite the same thing as being good, or even happy. I liked lockdown: does that make me a bad person?

    Dublin, April, 2020.

    Of course it was bewildering at first, and a little frightening – because no one really knew how severe the pandemic might be, or for how long it could last. (Let’s get our priorities straight here: there was a run on toilet rolls.) But after a few weeks, we settled into it. What I missed most upon entering the altered reality: 1) being able to meet friends face-to-face in the flesh; 2) being able to experience the giddy, healing rush of live music I get from going to concerts; 3) being able to travel, if and when I wanted. But I soon adapted to the new dispensation. After all, we now have all these wonderful machines with screens to help us keep in touch with people electronically, if we feel the need for company without risking the possibility of infection. Plus, we can use them to purchase pretty much anything we might want, as long as we are in funds or have access to lines of credit, and have said items delivered directly to our doors, thus obviating the need to ever stir outside, whether we are permitted to or not.

    I thought of Oceane in Tibor Fischer’s Voyage to The End of The Room (2003) (itself a riff on the antisocial aesthete Des Esseintes in J. K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884)); and, more recently, of the unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018): both protagonists who have, insofar as is practicable, retired from social interaction. I thought of many of Cormac McCarthy’s heroes – men invariably configured as some variation on the theme of first or last person on earth. Mainly, I thought of Kate in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), who either is, or imagines herself to be, the last woman on earth. All in some way extend the trope, with its origins in science fiction, of the depopulated world, brought to perfection in the dirty metaphysics of J. G. Ballard’s best work. To put it more simply, as a reclusive friend once described his habitual living circumstances to me, it was ‘Howard Hughes without the money.’

    Obviously, there were downsides. For a start, people were dying – often the poorest and oldest and most vulnerable in other ways. Then, some people still had to work, whether they wanted to or not, and not only health care professionals, but supermarket staff and take-away deliverers were deemed ‘essential’ or ‘key’ or ‘front line’ operatives – thus risking sickness and death for minimal reward. Yet others were acting like idiots, with their bizarre conspiracy theories and their deliberate flouting of restrictions. Personally, my greatest hassle was the way my eyeglasses steamed up every time I masked up.

    Dublin, April, 2020.

    But I was lucky: I had a house to myself with a garden, and a car and a bike and a fridge and a freezer, and a television and a hi-fi system and internet access, and I was mobile and could venture to shops when supplies ran low, or take long walks and cycles for exercise. Roaming around the Hellfire Club or the adjacent Massy’s Wood for hours on end, while listening to Éliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort on the headphones, was a favourite pastime, if I felt the need to get out of the house and blow the cobwebs off – not something I would necessarily have done if I’d been working five days a week. Furthermore, I did not have any very youthful or very elderly dependents relying on me for their daily needs or morale-boosting support. Reports of domestic abuse among those living in cramped, overcrowded conditions circulated and increased steadily, and I pitied anyone trapped in a fraught, tension-filled environment. My nutjob survivalist’s instinct began to kick in.

    I was alone because my wife had taken up a job abroad a few months pre-pandemic. When rumours of imminent lockdown first hit she had wanted to return home, but I managed to dissuade her. We had been going through an elongated rocky patch, and I reasoned that a) if forced isolation was short-lived, then it wasn’t worth her while uprooting herself all over again; and b) if having to stay indoors lasted for a longer time, then sooner or later we might well drive each other to distraction, if ensconced under the same roof for such a lengthy period. We were then trying to establish independent lives, and in retrospect I still feel my decision was the correct one – in as much as later we experienced a ‘Covid-bounce’ and were reconciled. Not that coming together again was a direct consequence of being apart, but being together under duress certainly wouldn’t have helped us in resolving our difficulties. Does anyone really need to be with a partner/lover every hour of every day? Each time I saw him/I couldn’t wait to see him again (‘Then He Kissed Me’ by The Crystals, 1963) is the stuff of teen anthems and first love. Constant companionship in a confined space may even be detrimental, if not wholly destructive, to a relationship. Or, at least, to one with me. Am I a bad person?

    In Middlemarch (1872) George Eliot has her ‘godless’ heroine Dorothea Brooke suggest that if religion were actually true and God existed, and achieving eternal salvation (and avoiding a similarly enduring damnation) was our main priority, then we should all devote our whole lives to this pursuit as cloistered contemplatives, rather than just leaving it at attending church on Sunday and doing a few good works. One of the few modern-era Catholic writers I can read with pleasure and profit, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968), wrote in Thoughts in Solitude (1956): ‘We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our bosom.’ He continues:

    When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.

    Still, not all of us can become Trappist monks, or opt to lead a comparably ascetic life. For one thing, belief in God, or some conception of divine transcendence, appears to be a necessary, if not quite sufficient, prerequisite. For another, the need for sex, or even the search for secular love, does require one to be ‘out there’, however nominally. As my wife once opined, ‘You should have been a monk – except you like sex too much.’ Not that a vow of celibacy is always mandatory for the anchoritic life, or acts as an insuperable impediment to a long withdrawal – at any rate not nowadays, and not outside of the western tradition. For example, it is on record that the flexible arrangements surrounding Leonard Cohen’s five year stint living at the Mount Baldy Buddhist retreat centre, where he was given the name ‘Jikan’, meaning ‘Silence’, did not preclude female callers, or indeed boozing marathons with his Zen Master teacher, Old Roshi. But he was Leonard Cohen, not your average seeker after enlightenment, and Mount Baldy is located outside L.A., not Kyoto, so exceptions were made and such privileges extended.

    But even setting aside the vagaries of libidinal desire, ultimately I think monastic life, which for many people lockdown could be said to have resembled, would be too social for me, certainly in its Cenobitic, or community form, if not in its Eremitic, or solitary practice. I like doing things – eating, sleeping, writing, reading – when I feel like doing them, rather than adhering to a strict schedule with other devotees. Interestingly, the Trappists, who are an essentially cenobitical order (in contrast to, say, the enclosed Carthusians), maintain a custom under which individual monks or nuns who have reached a required level of maturity within the community may pursue a hermitical lifestyle on monastery grounds under the supervision of the abbot or abbess. Merton was one such allowed to undertake this mode of living. Yet even then he fell into an earthly love, with Margie Smith, a student nurse assigned to his care while he was recuperating in a Louisville hospital from surgery he underwent in April 1966, to treat debilitating back pain. She was twenty-five, petite and demure; he was fifty-one, stocky and bald, with a wandering intellect and a boisterous laugh. Although in several diary entries (see Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom, The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six: 1966-67) he expressly denies sexual consummation, on July 12th he wrote:

    Yet there is no question I love her deeply … I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day at Wygal’s (the office of his psychologist, which he ‘borrowed’ for a tryst on June 11th – the diary entry for which day notes that they shared a bottle of champagne), and it haunts me … I could have been enslaved to the need for her body after all.

    A previous entry for June 14th notes his discussions with his abbot about this affair, and his intent to follow the instruction to end it. When he did, he still remained in occasional contact with Margie, and some recent Merton scholars have even argued that the monk regretted giving her up so much, and was so remorseful that she had married someone else (a doctor in Ohio, with whom she raised three sons), that he no longer felt life was worth living.

    Also, incidentally, according to The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) the youthful Merton loved jazz, but by the time he began his first teaching job he had forsaken all but ‘peaceful’ music. Later in life, whenever he was permitted to leave the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky, for medical or monastic reasons, he would catch what live jazz he could, in Louisville or New York. So maybe there is hope for me yet, to entertain a life of socially sanctioned solitude (with sporadic forays to musical events) – although I fear I would not take kindly to that clerical ‘supervision’.

    More to the point: I am not under thirty, or even under forty – so I would not expect those in that demographic, who are eagerly trying to establish relationships and careers and lives, to share my guarded enthusiasm for society grinding to a halt, or for taking a lifelong holiday from it. I have managed to attain some perspective on matters carnal, and on those of the heart (not to mention on my fluctuating sources of income) – even if this equanimity is, I suspect, largely hormonally determined, rather than an intellectual or emotional insight. Having said that, while I may still be partial to the odd ride, much less to a touch of romance, it was not impossible to hook up during lockdown, with a little technological aid, and within certain geographical limitations. Much like ordinary times.

    Dublin, April, 2020.

    Naturally, I reread Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) during the time of Covid, like many others. For, whether the surge in its popularity consisted chiefly of first-timers or revisitors, in this activity I was hardly alone, as publishers reported a huge worldwide increase in sales of the novel, once the virus had taken hold. Figures for the English translation went up by 150% in the last week of February 2020 as compared with the same period in the preceding year, while the original French version rose in number by a staggering 300%. (Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348-1353) and Defoe’s Journal Of The Plague Year (1722) enjoyed similar stupendous bumps up the charts, courtesy of the reading public.)

    What I discovered about The Plague was that it could have been written yesterday. So accurately did its descriptions of how individuals, and the general populace, behave in Oran during that escalating crisis chime with contemporary events, many passages could have been culled from the newspaper headlines and news bulletins of 2020-21. Which tends to make one despair of human nature, and embrace the cliché that it doesn’t change much. Here are three choice snippets, in case you didn’t get around to it this time:

    • ‘There have been as many plagues in the history of the world as there have been wars; yet always plagues and wars find people equally unprepared.’
    • ‘How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.’
    • ‘The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.’

    Compiling lists was something else which really caught on, and if you hunt around the internet you will turn up the catalogues of my favourite novels, favourite albums, favourite films, worst jobs, and all that. Everyone started baking sourdough or banana bread, and posting photos of the results on social media, me included. If it hadn’t been for lockdown, I doubt I’d have got through nearly every one of the over twenty films directed by the prolific Sion Sono (the Japanese David Lynch), or worked my way through as many of The Guardian’s ‘Top 20 J-horror films – ranked!’ as I could find, or rewatched all of Michael Haneke’s filmography in chronological order, or lapped up the entire boxset of The Wire for the third time (which I would gladly do again), or discovered the best of Dario Argento (and what, really, had been so important in my previous life as to account for this grievous omission?). I played online chess with a couple of musician acquaintances, and some anonymous randomers (happy to report that my game improved exponentially). I even recorded my versions of every song on Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks (1974) and had the temerity to upload the attempts to YouTube.

    All of which prompts the question: what had we all been doing with ourselves before the plague descended?

    Mainly, lockdown was a boon for me because I started writing again, having lost my way – aside from journalism and reviews – for a number of years. But this time it was not fiction, as previously, but rather essays, akin to this one. Martin Amis is not alone among writers when, in the epigraph to this piece, he expresses the tribe’s preference for solitude. Here’s James Baldwin, writing in ‘The Creative Process’ (1962): ‘The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.’ It’s almost enough to convince you that seclusion is an indispensable component of creation (although theatre, film, music and dance are clearly collaborative arts – and even desk-bound writers engage with agents, editors and publishers). But, perhaps in common with painters more than any other arts practitioners, writers live in their heads, and are solipsists par excellence. The interior world of imagination is always more stimulating to them than what Roland Barthes referred to dismissively as ‘The trivial kitchenry of doing.’ As for living, our servants can do that for us – if only we had servants.

    When I first had notions of becoming a writer, one of the most appealing aspects of the calling was the option of anonymity: like J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, you could be famous, or let’s say influential, without anyone recognising you in the street or bothering you in public. Nowadays, however, one has to be ready to be interviewed at the drop of a hat, and take a strenuous part in one’s own publicity campaign (“What? No social media presence?”). One is also expected to become a member of ‘the writing community’ – whatever that is, and wherever it lives. So many of today’s writers spend so much of their time being on television and radio and going to literature festivals – in other words, promoting themselves and their work – that it is difficult to imagine how and when and where they ever manage to get any writing done. You might as well be in a touring rock band. (And when do they do their songwriting? At soundchecks? In hotel rooms? In the recording studio? I suppose they are not on the road all the time – but since the digitalisation and free filesharing of music, needs must to make a living, which means playing live and selling merch.)

    In more recent years – primarily due to the ubiquity of  television and the rise of the internet – writers have at times been presented – many of them  willingly – as another type of media celebrity. Yet, in the not so distant past it was still quite difficult to reach an author from outside the circuit of the publishing world. Writers used to be identified mostly through their written work, and it was the norm for a reader to be aware of an author, to like or even love their work, and continue to be fully ignorant of their physical appearance, and also unaware of most of the biographical information that now is routinely accessed. One could scarcely imagine Franz Kafka or Fernando Pessoa giving an interview. Indeed, it is legitimate to question if individuals with such reclusive personalities would, in today’s climate, be offered a publishing deal at all.

    Publishing is a business, and a publishing house is unlikely to invest in a writer’s work if it stands to lose money, or to not make very much (unless a few hugely commercially viable wordsmiths subsidise all the ne’er-do-wells). Yet writers are, arguably, very different from performers of popular entertainment. In practice, of course, not many authors differ significantly from performance artists, and what they say on stage is at least as vital to their process as what they write on the page. But to bring about an increase in links between the two activities, whether intentionally or unwittingly, will certainly result in fewer published authors who are characterised by acute introversion.

    Now, it may be argued that the attraction of retreating inside a Proustian cork-lined study to do one’s writing means that the work produced will have a very narrow focus, and that you will have fewer stories to tell, except the ones about yourself. Such confinement implies that your daily ‘life experience’ will be extraordinarily circumscribed. However, in my opinion, most people have more than enough ‘life experience’ by the time they are twenty-five or thirty to be going on with for the remainder of their lives. If, indeed, life experience is really a requirement for writing well at all, especially in comparison with the transformative power of the imagination – for those who have one. That ‘smiling public man’, Senator W. B. Yeats, in ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ (1912), bemoaned the distracting vicissitudes of ‘Theatre business, management of men’ which he had earlier so eagerly embraced, and also elsewhere wrote ‘Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.’ Or, as has been remarked with reference to Jorge Luis Borges: ‘A man may lead an exciting life without ever leaving his desk.’

    (Note to television and radio producers, and festival organisers: I am now available for any interviews or promotional junkets going, and I promise to wax eloquent about the topic of this essay, or any other subjects about which I have written.)

    Dublin, April, 2020.

    Does much of the foregoing sound like plain old misanthropy? I do not regard myself as overly misanthropic, even if I have a low opinion of much of the human race. I still like the people I like, and like them a lot. It’s when people organise themselves into groups that my suspicions are raised. As Jonathan Swift wrote, in a letter to Alexander Pope,  ‘I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.’ Doubtless the proponents of wellness fads, and associated quackery, will diagnose me as ‘anti-social’, and conclude that I ‘lack empathy’. Not so. If anything, I’m more asocial than anti-social, and I can have oodles of empathy, when I want. Granted, maybe I should ‘want’ more. However, I do not place quite so high a value on empathy as an attribute as the esteem with which it is held in the current discourse appears to require. Too much empathy can get you into all sorts of bother.

    Nor am I agoraphobic (from Ancient Greek ἀγορά, meaning ‘an assembly of the People’, or ‘a marketplace’ (the typical spot for such an assembly); and φόβος, meaning ‘fear’) – although I do have a problem with ‘the market’ as a determinant of value, and therefore fear it. People who had known me in a previous life might even have described me as a bon vivant or man about town, such was my propensity for attending live artistic happenings, chiefly concerts. (In fact, there are those who would say that I have only two settings when it comes to my preferred mode of being: the quiet fragility of tremulous silence, or the overpowering loudness of raucousness sound. Signal to noise ratio.) However – and I don’t know if it is attributable to incipient old age, or whether it has been accelerated by quarantine – I now no longer need to be out all the time. Maybe I had always been a potential hermit, who simply lacked the courage of his convictions. Still, it’s quite a momentous revelation when you realise that you could get used to being content enough never seeing anyone for the rest of your life. ‘Man is a social animal’ Aristotle tells us in his Politics. ‘Virtue is social’ admonishes a voice in Philip Larkin’s astute poem on this theme, ‘Vers de Société’. Yet there is such a creature as a gregarious recluse, however paradoxical that might sound. Lots of animals hibernate for winter: why can’t homo sapiens (wise man!) do it for three or four months annually, if not for the whole year? But what of the need for company and companionship, if only to stave off the loneliness? The answer to this objection is that being alone and feeling lonely are two entirely different conditions. Some people feel lonely at the heart of a crowd of people; others are at peace staring at the stars by themselves.

    So, am I a bad person? Not really, although I may concede to selfishness. But all artists are selfish, or certainly no more or less so than the majority of the rest of humankind. There are fully socialised reasons for being selfish, just as there exist selfish reasons for being social. How bad a person does selfishness make you?

    I repeat: am I a bad person? No, I’m just an introvert – and there is nothing wrong with that. (Note to self: future essay comparing the relative merits and demerits of introversion and extroversion.)

    Mostly, I can’t be bothered arguing and debating with people much anymore. I mean, I kind of like it, sometimes, when it takes place at a level I consider ‘intelligent and informed’, but most discussion, it seems to me, exists at a standard that makes it hardly worth talking about or engaging in, and amounts to nothing more than people repeating their opinions and beliefs at each other at contrasting pitches. I guess this view makes me a snob, and of the worst kind – an ‘intellectual’ one. But really, as is in the nature of friendship, I like being with people who agree with or broadly share my worldview, and I get irritated being around people who are coming from the opposite end of the religious or political or literary or whatever spectrum. Perhaps that is my great character flaw; but it’s tiring, to the point of exhaustion, always being called on to defend yourself. And yet, it is ingrained that we can only change things (or maintain the status quo) through exchange of ideas in a public forum. That’s how much vaunted democracy, such as it is, functions. However, as far as I can make out, people who talk too much have nothing much to say. Or, at least, one has to put in quite a shift to discern what it is they are actually trying to express. Talk is cheap. A still tongue in a wise head. Have we gleaned nothing from Wittgenstein’s dictum: ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’? Or have we not heard the sagacious Borges’ counsel: ‘Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence’?

    But even I am human. I have slowly crept back to attending gigs, going to the cinema and theatre, meeting friends, even going to parties, and making a couple of journeys abroad – although I did suffer from Covid-hesitancy at first. The intensity of crazed moshing at black midi in Vicar Street was disconcerting, as was the surprise that Mitski Miyawaki had morphed from being an act with a relatively mature audience of twenty and thirty-somethings to a TikTok sensation for fifteen-year-old girls queueing around the corner at the same venue, before it opened its evening doors. In both cases, I forsook my usual front row vantage point, and retreated to the back of the hall.

    I have noticed a greater than usual degree of incompetence on my part, in almost every piece of daily business that I do. Nothing feels the same as it did, in The Before Times. When you step off the carousel, you are not sure you want to get back on again – finally acknowledging that it may have really been a treadmill all along. I returned to work, because I had to, but more than ever before was plagued (apologies) by the nagging question ‘What am I doing?’ (with my time, with my life, with my endless numbered days), asked with an existential weight that was spirit-crushing. It was back to the small talk, or as its components are also called, pleasantries. Some colleagues were in agreement with me that we have all become ‘a little more Zen’, post-hiatus. Although there is an underlying apprehension that we are just dazed and confused zombies. After all, how could we tell the difference?

    Inevitably, and in spite of obeying all official directives and taking all reasonable precautions, I contracted the plague myself, having successfully dodged it for over two years. The perils of being out and about, mixing with the throng, instead of sheltering safely at home. I may even have picked up some form of Long Covid, given my occasional breathlessness and sudden bouts of tiredness, and general brain fog and word soup. What is all this mad rushing around for?

    Dublin, June, 2020.

    The most disappointing thing about the easing of lockdown is that it seems, both individually and as a society, that we have learned nothing from the experience. We are still pursuing the mythic chimera of endless economic ‘progress’; we are still subjecting ourselves, or being subjected to, lives of pointless wage-slavery; we are still pillaging the planet’s natural resources for short-term solutions and private gain. We still have not learned that we are not landlords here on earth. We are not even tenants. We are guests, just passing through. At the time of our leave-taking, wouldn’t it be preferable to know that we had made things a little better, or at least no worse, for all present and all of those to come, rather than just making sure that we took as much of the world’s bounty as we could get for ourselves and our own, and had as a good time as possible while doing so, at the expense of others?

    Maybe I did not feel ‘most alive’ during lockdown, but I do feel ‘most alive’ when writing, and lockdown facilitated me towards that end. Therefore, it was one of the happiest times of my life, and it is little wonder that I harbour residual nostalgia for those halcyon days. In fact, it is tempting to declare: that’s what life should be. In ‘The Choice’ (1933), Yeats tells us ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work.’ In response, Derek Mahon takes issue with this high-flown assertion, in ‘Knut Hamsun in Old Age’ (1980):

    One fortunate in both would have us choose
    “Perfection of the life or of the work.”
    Nonsense, you work best on a full stomach
    As everybody over thirty knows –
    For who, unbreakfasted, will love the lark?
    Prepare your protein-fed epiphanies,
    Your heavenly mansions blazing in the dark.

    So, should I get out more? No, not if going out means writing less – which, in my case, it usually does. ‘No man is an island’ averred John Donne, in a phrase which that mischievous mystic Merton referenced when he took it as the title for one of his finest essay collections. Alas, just as it is not given to everyone to be a monk, not all of us are writers or artists. My only hope garnered from lockdown is that I can retain the writerly momentum I gained during it, now that the world has opened its doors and windows once again, and everything is returning to a not-so-very-new ‘normal’.

    Feature Image: Dublin, April, 2020.

  • Ciarán O’Rourke: Breaking the Cycle

    One Big Union is a self-published collection of essays by Irish poet Ciarán O’Rourke. The essays, many of which have been previously published in such outlets as Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Marxist Review, and indeed, Cassandra Voices herself, are a mix of literary criticism, political theory, and personal writing.

    The book’s introduction locates itself in the burgeoning genre of pandemic writing. Thus he writes:

    Between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021, a period of cascading social and ecological crises, I found myself returning to the work of a number of poets, artists, and political firebrands, with a fresh sense of discovery and gratitude. This miscellany of essays is the result.

    In essence, this book is a polished version of a reading diary, with O’Rourke responding to the artists he was confined with over quarantine. As such, it’s an intensely personal and vulnerable work, even when the directly autobiographical material is minimal. 

    You finish the book with the impression that Percy Bysshe Shelley plays a leading role in O’Rourke’s inner life ; that Irishness is something O’Rourke feels strongly attached to; and that he is passionately devoted to left-wing political ideals, even though he finds the atmosphere of devoted Communist organisations mentally stultifying. 

    This is a lot to know about a relative stranger, and it’s a testament to O’Rourke’s ability as a writer that this distinct, personal voice is present throughout, even in moments when the subject matter veers into academic territory.

    Hole in the Wall Blues

    Perhaps it’s scholarly fatigue, but I must admit I found the moments of personal, autobiographical writing the most compelling parts of the book. 

    In ‘Hole in the Wall Blues’, O’Rourke writes about a topic made timely by the Save the Cobblestone protest – the erosion of Dublin’s cultural geography – in an endearingly personal way.

    The example he uses is the Screen cinema on Townsend street, now a building site for what O’Rourke believes will be a “rental hub”.

    It wasn’t like the Screen cinema was some beautiful location, he argues. No, it was dingy, cheap, and outmoded. But, O’Rourke writes, “just by being there and providing the service it did, this rather run-down space had made the city a home of sorts”. 

    In another essay, ‘Sea Music’, he talks about the strange intimacy that has grown between himself and the other regular bathers at Seapoint. These accounts of his private life made me care about the more abstract essays, helping me, as a reader, trace the thread of emotional necessity behind his discussions of Percy Shelley or Langston Hughes.

    Satisfying Punch

    Although most of these essays are ruminative and introspective, there are a few that pack a satisfying punch. My favourite is ‘Smashing the Mirror’, where O’Rourke excoriates Poetry Ireland’s toothless humility in front of the strong arms of cultural hegemony, exemplified in their partnership with the Dublin office of Facebook for national poetry day in 2017, and their use of a video of Joe Biden giving a merry, public-relations-approved speech about the beauty of Irish poetry for their fundraising campaign in 2019. 

    What does it mean for the institutions of Irish poetry to flatter the centres of power so shamelessly? O’Rourke is excitingly sharp in his rhetorical denouncement:

    The emerald glint in Biden’s eyes, the nostalgic quaver in his voice, is meant to reinforce, for voters at home and lackeys elsewhere, a relation (between lord and vassal, say, or centre and outpost) that each of these circumstances also exemplifies – all under the guise of celebrating Irish poetry. And Poetry Ireland, it seems, is happy to play along: cosying up to power, for the sake of PR, and presumably on the long-term promise of cash.Admission of Bias

    I may be biased when it comes to reviewing this book. In the first year of my English Studies course in Trinity College, Ciarán O’Rourke was working as a teaching assistant while he finished his phD, and I happened to be placed in his Romanticism tutorials. 

    Ciarán was a wonderful teacher, with a gift for generating class discussion. He also had the touch of eccentricity required to deliver a course on Romanticism. At one point he had the whole class stand up and communally recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in early Spring; as if we could hurry the pace of the seasons through the right incantation of the words.

    With that said, I had no idea I was reading my former teacher’s book until after I had read through the collection. From the tone of the writing, and the subjects covered (bathing in Dun Laoghaire, Marxist politics, nineteenth century poets), I had assumed the author was in his fifties or sixties. I imagined a Terry Eagleton type – hip enough to know about Ursula Le Guin, but whose outlook on life has been shaped by figures from a deeper past. Then I looked up some interviews, and, with a jolt, recognised the fresh-faced, tall figure of my Romanticism tutor.

    Critique

    One criticism I have is in relation to the structure of the book. First, it lacks certain features of a professionally published work. There is no publication date. The cover image, by Lewis Hine, is not credited on the back cover, or on one of the first pages, but in the ‘Introduction and Acknowledgements’ section.

    These may seem minor issues, but by failing to follow conventions, it becomes harder to work with, and conveys an attitude of slight carelessness, unbefitting of its important contents.

    My second criticism is of the repetition between essays. As many of the essays were published in different publications, it appears the author was unconcerned at repeating a few key points. When gathered together in a book, however, these repetitions jar on the reader.

    For example, several pieces of information related to Shelley in the essay entitled ‘Shelley’s Revolutionary Year’ are duplicated without development in the title essay ‘One Big Union’, for example. This certainly conveys the extent of Shelley’s psychological importance to the author, but it doesn’t expand on the issue.

    Overall, this is an intriguing collection of essays from a young Irish poet. Those interested in O’Rourke’s poetry will gain insights into his artistic influences, and anyone looking for topical cultural critiques will be well served by some of the later essays in particular. Its main value is as a political statement of purpose for the poet. It also represents an opportunity for those interested to support a promising Irish writer, whose work has been hitherto largely available to readers for free.

    One Big Union is available for purchase through Ciarán O’Rourke’s website, ragpickerpoetry.net

  • Covid-19 in Ireland: Landfall

    In August of last year I wrote an article pointing to the impending consequence of the Irish government’s rolling lockdown policy, ‘The Perfect Storm’[i] gathering on the horizon over the country. By that I meant a significant second wave of Covid-19 – to hit this winter. I made that prediction based on the following factors:

    An elevated number of potential viral hosts, which is a consequence of suppression of natural-immunity.

    Increased life of the virus in the external environment due to decreased daylight

    Raised levels of social anxiety and subsequent susceptibility to illness/infection

    Continued persistence of the virus at low levels within Irish society

    The ‘storm’ made landfall at the start of January, leading to the imposition of an extreme lockdown for the third time – with children denied their constitutional right to an education –  amid renewed fears the hospital system would be overwhelmed, as many elderly in care homes passed away once again.

    Sadly, this ‘third’ wave actually commenced in week 48 of 2020 (22/11/2020), while the country was still under Level 5 Lockdown restrictions, according to a report by the HSPC.[ii]

    Could additional deaths have been averted if the Taoiseach had not sought ‘a meaningful Christmas’; or if NEPHT’s advice had been followed to the letter – permitting house visits rather than opening restaurants and gastropubs[iii] at the start of December? Based on the HSPC report that seems doubtful. And I would question whether most Irish people would have willingly foregone sociability throughout the depths of winter – there was certainly no political clamour to cancel Christmas – having endured near-constant lockdown since March. But you never know.

    Furthermore, without a Christmas spending spree many indigenous retailers and restaurateurs might have been forced out of business – to the unrestrained joy of Jeff Bezos, Tescos and the rest.

    But in Ireland, as ever, we desperately need someone to blame third time round; anyone other than NPHET that has managed to preserve a reputation for scientific insight despite the damage it is doing to the country. So, instead of questioning the government’s response, youngsters – who may have availed of a brief chink of light to socialize – are scapegoated.

    Other than that we find talk of selfish immigrants returning home over Christmas to see loved ones. And now attacks on those who escaped the overwhelming doom and gloom for a post-Christmas break. Yet, whatever one’s thoughts on the sustainability of flying, it is notable that just 1% of cases since the pandemic began have been traced to travel abroad.

    Lockdown Policy

    In the midst of any crisis scientific arguments compete to establish the best way forward. In the case of Covid-19 in Ireland ‘the argument’ has been remarkably one-sided. Discussions in the media are generally over the severity of lockdowns to be employed – this hitherto unheard of public health intervention with enormous collateral damage, which has somehow been normalised.

    From the outset I have been convinced that the Irish government at the prompting of the WHO – along with most other Western governments – adopted an erroneous approach, based on a flawed epidemiological assessment, which led Leo Varadkar to suggest there could be a staggering 85,000 deaths[iv] in Ireland.

    Virtually alone in Europe, the Swedish health authorities (relatively free of political interference) stood apart, refusing to lockdown in March, 2020. I would argue that this softer approach has been to the benefit of the vast majority of people living there – and may even lead to a lower death toll in the end – compared to the trauma of lockdowns experienced by citizens in most other European countries.

    Notably, during the first wave almost 92% of confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in Ireland were among over sixty-five-year-olds,[v] and when this Irish cohort is compared to Sweden’s considerably older population a very different picture emerges; in contrast to the usual truck of ‘deaths per capita’ and ‘deaths per million.’

    Hats off to the impressively organised states of Norway and Finland, where Covid-19 mortality has remained very low indeed, but vigorous track and trace strategy operating in these countries have proved ineffective elsewhere; even Germany is floundering this winter, having been locked down for months.

    Revealingly, in March 2020 the Director-General of the Norwegian Institute for Public Health Camilla Stoltenberg[vi] recommended that her government should keep schools open – as in Sweden – and was advocating last June for a softer approach in the likely event of a second wave.

    Now, as the death toll from Covid-19 in Ireland steadily converges with Sweden’s – especially when adjusted for the relative age of each population – it remains to be seen whether much-vaunted, but still experimental, vaccines will significantly alter the respective death tolls.

    I maintain that a policy of keeping the Irish population under rolling lockdowns until the whole population is vaccinated will have a worse impact on the nation’s long-term health than any mortality or morbidity that may be avoided.

    Zero Covid Utopianism

    The frankly bizarre ‘option’ of Zero Covid-19 that has been grasped by some on the left, and the right, in Ireland is a form of Utopianism. It ignores the virtual impossibility of eradicating an aerosol, sub-microscopic pathogen such as Covid-19 from Ireland. Moreover, we remain one of the most globalized societies in the world with over half-a-million foreign born resident in the country[vii] and an Irish-born diaspora of three million;[viii] rely on international trade for most commodities; besides having a porous border to the North.

    Moreover, New Zealand and Australia are currently enjoying summer, when respiratory viruses retreat. This seasonal effect is enhanced by a depleted ozone layer over the Southern Hemisphere – causing the world’s highest rate of skin cancers[ix] – which elevates the level of UV light that destroys viruses. Both countries are also insulated from the rest of the world by vast oceans and an uninhabited landmass. Even still, outbreaks occurred in New Zealand and Melbourne last winter, prompting draconian responses.

    Notably, however, the maximum number of cases that Melbourne – with a population almost the size of Ireland’s – experienced in a single day was just seven hundred, and it required an extreme 112-day lockdown[x] – and/or the arrival of spring before an apparent elimination. In contrast, case numbers in Ireland have exceeded eight thousand in a single day.

    Covid-19: Southern Dreaming

    A Zero-Covid approach assumes the island of Ireland is sealed hermetically. Good luck with telling the DUP that they have to follow the rules of the South! And ‘success’ would presumably give way to a permanent state of siege against the viral dangers posed by the outside world.

    At this point even New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has had enough, acknowledging the long-term impossibility of pursuing Zero Covid she recently said: ‘Our goal has to be though, to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally, with the flu. It won’t be a disease that we will see simply disappear after one round of vaccine.’[xi]

    Comparing Ireland to East Asian countries may also be inappropriate as, Wuhan apart, no single country in that region has experienced a significant outbreak. Notably, Japan, which has avoided locking down throughout the crisis experienced forty times as many flu and pneumonia deaths during that period. This suggests other factors – East Asia has been the geographic origin of several modern coronavirus epidemics – may be inhibiting the spread of Covid-19 there.[xii]

    Yet this message has not trickled either left or downwards into popular opinion as the Irish Times continues to print articles in support of ‘the plan’.[xiii]

    ‘Zero Covid’ is as much a vote-winner, as a zero tolerance for crime or any other virtuous objective, but it’s political claptrap from an taxidermized left and a neoconservative right, furnished by scientists that seemingly have no conception of biological realities.

    Reality Bites

    The success of any institution might be summed up by the notion that it is only as good as its ability to predict the future. Throughout human history we have had two powerful methods of prediction: science and religion. If not religion, we might define this in terms of ‘faith,’ or an ‘unscientific’ belief system of some kind or other.

    If the Romans, the Egyptians, the Spartans, or the Native Americans, had done a ‘better’ job predicting the future, the world would be a different place. Thus, the success or persistence of any individual, nation, or civilisation, is based on an ability to reliably predict the future. Our faith in science is strengthened solely by this condition, and undermined when predictions go awry.

    Galileo Galilei, 1636 portrait by Justus Sustermans.

    Galileo’s prognostications in respect of the Earth and the Sun led him into conflict with the dominant powers of his day. The accuracy of his predictions disturbed the established cosmic order, as any heresy does. The predictions of Einstein had a similar effect on Newtonian Physics, and now Quantum Mechanics has become the sacred cow. Final judgements on the success or otherwise of policies are, of course, made through the prism of hindsight.

    Two Schools of Thought

    At present around the world there are two broad scientific schools[xiv] of thought in respect of how to respond to Covid-19. On one side there is a dominant view: that we are in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, where humanity is dealing with a virus that will kill, and perhaps permanently incapacitate, many millions more than it has already done; and that the correct response for any government should be to impose a lockdown and mandate masks until the ‘scientific cavalry’ arrive, carrying their novel genetic vaccinations as shields to save the day.

    On the other side there are the conspiracy theorists, Covid-deniers, and a minority of scientists who consider most most masks in use to be ineffective, and who argue that restrictions and lockdowns cause more harm than good. These scientists have advocated protecting the vulnerable and permitting an equilibrium of natural immunity to emerge within the non-vulnerable majority as the least harmful way forward.

    The question for ordinary people and politicians, then, is where does the truth lie? Or, more accurately, who is correctly predicting the future?

    When the dust settles in a few years, perhaps we’ll see that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. An appreciation of a middle way, or synthesis, is evident in Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell’s acknowledgement in June that mistakes were made in the first wave.[xv]  Such concessions to human fallibility seem to be the preserve of Scandinavian leaders. This may explain why increased restrictions have been introduced in Sweden during their second wave, though its government has refrained from imposing a lockdown, and the emphasis is still on personal responsibility.

    By the start of February, without a lockdown, Sweden appears to be sitting pretty with the death toll falling precipitously during the month of January, suggesting a herd immunity threshold may have been reached.

    [An earlier version of this article read: “surveys indicate that at least forty percent of the [Swedish] population now have antibodies to the virus,[xvi]” We have sought corroboration from Sebastian Rushworth MD @sebrushworth, having been advised that this claim is unreliable]

    Likewise, there are positive signs that India has now reached a herd immunity threshold,[xviii] without recourse to vaccines.

    Benefit of Hindsight

    Last April I resigned my position on the Irish Medical Council to the shock of family, friends and former colleagues. I did so because I believed a catastrophe was immanent, and that hundreds of nursing home residents would die as a consequence of political ineptitude and mass hysteria. As it transpired, 62% of deaths in Ireland occurred in this setting during the first wave of the pandemic, the second highest proportion in the world.[xix]

    I take no comfort that my fears were realised, and have since also resigned as a contracted employee of the HSE. I could no longer, in good conscience, enforce guidelines upon staff and patients I do not consider either efficacious or ethical.

    I would argue that a failure to conduct a proper inquiry into the decision-making that led to this carnage has led to avoidable mortality in this second wave in the care home setting. Any enquiry would surely have highlighted the inadequacy of safety protocols in these settings, and the absence of real expertise on NPHET.

    Before my small Covid-19 rebellion, in March 2020, I circulated a paper on the response to Covid called The Mismanagement of Covid-19 in Ireland. Its premise was (and remains) quite simple: that Covid-19 is a viral illness with a mortality confined to a relatively small and manageable subset of our population.[xx]

    I argued that Ireland’s gross demographic – the youngest population in Europe – is (and was) the key to navigating a safe path through the crisis. With a relatively low population of over sixty-fives – approximately 650,000 – this amounted to a manageable population of those truly vulnerable.

    I also noted how, unlike during influenza pandemics of the past, children and young adults were not dying of this disease, and that the vast majority of adults without serious underlying conditions were also relatively (if not entirely) immune to significant consequence.

    Long Covid

    A current cause for concern with Covid-19, which may be deterring our governments from permitting younger people from resuming their lives is so-called ‘Long Covid,’ or Covid ‘Long Haulers’ as this is referred to in the U.S..

    This is a condition that appears to fit within the category of a post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue;[xxi] which is ‘a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection. It can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.’

    In October one of the leading advocates for Long Covid patients, and a firm advocate of draconian policies, Oxford University’s Professor Trish Greenhalgh clarified that Long Covid is only very rarely a long-term affliction:

    The reviews we’ve done seem to suggest that whilst a tiny minority of people, perhaps one per cent of everyone who gets Covid-19, are still ill six months later, and whilst about a third of people aren’t better at three weeks, most people whose condition drags on are going to get better, slowly but steadily, between three weeks and three months.[xxii]

    But a paper from 2017 gives an idea of the pre-existing scale of chronic and post-viral fatigue syndrome in the U.K.:

    Fatigue is a symptom of a number of diseases—anaemia, depression, chronic infection, cancer, autoimmune disorders and thyroid disorders among them. But no apparent cause can be found for a state of extreme and disabling exhaustion that has acquired a number of names, the most generally accepted worldwide being chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). In the UK, where it is (often incorrectly) known as ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), 150 000 people are said to be affected. Other terms used for the condition are postviral fatigue syndrome (PVFS) and chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS).[xxiii]

    So, we can conclude that Long Covid is hardly a new phenomenon, and while the pandemic is likely to create an additional burden on health services, the extent of the problem needs to be put in context: perhaps one percent of sufferers are still ill after six months.

    Moreover, the impact of Covid-19 is significant heightened by environmental factors such as air quality[xxiv] and poor nutrition. I would argue, therefore, that the threat of Long Covid is insufficient grounds for closing universities and denying young people the chance of a social life beyond walking the block.

    Indeed, the obesity pandemic that leads to a wide range of morbidities is a far greater challenge to this nation’s health, and a crucial indicator of an individual’s risk of severe case of Covid-19 .[xxv] Yet there has been no serious attempt since the Covid-19 pandemic began to address how Ireland fails to adopt international best practice for addressing obesity.[xxvi]

    Seasonality

    In my March paper I also observed that Covid-19 is a member of the coronavirus family responsible for many common colds,[xxvii] and that such viruses are seasonal, in that they are eliminated especially by increasing UV light (and the population’s tendency to retreat indoors). These were hardly earth-shattering revelations, and have been noted by many other doctors and scientists around the globe.

    I also compared the population of over sixty-five-year-olds in Ireland, to the equivalent cohort in the U.K., noting there are roughly twenty-times the number of over sixty-five in the UK (while the overall population is less than ten times that number); so I assumed U.K. mortality would be in the region of twenty times that of Ireland’s.

    In this respect, Ireland has performed significantly better than the U.K., but other factors such as population density and an elevated risk of severe disease among BAME groups[xxviii], may account for the  higher relative death toll there. It should also be emphasised that the U.K. has almost the highest rate of mortality in the world.

    ICU Capacity at the beginning of the pandemic.

    Like many other doctors and scientists, I argued that in the absence of a proven cure or vaccine at that time for Covid-19, humanity is (or was) very much operating at the whim of nature. Thus, without a cure we were (and to a certain extent still are) subjected to natural forces, as I assumed this virus would spread widely through the population. All we could do, then, was ‘flatten the curve,’ protect the vulnerable, and await a safe vaccine.

    At the outset of the crisis that was the mantra behind which the public united. Flattening the curve would reduce the rate at which the vulnerable would present for treatments in hospitals. This would protect the system form being overwhelmed, bringing an increased chance of survival for those badly afflicted.

    ‘Protect the NHS’ from collapse was a similar cry across the water. That made sense at the outset of the crisis. The reiteration of these ‘priorities’ might now illicit a yawn, as our national health authorities did not use the flattened time and space to increase ICU capacity substantially, which brings the ‘necessity’ of recurring lockdowns.

    Hysteria

    Since March of last year events have taken a strange turn. With fear and hysteria at the helm politicians lost their nerves. The mantra shifted from ‘flatten the curve’, to ‘protect everyone from this deadly disease,’ despite it becoming clear that the infection fatality rate (IFR) is considerably lower than the 0.9% assumed initially. Now a paper on the WHO website states that the infection fatality rate for the disease is less than 0.2% ‘in most locations.’[xxix]

    Perversely, children have become the focus of inordinate efforts; locked indoors, locked out of school and forced into wearing masks. We have insisted upon protecting them from a disease that has not caused a single child death in Ireland throughout the entire crisis.[xxx]

    Troublingly, when Covid-19 panic gripped the nation, politicians and mainstream media listened only to the scientific ‘authorities’ that fed the hysteria and justified everything from political incompetence to profligate expenditure. Hospitals were emptied in preparation for an approaching ‘tsunami’ of illness, as tens of thousands of deaths were incorrectly predicted by politicians and esteemed professors, all of whom continue to profess, and have even grown in esteem.

    Covid patients were dumped from hospitals into Nursing Homes, and tests were withheld from residents lest they run short for the healthy-hysterical. The vulnerable were not only abandoned, but too many of them were crushed in the stampede.

    Thus, there is the shocking case of a resident in a Meath care home discovered to have had a maggot-infested a wound.[xxxi] What began as a campaign to protect the vulnerable, had turned into nothing short of a manslaughter machine.

    At the End of the Day

    The natural endpoint for viral infection in respect of many viral pathogens is of course ‘herd immunity.’ This is the point where a sufficient proportion of a population have been exposed to and develop full or partial immunity to a particular pathogen, such that its rate of reproduction is below 1 most of the time.

    With insufficient hosts, a virus can no longer spread easily. This is not full elimination but an endemic equilibrium within the population, with a certain annual death toll tolerated – such as is the case with influenza, which kills up to a thousand people a year in Ireland, despite the availability of a vaccine.

    This natural evolution, or pathogenesis, is also helped along by the seasonal shift from spring to summer. Increasing daylight reduces the level of viral particles, and people spend more time out of doors, or ventilate their living spaces in warmer conditions. This is how nature brings an end to seasonal colds and flus. Yet curiously this basic piece of natural science was largely ignored in March. Talk of UV light became highly politicised and thence poisoned.

    The Swedes

    Sweden provided a template for a country acting within the bounds of common sense and science. From the outset health authorities there endeavoured to protect a vulnerable aged cohort, leading to a natural-immunity developing within the population. In permitting this to occur they also took the precaution of doubling ICU capacity[xxxii] which, like Ireland’s, had been among the lowest in Europe when the pandemic began.

    Comparison between Sweden and Ireland cannot be made on a like-for-like basis, any more than the Irish can be compared to any other national group; however, some relevant comparisons can be drawn in respect of population demographics.

    Sweden has twice Ireland’s population, but 3.2 times the number of over sixty-five-years-olds. Ireland has not quite experienced just over a third of Sweden’s mortality (11,815 v 3,418); but while Ireland’s death rate from Covid-19 has been steadily increasing over the month of January, Sweden’s has flattened to point where, according to the WHO, Sweden’s death toll has been in single figures since the start of February, while Ireland has been experiencing daily deaths over one hundred.

    Source: WHO

    There may be a further uptick in Covid deaths in Sweden once schools reopen – and even a third wave – but the hopeful signs are that the country is now reaching a herd immunity threshold – one that has brought less suffering overall when compared to other jurisdictions.

    A similar comparison can be drawn between Sweden and most other European states, implying, in most situations, that mortality is not significantly reduced by lockdown policies. Yet invariably whenever one reads about Sweden in mainstream Irish media[xxxiii] comparisons are only drawn with best-in-class Scandinavian neighbours, where lockdowns have also been, for the most part, avoided.

    Lockdowns are likely to increase mortality through missed cancer screenings, dysfunctional health services, serious mental health impacts, besides the ‘shadow-pandemic’ of domestic violence that has occurred under lockdown.

    The writing on the wall?

    What of the good people on the opposite side of the Swedish argument? It is fair to say that lockdowns can flatten the curve. This is apparent if we compare mortality graphs on the Euromomo website that tracks excess deaths across Europe. It shows that Sweden did not see the same kind of spike on their graph of mortality during the first wave as in other countries that locked down, but experienced a steady decline, which in July led the New York Times to state prematurely that ‘Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale’[xxxiv]

    Source: Euromomo.

    The question is whether the short-term benefits of lockdowns in terms of averted-deaths are worth the cost? Or, were lockdowns necessary, and will they ultimately translate into lives being saved rather than simply deferring deaths? Perhaps the truth lies in the middle of these arguments but I know which side I lean.

    Lockdowns do not prevent deaths, but slow the rate of infection and mortality. They can only ease the burden on hospital or tertiary care services. The purpose of lockdown should be to insure that the sick can access the best treatment available, and should not be ‘a primary means of controlling the virus’[xxxv] according to leading authorities in the WHO, as we are experiencing in Ireland.

    Although the mortality figures in Ireland still lag behind Sweden’s I suspect this is deferred mortality and does not represent patients who have been cured or saved. The curve has been flattened. Thus far, lockdown policies have had the beneficial effect of decreasing mortality by less than 20% compared to Sweden’s when adjusted for our respective age profiles. In my view, however, what may simply be deferred mortality, cannot justify the burden of lockdowns on the wider population.

    Only when the crisis has passed, and with the benefit of hindsight, will it be possible to determine if the Swedes broadly got things right. Although, it is more appropriate in the context of a disease that has killed thousands of people – and caused suffering to most of the rest of the population – to state that some countries will have managed it better than others. For sure, no one will have got everything ‘right’.

    Assuming vaccines do not represent a panacea, if it transpires that most Irish mortality is confined to the nursing home sector, and that all lockdowns accomplish is to preserve a larger number of potential hosts for successive seasonal resurgences then the pandemic will have been a more painful and long-running saga in Ireland than it might otherwise have been.

    [i] Marcus de Brun, ‘The Perfect Storm’, Cassandra Voices, August 19th, 2020, https://cassandravoices.com/science-environment/covid-19-the-perfect-storm/

    [ii] Epidemiology of COVID-19Outbreaks/Clustersin IrelandWeekly Report Prepared by HPSC on25thJanuary 2021, https://www.hpsc.ie/a-z/respiratory/coronavirus/novelcoronavirus/surveillance/covid-19outbreaksclustersinireland/COVID-19%20Weekly%20Outbreak%20Report_Week032021_25012021_WebVersion_final.pdf

    [iii] Digital Desk Staff, ‘Opening hospitality will mean limiting Christmas gatherings, Nphet warns’, November 26th, 2020, Extra.ie, https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/nphet-strongly-opposed-to-parts-of-governments-lockdown-exit-plan-1042387.html

    [iv] ‘Up to 85,000 Irish people could die from coronavirus in worst-case scenario, Taoiseach indicates, as three more diagnosed’ John Downing, Eilish O’Regan and Gabija Gataveckaite, Irish Independent, March 9th, 2020, https://www.independent.ie/world-news/coronavirus/up-to-85000-irish-people-could-die-from-coronavirus-in-worst-case-scenario-taoiseach-indicates-as-three-more-diagnosed-39029363.html

    [v] COVID-19 Deaths and Cases, Central Statistics Office, https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/br/b-cdc/covid-19deathsandcases/

    [vi] ‘Norwegian health chief: we advised against closing schools’, 10 June, 2020, Unherd, https://unherd.com/thepost/norwegian-health-chief-we-advised-against-closing-schools/

    [vii] ‘Census of Population 2016 – Profile 7 Migration and Diversity’, https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp7md/p7md/p7anii/

    [viii] Ciara Kenny, ‘ The global Irish: Where do they live?’, February 4th, 2015, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/generation-emigration/the-global-irish-where-do-they-live-1.2089347?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Flife-and-style%2Fgeneration-emigration%2Fthe-global-irish-where-do-they-live-1.2089347

    [ix] American Institute of Cancer Research, Skin cancer statistics, https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/skin-cancer-statistics

    [x] Phil Mercer, ‘Covid: Melbourne’s hard-won success after a marathon lockdown’, 26th of October, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54654646

    [xi] Luke Malpass, ‘Jacinda Ardern declares 2021 ‘the year of the vaccine’’, January 21st, 2021, Stuff, https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/124012148/jacinda-ardern-declares-2021-the-year-of-the-vaccine

    [xii] Ramesh Thakur, ‘The West should envy Japan’s COVID-19 response’ January 10th, 2021, Japan Times,  https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/01/10/commentary/japan-commentary/west-japan-coronavirus-response/

    [xiii] Gabriel Scally: It is essential Ireland tightens borders in fight against Covid-19, January 30th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/gabriel-scally-it-is-essential-ireland-tightens-borders-in-fight-against-covid-19-1.4471283

    [xiv] Sarah Bosley, ‘Covid UK: scientists at loggerheads over approach to new restrictions’, September 22nd, 2020, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/22/scientists-disagree-over-targeted-versus-nationwide-measures-to-tackle-covid

    [xv] Rafaela Lindeberg, ‘Man Behind Sweden’s Controversial Virus Strategy Admits Mistakes’, Bloomberg, June 3rd, 2020,  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/man-behind-sweden-s-virus-strategy-says-he-got-some-things-wrong

    [xvi] Sebastian Rushworth M.D., ‘Here’s a graph they don’t want you to see’, 25th of January, 2021, https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/01/25/heres-a-graph-they-dont-want-you-to-see/

    [xvii] Sheena Cruickshank  ‘A new study suggests coronavirus antibodies fade over time – but how concerned should we be?’ October 27th, 2020, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-suggests-coronavirus-antibodies-fade-over-time-but-how-concerned-should-we-be-148957

    [xviii] Amy Kazmin, ‘India’s tumbling Covid cases raises question: Is the pandemic burning itself out?’ February 1st, 2021, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/india-s-tumbling-covid-cases-raises-question-is-the-pandemic-burning-itself-out-1.4472406?mode=amp

    [xix] Fergal Bowers, ‘High percentage of virus deaths in Ireland’s care homes highlighted in comparison report

    [xx] Mismanagement of Covid in Ireland’ May 27th, RTE, https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0527/1143036-covid-deaths-ireland/

    [xxi] ‘What to know about post-viral syndrome’ Medical News Today, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326619

    [xxii] Jennifer Rigby, ‘Why long Covid can be really grim, but is rarer than you think’, October 3rd, 2020 The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/long-covid-can-really-grim-rarer-think/

    [xxiii] Postviral Fatigue Syndrome, Science Direct, https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/postviral-fatigue-syndrome

    [xxiv] Matt Cole et al, ‘Air pollution exposure linked to higher COVID-19 cases and deaths – new study’, July 13th, 2020, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-exposure-linked-to-higher-covid-19-cases-and-deaths-new-study-141620

    [xxv] Meredith Wadman, ‘Why COVID-19 is more deadly in people with obesity—even if they’re young’, September 8th, 2020, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/why-covid-19-more-deadly-people-obesity-even-if-theyre-young

    [xxvi] Shauna Bowers, ‘Irish policies to tackle obesity ‘fall behind international best practice’ – report’, November 9th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/irish-policies-to-tackle-obesity-fall-behind-international-best-practice-report-1.4403921?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth%2Firish-policies-to-tackle-obesity-fall-behind-international-best-practice-report-1.4403921

    [xxvii] Anthony King, ‘Coronavirus family now a prime suspect in previous pandemics,’ February 4th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/coronavirus-family-now-a-prime-suspect-in-previous-pandemics-1.4463053

    [xxviii] Tom Kirby, ‘Evidence mounts on the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on ethnic minorities’, The Lancet, May 8th, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30228-9/fulltext

    [xxix] Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data

    John P A Ioannidis, WHO, September 13th, 2020, https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/99/1/20-265892/en/

    [xxx] (According to the CSO there have been 20,402 confirmed cases of Covid amongst the age group 0-24yrs, during the period from Feb 2020 to December 2020 and not a single recorded death in Ireland. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/br/b-cdc/covid-19deathsandcasesseries18/

    [xxxi] Simon Carswell, ‘Widow ‘outraged’ by footage of husband’s facial wound’, August 26th, 2020, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/widow-outraged-by-footage-of-husband-s-facial-wound-1.4338831?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth%2Fwidow-outraged-by-footage-of-husband-s-facial-wound-1.4338831

    [xxxii] Emma Lofgren, ‘’The biggest challenge of our time’: How Sweden doubled intensive care capacity amid Covid-19 pandemic’, June 23rd, 2020, The Local, https://www.thelocal.com/20200623/how-sweden-doubled-intensive-care-capacity-to-treat-coronavirus-patients

    [xxxiii] Suzanne Cahill, ‘Coronavirus lockdowns are still a step too far for Sweden’, February 3rd, 2021, Irish Times,  https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/coronavirus-lockdowns-are-still-a-step-too-far-for-sweden-1.4473119?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fcoronavirus-lockdowns-are-still-a-step-too-far-for-sweden-1.4473119

    [xxxiv] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html

    [xxxv] Michelle Doyle, ‘WHO doctor says lockdowns should not be main coronavirus defence’, October 12th, 2020, ABC, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/world-health-organization-coronavirus-lockdown-advice/12753688

  • Looking Back on Lockdown

    With lockdown actively under consideration in some European states once again, including Ireland, we look back on a selection of testimonies from a period many of us thought we had put behind us.

    It all happened too fast, so quickly that we didn’t have time to fully understand. The night before we were sipping beer and eating tapas and waiting for spring to come in the warm evening breeze; the following day we were on the sofa consulting the Netflix schedule for the umpteenth time, without finding an entirely satisfactory choice.

    Diego Pugliese, ‘Barcelona Under Lockdown’, April 3rd, 2020.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Our bodies, already weakened by sedentary lifestyles, are becoming weaker, muscle-mass decreasing quickly through lack of exercise. We do what we can, setting up home gyms, doing yoga in our bedrooms, a few push ups in the morning. No running, swimming, no going for walks; hardly breathing in the fresh air, panting, moving, or sweating. I do a little gardening in pots on the balcony, which I hadn’t done before. All of a sudden tomato seeds seemed the most important item on my shopping list during my weekly, stressful visit to the supermarket.

    Silvia Panizza, ‘Under Lockdown in Piedmont’, April 6th, 2020.

    We can have a gnawing sense that our civilisation got things wrong, that it is being, somehow, punished. A year ago I heard a retreat-giver say that we had lost the ability to read the signs of the times. We had belonged, or thought we belonged, on a planet that although under threat, and although subject to disaster more or less randomly distributed, was broadly on a path of progress, of improvement, even for under-developed regions. Nature mostly provided balance and harmony.

    Modern science reinforces this optimism at the cosmic level. We now know that the total universe that includes our Milky Way as one of nearly a hundred million galaxies has been expanding since the Big Bang. But if the rate of its expansion had been even a millionth of a percent slower, the whole thing would have collapsed, imploded in upon itself. There was fine tuning. Now trust is at issue with a particularly severe jolt for the Western world. It could be said that most of our strategies of coping are in the nature of distraction. To the extent this is so, the underlying unease remains. Call it dis-ease in fact.

    Fergus Armstrong, ‘A Voice from the Cocoon’, April 17th, 2020.

    Image (c) Felipe Monteiro

    What I, other immigrants, and the Portuguese hope is that we can return to the life we had before, and be able to leave this prison, without bars, that our homes have become. While we try to renew ourselves, the city is still and visibly lacking the energy and joy of the local population.

    What is most intriguing in this situation, at least for me, is that we are trying to reinvent ourselves. For example, I have started to cook a lot more during these days of confinement, learning new recipes, in addition to adapting the house for new activities we never used to do at home, like dancing and exercising.

    Despite everything I believe that together we will overcome this difficulty, which is happening on a a global scale; staying at home admiring the birds and their songs that echo along with an inaudible cry for freedom from the citizens.

    Felipe Monteiro, ‘Porto Under Lockdown’ April 17th, 2020

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    I had booked a hotel – but ended up alongside five families living in a large apartment for seven days. Only two of us were allowed outside to buy food – everyone else had to stay inside. Before leaving we were covered head-to-toe, in gloves, face masks and head coverings. On our return we went through elaborate cleaning procedures before re-entering the apartment. We had to remove our ‘outside’ clothing and spray everything with 75% alcohol.

    No cars with registrations from outside the capital city were allowed in. The schools were on holiday and due to return the first week in March but are still closed all over China. Only students doing important exams at the end of term will be allowed to return initially, which hasn’t happened yet.

    Leaving Beijing, I returned to my home city of ****. You are supposed to scan your phone so they can track potential carriers arriving into the city – which I hadn’t, having used a private firm for the airport collection. This meant my car registration didn’t show up on the cameras. So the next day the authorities were in touch to find out how I made it back from the airport.

    Tobias Easterby, ‘China Under Lockdown: Another Cultural Revolution?’ April 19th, 2020

    Illustration by Malina Molenda/Artsyfartsy for Cassandra Voices

    What if I had to take care of my little ones? While my mom goes outside to try and bring a little money in. What if she loses her job because of the pandemic? Then our only source of sustenance would be gone. Then we would be relying on the government even more than what we were doing before. What do you call that? Resting on the government? Relaxing on the government? Maybe even sleeping on the government because of the sheer amount of people whose lives were turned upside down because of it. As if living life sideways was any easier.

    Elizabeth Ekinwande, ‘Leaving Certificate Under Lockdown’, April 19th, 2020.

    The Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic is a sign of underlying differences in how they understand morality in the public sphere, and how they relate with each other: this comes from a more utilitarian perspective.

    Utilitarianism has earned a bad reputations as it has been incorrectly conflated with crude capitalism, when it is really about taking peoples’ wellbeing seriously, or ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ As Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills understood it, utilitarianism is extremely equalitarian .

    Notably, the Swedish government has taken the advice of moral philosophers who come from a moral utilitarian perspective. The core difference between their approach and what we are seeing for the most part elsewhere is they attempt to avoid an understandable reaction to save lives immediately. They put aside an emotional response and consider the future consequences.

    William Smith, ‘Covid-19: ‘A View from Sweden’, April 25th, 2020.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Across the hall, the atmosphere is suddenly lifted by the wit and humour of a ninety-odd year-old who has somehow escaped the dementia and delirium that pervades here. Unlike his fellow residents, this is a man who never wears his breakfast and is more recognisable to me in crisp shirt and tie, top button fastened. When we first met some months ago I doubted his cognition on hearing him shouting instructions to ‘Alexa’ across the room, but it turns out that I was the one that was out of touch. I look at his records – not for resuscitation, not for transfer. Despite his joviality, the oxygen levels already look poor. Given that it is still early on in the course of his infection, it is only a matter of time before he will crash and be gone.

    As the nation scrambled to prepare itself for the deluge of demand on ventilators, this was the kind of man who was never to have been deemed eligible. Yet in spite of the full newspaper spread photos of busy intensive care units, I know there is room for him, and that he has the will to live. Despite his age, were he to defy the admittedly poor odds, he has a quality of life to return to. We embark on the conversation that echoes a distant role-play from medical training which treads gently but directly on taboo. How is it you wish to die, and what interventions might be acceptable or worthwhile to try to prevent that?

    Anonymous Doctor, ‘Diary of a Pandemic Doctor: Nursing Home Chaos’, April 26th, 2020.

    Fear plays a major role in influencing the decisions we make and the actions we engage in. Research has shown that there are sound evolutionary reasons for this. The selection pressures from these types of danger have resulted in domain-specificity in the reactivity of the fear system, meaning that the system has evolved special sensitivity toward such dangers. However, ‘not all human fears are instinctual and hardwired—we need to learn what to be afraid of.’ [i] While this capacity is critical in helping humans deal with the different environments in which they find themselves and which present different sources of ‘danger’, it can also be abused by those seeking to advance their own interests at our expense.

    Justin Frewen, ‘Fear and Loathing in the time of Covid-19’, May 14th, 2020

    Image (c) Conor Blennerhassett

    The resorts of Magaluf, Palmanova and Santa Ponça on the southwest coast of Mallorca are among the island’s most popular destinations. By May, they are usually heaving with a mix of young families, pensioners and stag and hen parties – all availing of cheaper low season prices and temperatures in the high 20s and even low 30s.

    Conor Blennerhassett, Photo Essay: Mallorca After the Pandemic, May 26th, 2020

  • Covid-19: A Simple Moral Calculus

    Introduction

    There are still many unresolved questions regarding the pathogenesis of this disease and especially the reasons underlying the extremely different clinical course, ranging from asymptomatic forms to severe manifestations, including the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). SARS-CoV-2 showed phylogenetic similarities to both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV viruses, and some of the clinical features are shared between COVID-19 and previously identified beta-coronavirus infections. Available evidence indicate[s] that the so called “cytokine storm” an uncontrolled over-production of soluble markers of inflammation which, in turn, sustain an aberrant systemic inflammatory response, is a major [factor] responsible for the occurrence of ARDS.
    Francesca Coperchinia, Luca Chiovatoab, Laura Croceab, Flavia Magriab, Mario Rotondi, ‘The cytokine storm in COVID-19: ‘An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system’ (2020)[i]

    For the first time in the post-war history of epidemics, there is a reversal of which countries are most heavily affected by a disease pandemic. By early May, 2020, more than 90% of all reported deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been in the world’s richest countries; if China, Brazil, and Iran are included in this group, then that number rises to 96%.
    Richard Cash and Vikram Patel, ‘Has COVID-19 subverted global health?’ (2020)[ii]

    The evidence of Hitler’s as well as Stalin’s dictatorship points clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the top of the whole structure.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

    All this hate and violence [in the world] is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.[iii]
    Sacha Baron Cohen, speech, (2019)

    Comment is free, but facts are sacred.[iv]
    John Scott, editor of The Guardian, (1921)

    In March, 2020 a simple moral calculus seized Western consciousness. Prompted by grim epidemiological assessments, and distressing accounts from emergency doctors in Northern Italy, a call to #flattenthecurve resounded across social media. The global force of hashtag activism led millions to renounce meeting friends and family in an extraordinary display of solidarity with vulnerable older people.

    Twitter, which had previously styled itself ‘the free speech-wing of the free-speech party’[v], allowing all manner of unmoderated content to appear on controversial subjects such as climate change – as well as hate speech from President Donald Trump – abruptly changed policy on March 16th saying it would be:

    Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. Rather than reports, we will enforce this in close coordination with trusted partners, including public health authorities and governments, and continue to use and consult with information from those sources when reviewing content.[vi]

    Problematically, however, there is no canonical response to the global pandemic and significant debate has occurred between authoritative sources, as different governments pursue varied policies, with mixed results. This has created potential for national authorities to impugn or disqualify reasonable criticism by grafting health warnings on accounts at variance with a particular government’s guidance, or wider political objectives.

    Twitter has not acted alone, Google has taken unprecedented steps to erase material that violates ‘Community Guidelines’: ‘including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.’[vii]

    Typically, Facebook adopted a laissez faire approach, although users who had read, watched or shared ‘false’ coronavirus content received a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation’s website.[viii]

    Whatever one’s view on the importance of social distancing, our readers may recall Ronald Dworkin’s pronouncement that ‘free speech is a condition of legitimate government.’ He argues that the universality of speech as a mode of rational discourse and scientific inquiry could act as truth-seeking counterweight to mass hysteria, negating unreason and prejudice.[ix]

    Moreover, Stephen Sedley, the great English judge, called freedom of expression ‘the lifeblood of democracy;[x] or as George Orwell put it in the introduction to Animal Farm (1945): ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

    Accepting Covid-19 represents an extraordinary challenge requiring a concerted response, censorship by Big Data in such a blanket form, including of recognised academic authorities, surely only lends credence to conspiracy theories, fomented by the far-right in particular. Disregard for freedom of expression casts doubt over the integrity of scientific inquiry and inhibits rational debate.

    Reappraisal

    The English-speaking world was led to believe in early March that Covid-19 had a mortality rate of between 2% and 3% [xi], and that its spread would be exponential, with a reproductive (R) value of 3 (i.e. one person would infect another three), compared to an R value of 1.28 for seasonal influenza.[xii] Moreover, based on Lombardy’s experience, it seemed the death toll would include hundreds or even thousands of health service workers tending to the sick.

    As the weeks passed the assessment of the mortality rate was scaled back to 1.4%,[xiii] but by then the virus seemed to be moving through Europe like a forest fire at the height of summer. Soon the number of daily mortalities from the disease was dominating news headlines.

    Insofar as possible, most reasonable citizens abided by the popular injunction to #staythefuckathome, entrusting governments with emergency powers to guard against errant behaviour.

    As time passed, however, we learnt that early projections on the infection fatality rate seem to have been significantly wide of the mark. Lone Simonsen professor of population health sciences at Roskilde University in Denmark recently said she expected a infection fatality rate ‘possibly as low as 0.2% or 0.3%’, while Professor Emeritus at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Professor Johan Giesecke has suggested an even lower figure of 0.1%.[xiv] The U.S. Centre for Disease Control’s best estimate implies a COVID-19 infection fatality rate below 0.3%.[xv]

    Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford has gone lower still estimating an infection fatality rate of between 0.1% and 0.01%.[xvi] She bases this on an assumption the virus has been in circulation far longer than initially assumed, an argument gaining traction, with satellite data suggesting the pandemic hit Wuhan in China a far back as October,[xvii] while France’s ‘first known case’ was in December.[xviii] In truth, however, the infection fatality rate appears to depend hugely on the nature of any society, and not simply its age profile, for reasons to be discussed.

    An aggravated perception of danger is also likely to have occurred through media reports juxtaposing confirmed cases, with mortalities. Thus The Guardian reported on May 16th that, ‘According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker there are 4,531,811 confirmed cases worldwide. The number of people who have lost their lives is 307,001 according to official tolls, but the true number is likely to be much higher.’[xix]

    On a cursory examination, one might assume a infection fatality rate of 6-7%, or “much higher”. Little wonder then that people have been jumping out of the way of one another on footpaths.

    This infection fatality rate may well prove to be considerably higher than a seasonal flu mortality rate of 0.04%, but it is instructive that during one such outbreak in 2017-2018 that there were 61,000 influenza-associated deaths in the United States alone.[xx] Yet these preventable deaths hardly registered on the national consciousness, unlike like the victims of Covid-19.

    As Simon Jenkins, one of the few Guardian commentators who has kept the pandemic in perspective put it: ‘When hysteria is rife, we might try some history.’[xxi]

    Epidemiological Modelling

    Based on a infection fatality rate of 0.9%, in late March an Imperial College team led by Professor Neil Ferguson predicted that unless stern measures were taken there would be half-a-million deaths in the U.K. and over two million in the U.S.:[xxii]

    But as early as March Nobel-prize winning bio-physicist Michael Levitt was identifying common sense flaws in prominent epidemiological modelling, saying:

    In exponential growth models, you assume that new people can be infected every day, because you keep meeting new people. But, if you consider your own social circle, you basically meet the same people every day …. You can meet new people on public transportation, for example; but even on the bus, after sometime most passengers will either be infected or immune.[xxiii]

    Levitt assumed the R rate would decline once reasonable steps were taken, such as social distancing and removing the possibility of close confinement in pubs, at sporting events and other so-called ‘super-spreader’ events. [xxiv] In March Levitt told Ferguson that he had over-estimated the potential death toll by ‘10 or 12 times.’[xxv]

    Moreover, given only one branch seems to have closed its doors over the course of the outbreak in the U.K.,[xxvi] it appears early panic about contagions occurring in supermarkets, which is still leading to people disinfecting their shopping, were largely unfounded.[xxvii]

    Mistaking Flu for Coronavirus

    Mortalities from novel flu viruses tend to be among individuals under the age of forty. This is because ‘emergent viruses resembled those that had circulated previously within the lifespan of then-living people.’[xxviii] This means older peoples’ immune systems are generally better equipped with antibodies to fight off such novel infections.

    As yet it is still unclear whether exposure to other coronaviruses, including the ‘common cold’, provide greater immunity to Covid-19, although one recent paper does suggest, ‘cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating “common cold” coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.’[xxix]

    It remains to be seen whether the death toll from Covid-19 will scale the heights of the ‘Asian’ Flu (H2S2) of 1957, (with a an estimated median R value of 1.65[xxx]) which led to 1 million deaths around the world, including 80,000 in the United States; or the ‘Hong Kong’ flu (H3N2) of 1968 (with an estimated median R value of 1.80) that was responsible for between 1 million and 4 million[xxxi]; let alone the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 that carried off an astonishing fifty million people[xxxii], (with an estimated median R value of 3 [xxxiii]), most of whom were in the prime of their lives.

    Hugh Pennington emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen recently took an optimistic view on the prospect of avoiding a dreaded ‘second wave’ of infections:

    The idea of a second wave comes almost entirely from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The first wave occurred in June and July and the second in October and November. The first was mild, the second was lethal. It is yet to be explained why the infections occurred in waves and why the virus faded away after the first and then returned.

    ‘Flu is very different from Covid-19’ Pennington says, ‘Although both are commonly spread by the respiratory route, and both have infected prime ministers, the more we learn about Covid-19, the less its biology and epidemiology resemble that of flu.’

    He further contends, ‘In the absence of controls, flu has an R rate of seven [presumably he means at the height of a pandemic]; Covid-19’s is between two and three [lower seemingly than the earlier assessment]. And far more than with flu, Covid-19 cases have very commonly occurred in clusters.’

    Conflation with flu modelling may also be discounting wider “imperviousness” than assumed. UCL Professor Karl Friston famously drew on astrophysics to explain Germany’s low infection rate relative to the U.K.:

    it looks as if the low German fatality rate is not due to their superior testing capacity, but rather to the fact that the average German is less likely to get infected and die than the average Brit. Why? There are various possible explanations, but one that looks increasingly likely is that Germany has more immunological “dark matter” – people who are impervious to infection, perhaps because they are geographically isolated or have some kind of natural resistance. This is like dark matter in the universe: we can’t see it, but we know it must be there to account for what we can see.[xxxiv]

    The curious case of Japan also indicates that certain societies – or nations – are considerably more impervious than others. As the country in the world with the oldest population in the world, and with heavy urban densities, one would have expected the virus to have had a devastating impact there, yet:

    No restrictions were placed on residents’ movements, and businesses from restaurants to hairdressers stayed open. No high-tech apps that tracked people’s movements were deployed. The country doesn’t have a center for disease control. And even as nations were exhorted to “test, test, test,” Japan has tested just 0.2% of its population — one of the lowest rates among developed countries.[xxxv]

    Japan’s population of over 125 million experienced less than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19.

    Nonetheless, apart from underlying exacerbating factors such as population density and an ageing population – relative to its Irish neighbour at least[xxxvi] – as well as a high obesity rate,[xxxvii] the U.K.’s high death toll can, at least in part, be attributed to Boris Johnson’s government’s ‘sleepwalking’ through the beginning of the crisis,[xxxviii] almost wlilfully ignoring the threat, and putting out highly inappropriate messages, including on shaking hands.

    Nevertheless, the suggestion aired on an episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches that 13,000 deaths would have been avoided if a lockdown or stay-at-home order had been introduced at the beginning of March came from a health analyst, George Batchelor, rather than a recognised academic authority, and should be treated with caution.

    Revealingly, in Hong Kong where 90% of cases were contact traced, ‘the number of individual secondary cases was significantly higher within social settings such as bars and restaurants compared to family or work exposures.’ In time it may be determined that Boris Johnson’s hesitation in closing pubs was his most costly mistake.[xxxix]

    QALY

    In Italy, where average life expectancy is approximately eighty-three-years-of-age, the average age of mortality from Covid-19 was approximately eighty years-of-age.[xl] This figure includes over one hundred health care workers.[xli] Many of these premature deaths occurred in the clusters that Hugh Pennington refers to – perhaps from heavy ‘viral load’[xlii] encountered in poorly ventilated hospitals and care home facilities.

    The overall loss of life years from the Covid-19 pandemic may prove minimal, however, compared to novel flu viruses, which have mainly afflicted the young over the past century.

    This is not to diminish the value of any life, but public health interventions are conventionally given a comparative value (QALY – Quality-adjusted Life Year), ‘which is routinely used as a summary measure of health outcome for economic evaluation, which incorporates the impact on both the quantity and quality of life.’ The financial cost of any intervention, including a lockdown or stay-at-home order, must be measured against its impact on both quantity and quality of life.

    There are now serious question marks around the efficacy of lockdowns. Using ‘Bayesian’ modelling a team led by Professor Simon Wood in Bristol University supports Michael Levin’s assessment that early epidemiological models were flawed, suggesting that ‘the number of new daily infections in the UK peaked some days before lock down was implemented, although it does not completely rule out a slightly later peak.’[xliii]

    Furthermore, a quasi-experimental study carried out by the University of East Anglia concluded that stay at home orders, or lockdowns were ‘not associated with any independent additional impact.’[xlvi] Another recent study in Nature, however, offers a different assessment, but includes data from China, which may be unreliable, and where the extremity of the measures are  incompatible with democratic norms. Lockdown advocates also generally assume a higher infection fatality rate than recent reappraisals.

    During lockdown, across Europe and beyond, cases and deaths occured in clusters: within enclosed spaces such as care homes,[xliv] hospitals and meat packing plants,[xlv] but also households. Hashtag activism informed the public in most Western countries about the pandemic, who were refraining from unnecessary social encounters, and travel, already.

    This may be why the Norwegian Institute for Public Health has recently called for the government to avoid such a far-reaching measure if the country is hit by a second wave.[xlvii] Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg also bravely admitted before a national television audience: ‘I probably took many of the decisions out of fear.’[xlviii]

    The adverse consequences of lockdowns – including a spike in domestic violence[xlix], its effect on children[l] and unprecedented economic impacts, especially on SMEs and casual workers, also cannot be discounted.

    Worst of all has been the effect of draconian lockdowns on developing countries, such as India. Vikram Patel and Richard Cash (both of Harvard University) wrote in The Lancet:

    we suggest that countries must let people get on with their lives—to work, earn money, and put food on the table. Let shop keepers open and sell their wares and provide services. Let construction workers return to building sites. Allow farmers to harvest their crops and to transport them to be sold on the open market. Allow health workers to do their daily work as before, with sensible precautions such as use of gloves and masks to minimise the risk of exposure to the virus. And allow the average citizen to travel freely with restrictions only applied to clusters where lockdowns are necessary. Livelihoods are an imperative for saving lives. Some will say such an approach, which runs the risk of spreading disease, implies that the lives of poor people are not as valuable as those in wealthy countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. The policies of widespread lockdowns and a focus on high-technology health care might unintentionally lead to even more sickness and death, disproportionately affecting the poor.

    These arguments also apply in wealthier societies, as many among the poor do not have the privilege of being able to work from home, and may participate in the black economy. Government supports are generally inadequate and do not last indefinitely.

    The preceding points are not a definitive argument in favour of Sweden’s policies during the pandemic, faults in which have been acknowledged by its chief architect Anders Tegnell. But it is important for policy makers to recognise the cost of lockdowns, especially for extended periods. Also, importantly, handing discretionary powers to police forces in such circumstances establishes a dangerous precedent.

    Fatalism

    In solitude we have been consumed by a story that feeds into pressing contemporary dilemmas, including on the role of scientific expertise. This can be situated within a long-standing division in Western culture between rationality and intuition, evident during World War II in the conflict between Communism and Fascism.

    As Martin Glover put it:

    Stalin, as a version of the Enlightenment idea of redesigning society on a rational basis, shared the catastrophic implications of carrying out such a project without moral or human restraints. Nazism was against the universalism of Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers. It was tribal: not rights of man, but the German right to lebensraum … Stalinism shows what can happen when Enlightenment ideas are applied wrongly, Nazism shows what can happen when unenlightened ideas are applied rightly.[liii]

    A form of this has spilled into the so-called Culture Wars, including identity politics, that have raged in particular since the 1990s, culminating in Brexit and President Trump, but it is also perhaps evident at a psychological level within most of our personalities. Importantly, excesses of rationality can be as destructive as Fascism, as we saw under the guise of Communism.

    Responses to the pandemic have also been conditioned by prior faith in, or suspicion of, the Western medical system – including from so-called anti-vaxxers – with Populist right-wing politicians dismissing concerns about a bad flu,[liv] and offering to take it on the chin.[lv] In contrast, some on the left seem to have viewed the crisis as an opportunity to enlarge the role of the State, leading to countervailing scientific authorities to be dismissed on ideological grounds.

    There may also have been a tendency, evident in The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere, to heighten outrage against the administrations of Donald Trump in the U.S. and Boris Johnson in the U.K. by front-loading mortality statistics.

    Another explanation for the extreme response of individuals who consented to prolonged periods of self-isolation – including those of an age profile suggesting they had little to worry about themselves – is an evident fatalism haunting a globally dominant capitalist system. As David Graeber put it:

    Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other has, yet at the same time, capitalism seems to be uniquely incapable of conceiving of its own eternity. Could these two facts be linked?[lvi]

    An understandable fatalism in the face of climate change and mass extinctions, perhaps spilled into reactions to this pandemic, with self-isolation a form of repentance.

    Moreover, the idea of plague as representing divine retribution may operate at an unconscious level. Apart from Biblical episodes such as that visited on Egypt, it is found in ancient epics such as Homer’s Iliad. Thus, when King Agamemnon makes a war prize of Chryseis the daughter of Chryses a priest of Apollo, the sun god takes revenge by unleashing poison-tipped arrows against the Greek army, many of whom succumb to plague.

    More recently, films, such as Outbreak (1995) starring and Dustin Hoffman, and novels such as Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1997), have played on these fears.

    What was Covid-19 but God or Gaia punishing us for our consumerist sins?

    Guardian Angle

    The so-called hashtag activism that prompted civil society to take preventive measures against Covid-19, and which led to many governments to adopt draconian suppression policies, including lockdowns, has been led in the U.K. and Ireland in particular by The Guardian newspaper

    The free digital site with an estimated 42 million monthly visitors[lvii] devoted unrelenting rolling coverage to Covid-19, emphasising the simple moral calculus with a banner across its home page. This has been to the almost complete exclusion of all other content for the months of March, April and May.

    The Guardian’s loss of proportion, and nuance, has been particularly damaging as it is the most trusted newspaper brand in the U.K., including, importantly, among readers aged 18 to 29.[lviii] This may be traced to its position as a global news provider of free content dependent on maintaining an enormous click rate to derive a profit.

    In a recent memoir the former editor Alan Rusbridger describes how: ‘Only by going for reach could you make up for … the ‘frightening disparity’ between the yields in traditional and online media.’[lix]

    He reveals that by mid-2018:

    The Guardian was reaching 150 million browsers each month and a billion page views per month. There was no talk of paywalls: even so, reader revenues had overtaken advertising. And digital revenues – at £109 million – had, for the first time, overtaken the £107.5 million of print revenues. The paper was confidently talking of hitting break-even in 2018/19.[lx]

    The difficulty is that once you have reached such a high threshold, and have taken on hundreds of staff, you have to keep that readership transfixed.

    The Guardian’s increasingly monopolistic position has come at the expense of journalistic diversity, as smaller publishers cannot compete with its reach. Moreover the perceived reliability of its reporting creates a difficulty for competitors wishing to mount a pay wall without significant marketing investment. In such a squeezed field alternatives are increasingly the preserve of billionaires, such as Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers, Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos. This is having a corrosive effect on democracy, as many of these publications are ideologically tainted, and support vested interests.

    Underling all this, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009,[lxi] This pattern has been seen all around the world as revenues diminish and workloads increase. In the U.K. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories. They discovered the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. Or, to put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time they used to have to do their jobs.[lxii]

    This results in what Nick Davies has described as ‘churnalism’, whereby most journalists are passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’[lxiii]

    Hyperbolic Coverage

    An exhaustive assessment of Guardian coverage is beyond the scope of this article, but two examples of their unsatisfactory reporting throughout this crisis should hopefully suffice.

    On Friday, May 15th an article ran under the headline: ‘Dying to go out to eat? Here’s how viruses like Covid-19 spread in a restaurant’.[lxiv] It referred to a video experiment simulating ‘how quickly germs can be spread across a variety of surfaces in environments such as restaurant buffets and cruise ships.’

    To begin with, one guest of 10 at a restaurant buffet is shown with the substance on his hands meant as a stand-in for the coronavirus. Over the course of a typical dining period, the rest of the guests behave in predictable fashion, selecting utensils from serving stations, enjoying their food, checking their phones and so on.

    At the end of the experiment the black light is turned on and the substance is revealed to be smeared everywhere: plates, foodstuff, utensils and even all over some of the guests’ faces.

    A few paragraphs into the article, however, a second experiment demonstrates the positive effect of improved hygiene techniques, after ‘the “infected” person and the other diners take the simple precaution of washing their hands, and utensils and other implements are cleaned or replaced.

    The first difficulty with the study itself is that it is conducted in a canteen-style restaurant – a worst case scenario where cutlery and plates are exposed to many hands. But the most obvious problem is that the headline feeds into a narrative of fear and paranoia, to the detriment of anyone struggling to keep a restaurant afloat.

    Another headline from May 26th paints a lurid picture: ‘Global report: ‘disaster’ looms for millions of children as WHO warns of second peak’.[lxv] Yet it soon apparent that the “disastrous” consequences for children, who are more likely to die after being struck by lightening than from a dose of Covid-19 and barely register as mortalities from the virus,[lxvi] is from increased vulnerability to forced labour and underage marriage. The “second peak” warned of by the WHO in the headline is a non-sequitur that has nothing to do with any elevated danger to children,

    Choice of headline is crucial as many browsers simply scan news sites. A 2010 Pew analysis found that the average visitor spent only 3 minutes 4 seconds per session on the typical news site. That compared with a 2005 survey showing about half of U.S. newspaper readers spent more than thirty minutes reading a daily paper.[lxvii]

    What has gone wrong?

    Clay Shirky writes in Here Comes Everybody (2008):

    When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to a bee … The hive is a social device, a piece of bee information technology that provides a platform, literally, for the communication and co-ordination that keep the colony viable. Individual bees can’t be understood separately from the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks.

    He asserts that the ‘Web didn’t introduce a new competitor into the old eco-system, as USA Today had done. The Web created a new ecosystem.’[lxviii]

    The Guardian embraced a form of ‘collaboration media’, which companies and politicians rapidly learned to respect, and fear. Former editor Alan Rusbridger recognised that ‘social media would disrupt conventional politics and transform the speed at which it happened.’ He acknowledges, however, that, ‘It was, obviously, not necessarily good at complexity – though it could link to the complexity. It could be frustratingly reductive. It didn’t patiently and painstakingly report, in the way a good new organisation still did. It was to some extent parasitical.’[lxix]

    Rusbridger also quotes former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans to the effect that ‘an investigation only really began to count once the readers and even the journalists were bored with it.’[lxx] But in an all-consuming demand for clicks, and in the frenzied political era of Trump and Brexit, balance has been lost. Lacking detached and independent journalism we have walked into a prolonged social experiment that will take considerable unravelling.

    A New Hashtag

    On May 25th, 2020, George Perry Floyd, a 46-year-old black man was killed when a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. His death brought a wave of demonstrations in major U.S. cities that have spread to other countries, with many protestors donning masks as protection against the virus.

    The hashtag generation has discovered another noble cause in #blacklivesmatter – to be clear #flattenthecurve was certainly well motivated – but let us hope balance and nuance is not lost, and that a deadening conformity does not ensue in debates over race, poverty and the ambit of the state.

    The extraordinary scenes witnessed around the world could also be interpreted as a proxy for societies throwing off the heavy knee of lockdowns, containing a basic human impulse to interact with one another, honouring the exuberant Dionysian element in our nature that had been contained by Apollonian rationality.

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s unnamed narrator from Notes from the Underground (1864) seems to envisage the poles of this division. First, he describes the archetypal rationalist that ‘scientifically’ predicts all outcomes in society:

    All human actions will then of course be calculated, mathematically, like logarithm tables up to 108,000, and recorded in a calendar; or even better, well-intentioned publications will then appear, like the present-day encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and recorded that there will no longer be deliberate acts or adventures in the world.

    But he suggests this would create a reaction:

    I, for example, wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the midst of all this reasonableness that is to come, suddenly and quite unaccountably some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a reactionary and mocking physiognomy were to appear and, arms akimbo, say to us all: “Now, gentlemen, what about giving all this reasonableness a good kick with the sole purpose of sending all those logarithms to hell for a while so we can live for a while in accordance with our own stupid will![lxxi]

    Thus an excess of rationality may create conditions for profound irrationality, or even absurdity in the case of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s felicitous calculus.

    What Next?

    We still have to address the public health crisis of a pandemic, requiring substantial reforms in healthcare, architecture and spatial design to contend with a disease that should not be treated as a flu pandemic.

    Once unsustainable lockdowns ease, Western societies with susceptible populations must adapt to life with the virus. A policy of elimination is unrealistic and even cruel, unless we essentially exclude entrants from the outside world, as in New Zealand, or become a police state like China.

    Like a thief in the night, Covid-19 discovered weaknesses in the wealthiest countries in the world that also happen to be among the most unequal. Most obviously it found its way to older individuals, many weakened by increasingly poor diets and sedentarism that is behind a pernicious obesity pandemic.

    It has already been argued that life expectancy is declining in the United States,[lxxii] after two centuries during which it climbed steadily. Our lives, and diets, are simply unsustainable, and perhaps Covid-19 is nature’s (God or Gaia’s?) way of telling us so. The question is whether we are prepared to adopt the environmental approaches to lower the risk of further zoonotic episodes that lead to viruses.

    On a more basic level we need to retrofit buildings – embracing the idea of a healthy home[lxxiii] or workplace that diminishes viral load – and redesign transport systems to prevent contagions. As a priority we require hospital design for better infection control as ‘Building ventilation, whether natural or mechanical serves to dilute droplets nuclei in the air and is the single most important engineering control in the prevention of transmission of airborne infections.’[lxxiv]

    Yet surely we cannot lose the joy of social interaction, or turn romance into an online transaction controlled by algorithms. Great gatherings of people are still the lifeblood of politics, the arts and sport. For these to become historical curiosities, outlawed indefinitely as “super-spreader” events, would be lamentable.

    We have to shake the trauma off somehow, or dance it off perhaps. Above all children cannot be confounded by the fear of their parents and other adults, and have natural inclinations to play frustrated indefinitely. Let us restore the friendly hug or kiss in time. We have to accept a measure of death in exchange for the expression of lives we all value. Society cannot be broken by social distancing.

    Another vital lessons from this pandemic is that we require greater freedom of expression and media diversity. It is unacceptable for unaccountable corporate bodies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook to control narratives indefinitely. In truth, people may have to get used to paying for journalism once again, or at least acknowledge that without payment you are (mostly) getting clickbait.

    In writing ‘the first draft of history’ on Covid-19, The Guardian may be excused for making errors, but nor should the publication be viewed as a neutral conduit of facts either, unmotivated by profit, and without a seat at the highest tables of power. As Rusbridger reveals in response to the Edward Snowden and Julian Assange accounts: ‘I once remarked to a senior intelligence figure that the British and American governments, instead of condemning our role, should go down on their knees in thanks that we were there as such a careful filter.’[lxxv]

    All Images © Daniele Idini

    [i] Francesca Coperchinia, Luca Chiovatoab, Laura Croceab, Flavia Magriab, Mario Rotondi, ‘The cytokine storm in COVID-19: An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system’ (2020)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359610120300927

    [ii] Richard Cash and Vikram Patel, ‘Has COVID-19 subverted global health?’ May 5th, 2020, The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31089-8/fulltext

    [iii] Untitled, ‘’Greatest propaganda machine in history’: Sacha Baron Cohen slams Facebook, other social media companies’, NBC November 22nd, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/greatest-propaganda-machine-history-sacha-baron-cohen-slams-facebook-other-n1089471

    [iv] Simon Rogers, ‘Data journalism in action: what is Facts are Sacred about?’ April 4th, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/apr/04/data-journalism-facts-are-sacred

    [v] Josh Halliday, ‘Twitter’s Tony Wang: ‘We are the free speech wing of the free speech party’’ March 22nd, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech

    [vi] Vijaya Gadde and Matt Derella, ‘An update on our continuity strategy during COVID-19’,  https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/An-update-on-our-continuity-strategy-during-COVID-19.html

    [vii] Jon Levine, ‘YouTube censors epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski for opposing lockdown’, New York Post, May 16th, 2020,   https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/youtube-censors-epidemiologist-knut-wittkowski-for-opposing-lockdown/

    [viii] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Facebook alters virus action after damning misinformation report’, BBC, April 3rd, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52309094

    [ix] Ronald Dworkin ‘The Right to Ridicule’, March 23rd, 2006, The New York Review of Books, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/23/the-right-to-ridicule/, accessed 26/4/19.

    [x] Stephen Sedley, Law and the Whirligig of Time, London, Hart Publishing, 2018.

    [xi] Sharon Begey, ‘Lower death rate estimates for coronavirus, especially for non-elderly, provide glimmer of hope’, March 16th, Stat, https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

    [xii] Matthew Biggerstaff, Simon Cauchemez, Carrie Reed, Manoj Gambhir & Lyn Finelli, ‘Estimates of the reproduction number for seasonal, pandemic, and zoonotic influenza: a systematic review of the literature’ BMC Infectious Diseases, September, 2014, https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2334-14-480

    [xiii] Ibid, Sharon Begley, Ihttps://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

    [xiv] Justin Fox, ‘The Coronavirus is worse than the flu, bro’ Bloomberg, April 24th, 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-24/is-coronavirus-worse-than-the-flu-blood-studies-say-yes-by-far

    [xv] Jacob Sullum, ‘The CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%’, Reason, 24th of May, 2020, https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-implies-a-covid-19-infection-fatality-rate-below-0-3/

    [xvi] Freddie Sayers,  ‘ Sunetra Gupta: Covid-19 is on the way out’ Unherd, May 21st, 2020, https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/

    [xvii] Kaitlyn Folmer and Josh Margolin, ‘Satellite data suggests coronavirus may have hit China earlier: Researchers’, ABC News, June 8th, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-data-suggests-coronavirus-hit-china-earlier-researchers/story?id=71123270

    [xviii] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: France’s first known case ‘was in December’, BBC, May 5th, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52526554

    [xix] Guardian staff and agencies, ‘Global report: US House passes $3tn stimulus as experts track Covid-19-linked syndrome’, The Guardian, May 16th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/global-report-democrats-push-for-3tn-stimulus-as-experts-track-covid-linked-syndrome?fbclid=IwAR1tpHpfNr_3zdSY68Yw6BUpUfAM6S56Dke8VANSk21Fhx2OQZO9pRDzFug

    [xx] Center for Disease Control, ‘Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States — 2017–2018 influenza season’, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

    [xxi] Simon Jenkins, ‘Why I’m taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt’, The Guardian, March 6th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

    [xxii] David Adam, ‘Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19’, Nature, April 3rd, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

    [xxiii] Graig Graziosi, ‘Coronavirus: Nobel Prize winner predicts US will get through crisis sooner than expected’, The Independent, March 24th, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-michael-levitt-china-italy-a9422986.html

    [xxiv] Richard A. Stein, ‘Super-spreaders in infectious diseases’, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, April, 2011,  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971211000245

    [xxv] Tom Morgan, ‘ Lockdown saved no lives and may have cost them, Nobel Prize winner believes’, 23rd of May, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/23/lockdown-saved-no-lives-may-have-cost-nobel-prize-winner-believes/

    [xxvi] Amelia Winn, ‘Lidl becomes first supermarket chain to CLOSE a UK store after staff catch coronavirus – but shoppers are told doors will reopen on Monday’, Daily Mail, May 3rd, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8281995/Lidl-supermarket-chain-CLOSE-UK-store-staff-catch-coronavirus.html

    [xxvii] Emily Holden, ‘Do you need to wash your groceries? And other advice for shopping safely’, The Guardian, April 2nd, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/do-you-need-to-wash-your-groceries-and-other-advice-for-shopping-safely

    [xxviii] Tom Reichert, Gerardo Chowell & Jonathan A McCullers, ‘The age distribution of mortality due to influenza: pandemic and peri-pandemic’ BMC Medicine, December 12th, 2012, https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-10-162

    [xxix] Alba Grifoni, Daniela Weiskopf, Sydney I. Ramirez, Davey M. Smith, Shane Crotty, Alessandro Sette, Cell, ‘Targets of T Cell Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus in Humans with COVID-19 Disease and Unexposed Individuals’ May 14th, 2020, https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3

    [xxx] Matthew Biggerstaff, Simon Cauchemez, Carrie Reed, Manoj Gambhir, and Lyn Finelli, ‘Estimates of the reproduction number for seasonal, pandemic, and zoonotic influenza: a systematic review of the literature’, BMC Infectious Diseases, September 4th, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4169819/

    [xxxi] Mark Honigsbaum, ‘Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics‘,The Lancet, May 25th, 2020,  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31201-0/fulltext

    [xxxii] Center for Disease Control, ‘1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus)’ https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html

    [xxxiii] Emilia Vynnycky, Amy Trindall, Punam Mangtani, ‘Estimates of the reproduction numbers of Spanish influenza using morbidity data’, International Journal of Epidemiology, May 17th, 2007, https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/36/4/881/667165

    [xxxiv] Laura Spinney, ‘Covid-19 expert Karl Friston: ‘Germany may have more immunological “dark matter”’’ The Guardian, May 31st, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/covid-19-expert-karl-friston-germany-may-have-more-immunological-dark-matter

    [xxxv] Lisa Dua and Grace Huang, ‘Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing?’ Bloomberg, May 22nd, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/did-japan-just-beat-the-virus-without-lockdowns-or-mass-testing

    [xxxvi] Nicola Davis and Rory Carrol, ‘ Experts divided over comparison of UK and Ireland’s coronavirus records’, The Guardian, April 13th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/experts-divided-comparison-uk-ireland-coronavirus-record

    [xxxvii] Untitled, ‘ Obesity crisis: The UK’s weight problem in seven charts’, Sky News, August 20th, 2019, https://news.sky.com/story/seven-charts-on-the-uks-obesity-problem-11583981

    [xxxviii] Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Leake, ‘Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster’, The Sunday Times, April 19th, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh

    [xxxix] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Prime Minister Boris Johnson orders pubs, restaurants and gyms to close across the UK’ March 21st, 2020, Sky News, https://www.skysports.com/more-sports/other-sports/news/12040/11961096/coronavirus-prime-minister-boris-johnson-orders-pubs-restaurants-and-gyms-to-close-across-the-uk

    [xl] ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy as of June 3, 2020, by age group’, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/

    [xli] Untitled, ‘Italy says number of doctors killed by coronavirus passes 100’ France24, April 9th 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200409-italy-says-number-of-doctors-killed-by-coronavirus-passes-100

    [xlii] Marta Gaglia and Seema Lakdawala, ‘What we do and do not know about COVID-19’s infectious dose and viral load’, The Conversation, April 14th, 2020, https://theconversation.com/what-we-do-and-do-not-know-about-covid-19s-infectious-dose-and-viral-load-135991

    [xliii] Simon Wood et al, ‘UK Covid-19 infection peak may have fallen before lockdown, new analysis shows’, May 7th, Bristol University, May 7th, 2020, https://www.bristol.ac.uk/maths/news/2020/peak-lockdown.html?fbclid=IwAR2g2Mr0IudkXCnQo8leIdVBueq-fdkLNGk9lQjPYrrrO7GW2jfMT19Hg1Q

    [xliv] Observer Reporters, ‘Across the world, figures reveal horrific toll of care home deaths’, The Guardian, May 16th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/across-the-world-figures-reveal-horrific-covid-19-toll-of-care-home-deaths

    [xlv] Megan Molteni, ‘Why Meatpacking Plants Have Become Covid-19 Hot Spots’, Wired, May 7th, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/why-meatpacking-plants-have-become-covid-19-hot-spots/

    [xlvi] Press Release, ‘New study reveals blueprint for getting out of Covid-19 lockdown’, May 6th, 2020, University of East Anglia  https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/new-study-reveals-blueprint-for-getting-out-of-covid-19-lockdown

    [xlvii] Untitled, ‘Norway could have controlled infection without lockdown’, The Local, May 22nd, 2020, https://www.thelocal.no/20200522/norway-could-have-controlled-infection-without-lockdown-health-chief?fbclid=IwAR1jJTUpQLXLgONVqWmLJHQ2-rd-FG7794lONTsaquGaw0DJmhIUEOqWLwk

    [xlviii] Richard Orange, ‘Coronavirus: Norway wonders if it should have been more like Sweden’, The Telegraph, May 30th, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/coronavirus-norway-wonders-should-have-like-sweden/

    [xlix] Emma Graham-Harrison, Angela Giuffrida in Rome, Helena Smith in Athens and Liz Ford, ‘Lockdowns around the world bring rise in domestic violence’, The Guardian, March 28th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/28/lockdowns-world-rise-domestic-violence

    [l] United Nations Sustainable Development Group, ‘Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on children’ April, 2020, https://unsdg.un.org/resources/policy-brief-impact-covid-19-children?fbclid=IwAR35l8582cnFgE_sWLurILYXeGWyg_PYSo8BApmmsarSwa_8_FQGzafxoI0

    [li] Johan Giesecke ‘The invisible pandemic’, The Lancet, May 5th, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext

    [lii] Jon Henley, ‘We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy’, June 3rd, 2020, The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/architect-of-sweden-coronavirus-strategy-admits-too-many-died-anders-tegnell

    [liii] Jonathan Glover, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Pimlico, London, 1999, p.394

    [liv] Oliver Milman, ‘Seven of Donald Trump’s most misleading coronavirus claims’, The Guardian, March 30th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-misleading-claims

    [lv] Michelle Cottle, ‘Boris Johnson Should Have Taken His Own Medicine’, New York Times, March 27th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/boris-johnson-coronavirus.html

    [lvi] David Graeber, Debt – The First 5,000 Years, Melville, London, 2011, p.357

    [lvii] ‘Top 15 Most Popular News Websites | February 2020’, http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/news-websites

    [lviii] Jim Waterson, ‘Guardian named UK’s most trusted newspaper‘ The Guardian, October 31st, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/oct/31/guardian-rated-most-trusted-newspaper-brand-in-uk-study

    [lix] Alan Rusbridger, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2018, p.145

    [lx] Ibid, p.348

    [lxi] Ibid, p.163

    [lxii] Ibid, p.181

    [lxiii] Ibid p.181

    [lxiv] Luke O’Neill, ‘Dying to go out to eat? Here’s how viruses like Covid-19 spread in a restaurant’, The Guardian, May 15th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/15/how-coronavirus-spreads-in-restaurant-video

    [lxv] Guardian Staff and Agencies, ‘Global report: ‘disaster’ looms for millions of children as WHO warns of second peak’, The Guardian, May 26th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/global-report-disaster-looms-for-millions-of-children-as-who-warns-of-second-peak

    [lxvi] Statista, ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy as of June 3, 2020, by age group’  https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/

    [lxvii] Rusbridger, Ibid, p.275

    [lxviii] Quoted in Rusbridger, Ibid, p.135

    [lxix] Ibidp.143

    [lxx] Ibid, p.161

    [lxxi] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground, Alma Books, London, p.23-24

    [lxxii] S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., Douglas J. Passaro, M.D., Ronald C. Hershow, M.D., Jennifer Layden, M.P.H., Bruce A. Carnes, Ph.D., Jacob Brody, M.D., Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D., Robert N. Butler, M.D., David B. Allison, Ph.D., and David S. Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D. ‘ A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century’, The New England Journal of Medicine, March 17th, 2005,  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr043743

    [lxxiii] Kate Hamblet, ‘How to Design a Healthy Home ~ An Architect’s Blueprint’, HealthyGreenSavvy, January 5th, 2019, https://www.healthygreensavvy.com/healthy-home/

    [lxxiv] Fatimah Lateef, ‘Hospital design for better infection control’, Journal of Emergencies, Shock and Trauma, 2009, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776365/

    [lxxv] Ibid, Rusbridger, p.250

  • Artist of the Month – Uluç Ali Kılıç

    I am a visual artist based in Istanbul. I was born in 1979 in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. I studied painting at Hacettepe University in Ankara, graduating in 2003. As a student I was mostly influenced by abstract expressionism. I also began to use installations and video art. These three media are now my visual language.

    I came to Istanbul in 2004, moving into my aunt’s house while she was living elsewhere. There I carved out a studio. During those first years I developed installations and even had my work displayed in prestigious exhibitions.

    I was quite satisfied with life, even though I was broke financially. But since I wasn’t paying rent I could carry on working in the studio. After a while though I started taking freelance jobs as a storyboard artist for TV commercials, and moved with an advertising crowd, working for big agencies in Istanbul, which meant I could take care of myself.

    Unfortunately, after a while, I found I had no time to create my own material, as I had begun working full time for an agency. My life was heading in a direction I wasn’t satisfied with. Then I went travelling, returned, worked again, becoming a freelance producer, and directed some movies. But I was unsure of what I was doing with my life until 2010.

    Then I quit the advertising world for good and became a fulltime artist. Initially, I really struggled to shift my mindset into thinking about what I was doing creatively as a business too. So the first years after leaving commercial work were slow, and I struggled to be creative.

    I didn’t find it easy to be alone in front of the canvas. It took a long time to get going, but over the course of the last five or six years I have been able to create more satisfactorily. I have displayed some of my work in group shows, and also had solo exhibitions.

    A New Language of Expression

    I have developed a new visual language, all of my own, and created a series of installations in this manner. This included creating stained glass windows, made out of PET plastic bottles I recovered, that appear like paintings. I replaced glass with PET plastic to raise environmental awareness, contradicting how these materials are generally used.

    My subject-matter is often the harm and destruction humanity inflicts on its surroundings, or other traumatic issues occurring in our time, such as the refugee crisis and homelessness. I try to make long-lasting artworks using plastic material which isn’t biodegradable in nature. Likewise, these artworks aim to last long in any viewers’ consciousness.

     

    Also by simulating the atmosphere of a church or cathedral, I try to make a powerful impact on the audience. In some of the installations I am not showing simply a painting as an art object, but also use light beams to create churchlike-effects. This causes the original work to create another painting reflecting on the wall opposite. For example in my ‘Refinery of Light’ piece I created a projection mapped specifically to the contours of the work to create unpredictable patterns on the gallery wall.

    Tough Times

    2019 was a tough but educational year for me. I’ve been through deeply emotional experiences, struggling to come to terms with the end of a relationship, which eventually brought me face to face with my identity and subconscious. Losing a beloved one, I have felt very alone.

    In this era I recommenced painting as a way of dealing with my troubles, questioning my whole being, including my dark side.

    I have always wondered why I use painting as a form of visual expression. During this period painting fitted very well with my condition. First and foremost the process itself was one of the quickest ways of satisfying my hunger to create.

    I find painting keeps me simultaneously in a meditative and an emotional state, bringing focus to the issues I contend with, including who am I; why am I doing what I do; and what is my aim and mission in life. These paintings kept me busy in this emotional state, which is what I needed.

    Otherwise, in solitude, I develop certain obsessive-compulsive tendencies that are produced by stress, or feelings of sadness: then I generate perverse habits and self-destructive mechanisms.

    Rather than falling into these habits I replace these with a new attitude towards life, and ways of thinking.

    Sound and Vision

    As I painted those pieces I was listening to specific songs over and over, for weeks on end. I started building the structure of the painting from the references of the sound that I was hearing, continually tracing lines and gestures.

    This appears first in ‘Mahler Variations’ as I attempted to simulate the instruments in creating the visual structure of the painting. Then I let the panting ask me what it required, until it matured sufficiently.

    Those paintings were like visual reflections of a dance performance. The canvas was my stage and the painting was my movement during the performances. I also recorded myself on video as I painted.

    After a period listening to classical music I would then begin listening to a totally contradictory genre such as black metal for two months. Then there would be a long period of Indian classical music and so forth for each piece.

    So these works can be seen as a chart of a depressive era, during which I descended into my subconsciousness. I should add that I always made my most successful works when I felt pressure on my shoulders, and was out of my comfort zone.

    Under Lockdown

    For any artist this period of isolation is nothing unfamiliar. Solitude brings you closer to your inner self. Artists are personalities who are living in solitude inside the community.

    In my case, at forty-one-years of age, I think I am at a critical stage in life, and feel under pressure to realise my gifts.

    Honestly, I always think that none of my pieces are good enough, compared to what I feel I am capable of, but lately I have been feeling that I should be more thankful for what I have received from life so far.

    Now that we all are forced to stay at home and isolate from one another we have to think about how much comfort and luxury we are accustomed to. We shouldn’t view this as a handicap, but more like a gift for a short period of time, where we start to realize how greedy, spoilt and arrogant most of us are in our lifestyles.

    Yes, it is hard to be suddenly changing our daily routines, but we need to adapt our minds to feel and discover who we really are, and what is most important to us. This situation puts many of us in a very hard position emotionally, psychologically and financially. It also threatens our health, but these limitations also create the pressure which leads to creativity and evolution.

    In fact artists voluntarily create these conditions to produce their works of art. So in a way there’s a similarity between the current situation and the creative process itself. We should use the time as a healing process to wake up from the artificial, materialistic and selfish way of life we are accustomed to. This is the best time to discover ourselves, and call back our souls to take over for the rest of our lives.

    F***ing Money

    It think it is appropriate to finish this piece by referring to an installation I created in 2018 called ‘F***ing Money’, which was a sculpture replicating a cash machine inside a gallery space.

    The actual artwork is not the sculpture but what happens to it. I put a motion sensor in the room which triggers a mechanism. Whenever a viewer gets close to the artwork the mechanism shoots out a tiny jet of water onto the sculpture, eroding it bit by bit. Eventually it collapsed.

    I also exhibited the demolition on video 24/7 from the gallery window in loops on public display. The idea was a reflection on values, interests, labour and on the price we put on the what we create.

    All artworks by © Uluç Ali Kılıç

    ulucalikilic.com/about/

    instagram.com/ulucturucu/

    Feature Image: Uluç Ali Kılıç in his studio. Istanbul, June 2019. Daniele Idini for Cassandra Voices.

     

     

  • Barcelona Under Lockdown

    It all happened too fast, so quickly that we didn’t have time to fully understand. The night before we were sipping beer and eating tapas and waiting for spring to come in the warm evening breeze; the following day we were on the sofa consulting the Netflix schedule for the umpteenth time, without finding an entirely satisfactory choice.

    That feeling is like after an unexpected accident, with a supernatural aftertaste. It is as if a divine finger had pushed a gigantic ‘STOP’ button, and our swirling swarm on planet Earth had been suspended; crystallized in a drop of time. One after another, the places where we went to disfrutar de la vida, ‘to enjoy life’, closed their shutters, leaving us confused and lost.

    For some it was a trauma to be compelled to cook for themselves. Staying indoors in a city that has unbridled sociability as one of its calling cards is difficult, but Barcelona is still trying to maintain its atmosphere despite the lockdown.

    Normally in the evenings the lights of buildings are turned off, with people outside. Lately I discovered that the building opposite my own is actually inhabited.

    Yesterday I went out to dispose of the trash and do the occasional shopping we are allowed to do. As I left the door from the balconies above I heard a ripple of applause: for a moment I was moved, it seemed to me that I had become the hero in a dystopian film.

    I know they weren’t applauding me, it was just a manifestation of unity in this battle, fought with heavy doses of TV series, bored yawning, punctuated by scared, masked bellboys who bring stuff up to your home. I understood these people: even applauding strangers helps fill the empty minutes.

    At least to help us stop missing our previous lives, the weather has decided to remain cold, even if the cold of Barcelona is far from the perennial grey nightmare overhead in Dublin, under which I lived for eight years.

    Occupying one’s time is difficult, with the bars all closed there is no possibility of drinking red vermouth with friends. I live in Barceloneta, a neighbourhood that is a peninsula kissed by the sea.

    Out on the street, the police remind you to stay at home, speaking calmly into megaphones. Someone brings out their dog to take a piss. The most important road, Carrer de la Maquinista, is empty. The most famous restaurant, ‘La Bombeta’, is closed. The buzz of people’s voices is replaced by the singing of birds, unexpected protagonists in neighborhood life, the vida de barrio that we miss so much.

    Flags of Catalonia are still draped from the balconies, moved by a gentle wind. At this time, these people should be my enemies on the football field, as my team, Napoli was set to face Barcelona in the UEFA Champions League round of sixteen, but looking at their worried and tired eyes, so similar to my own, I never felt so close to them. There will be time for confrontation, on the field. Now is the time to be close, very close. If not with our bodies, then in our hearts.

    We all wonder when we will be able to walk back to the Paseo Joan de Borbò, stopping at one of the many bars to talk about stuffed bombas; or who is the greater footballer between Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi; or to watch that black-eyed chica that turns the cabeza and makes the corazon skip a beat, every time she passes by.

    Such a simple thing, like shopping, has become an experience reminiscent of hours spent gaming; at times I feel I am becoming the protagonist of any chapter in the Fallout saga. The neighbourhood is deserted, everything is closed and dark. The only lights on Plaza de la Barceloneta are those emanating from the church of Sant Miquel.

    In the supermarket people are afraid even to smile at you. They are not worried about touching you or being too close, they are simply afraid to recognize in you the fragility of the human condition that unites us all. Breathing inside a mask is for me, with my glasses, embarrassing: with each breath the lenses mist up, giving my vision of the surroundings a dreamlike quality.

    In the meantime people are dying, the daily bulletins are becoming increasingly distressing; there is a great deal of concern, and prayers, for the situation in Madrid, but more than miracles the patients need respirators and medical personnel. Here in Barcelona, too, cuts to the health budget are being felt.

    People have stopped applauding and there is silence around me, so dense and spooky that it is frightening. More than the infection, and what can happen to any of us if we are hospitalized alongside people fighting for their lives.

    We are used to fight for our place in the world, but are we prepared to fight for a lifesaving hospital bed? Now we don’t want to think about it. On the sofas where we spend our days we try to feel secure. Less weak.

    In the meanwhile, I’m out. I allow myself five minutes to smoke a cigarette sitting on a bench. But my mind is not free. I just cannot relax. My only thought is about how to get home and carefully spread the antibacterial soap between my hands. A little anguish peeps out: what if I caught the virus on this excursion? I already know that for the next two weeks this thought will haunt me.

    But I’m not the only one: here we are, stuck between the duty to stay at home and the desire to go out. In the middle of two fires, or, as De Lucia would say, entre dos aguas. But Barcelona no se rinde – ‘Barcelona won’t give up’. It plays the rumba and waits patiently. The day when we will be allowed to leave our thirty-five-square-metre apartments is inching closer.

    When I get back home, I close the door behind me. The sofa seems to look at me worriedly: “Where have you been?”, he seems to ask me. Everything is so unreal that I don’t know how to answer.