Coronavirus

I discovered a clip, from 2015, featuring a speech made by Bill Gates. He wheeled on an oil drum and said that, as a young man, they had always kept one of these in the house, filled with provisions for use in the event of nuclear war. He went on to point out that we still spend unbelievably massive amounts of money on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. However, he continued, it will not be nuclear bombs that wipe out tens of millions of people, but a virus. By contrast to what we spend on protecting ourselves from nuclear attack, he said, we spend nothing on creating a response to the viral attack that is coming. Indeed, just such an attack is now upon us.

We are surrounded by bugs. Indeed, our guts are home to a whole community of bacteria, which are an essential part of our digestive system. Some bugs, whether bacteria or viruses, are deeply harmful to us. Their life cycle and speed of duplication means that mutations will occur at a rate that seems very rapid to us. They evolve fast and, at times, even jump species. Outbreaks of virus infections in recent years, such as bird-flu or swine-fever, have led some to wonder what the fuss is about. Why the alarm? Today’s pandemic is why? It was never a question of IF the pandemic, but WHEN? In 2018 the UK National Security Strategy warned that a pandemic was inevitable. “We estimate that a pandemic could cause fatalities in the United Kingdom in the range 50,000 to 750,000, although both the timing and the impact are impossible to predict exactly.” In 2012 the Tory government’s Health and Social Care Act had further fragmented and privatised the NHS. The following year the British Medical Association had written: “The fragmented nature of the new health system will require that each organisation … [is] aware of the plans in place to deal with potential outbreaks of ill health, such as pandemic flu or legionnaires disease.” Since then there has been a steady move to reduce hospital beds and to restrict the budget of the NHS. In Germany there are 29.2 Critical Care Beds per 100,000 of the population. In the UK that figure is 6.6.

A key underlying problem is that we have over-populated this planet. Globalisation, together with both intense concentrations of people in cities and cheap and easy access to international transport, has created the perfect opportunity for a new virus to flourish and multiply. We have known this was coming, but we have done little in the way of preparation. Now, not only are many in danger of losing their lives, but our whole way of life and the very economic foundations of our society are under threat. In the short term, the question must be how our society can survive for the eighteen months or so before a vaccine is readily available. In the longer term, profound questions about how we order our lives must be answered. Money is simply the means by which we transact the deals that make a society possible. If large sections of society no longer have the work, the money or the means to make the necessary transactions to keep a roof over their head or feed their family, then the whole system collapses and lawlessness takes over. This virus will change life as we know it and challenge some of our deepest assumptions. Life will never be the same again.