Life beckons anew

After the corrosive toll of our pandemic lunacy in 2020, life beckons with fresh perspective we pray as 2021 takes off, however gradually – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

One of the worst manifestations of popular culture for some time has been the trend to get extensively loud and drunk on New Year’s Eve, then be utterly spent on 1 January, seeking to “recover” from the excess faux jubilation. And then the dispiriting realisation that the world is depressingly similar to the one we waved off in alcoholic stupor, annoyingly dawns.

A better tradition, found in parts of France, extolled by the writer Peter Mayle, is a quiet 31st. A beverage of choice, and a genteel welcoming of the New Year. Then, in fairly good shape, Mr. Mayle recommends the Provencal tradition of the New Year’s lunch. The village gathers at various establishments, family communes, and there is an admirable multi-course repast with which to “welcome” in a hopefully fresh horizon. We meet the New Year not “hung over” but celebrating and basking.

Well, after the corrosive toll of our pandemic lunacy in 2020, life beckons with fresh perspective we pray as 2021 takes off, however gradually.

In hindsight, despite all the “panic porn,” even if you take all the numbers “ascribed” to C-19 as literal (and we know there are all kinds of issues with how death certificates were filled out, and how uncertain causation was in many, and the curious “disappearance” of influenza and flu in the southern hemisphere reported by WHO, but explained by nobody and the corresponding  plunge in those numbers in the US as well, based on how respiratory illnesses were recorded or otherwise), even taking the global numbers at face value, it seems COVID resulted in only 3% of global mortality for 2020.

If that doesn’t make you seethe and fume, then your thresholds for outrage as to what type of impact constitutes justification for wrecking lives and a global economy and inflicting indirect suffering of all kinds on so many, is a lot higher than I anticipate.

The media, who apparently can neither read statistics very accurately nor do math reliably, went out hyperventilating even though this was evident. And no, this is not the “result” of lockdowns or mask wearing, as there seemed to be either no effect, or an inverse effect between jurisdictions with such mandates and those without. Times Square on New Year’s Eve was a ghost town, while millions were out in China celebrating the passing of the calendar year, Wuhan itself was teeming.

Back here in Lanka, I continue to be baffled by our so-called COVID “death statistics” as case after case seems laden with multiple comorbidities, liver complications, kidney failure, blood poisoning, heart attacks and then the statutory “COVID pneumonia” mention which could just be a positive PCR test, or else latter stage complications once immune systems are compromised, but clearly not the instigation. 

Despite that, the “ascribed” mortality is just north of 200 from March to now. You could hardly summon existential panic on this basis. For comparison, car deaths, despite curfews and lockdowns and zonal travel restrictions, from March to close to year’s end were close to 1,900! Very likely past 2,000 now. So, what’s the real pandemic?

We have reason for sane optimism

The narrative cannot be the “vaccine cavalry” is on the way. It is beneath us to field so gossamer a case for normalcy for a disease with a 99% recovery rate globally below 60 without comorbidities. But let’s take a closer look.

So, the vaccination contender we’ve read more about recently is Moderna. We are told that 30 people out of the 15,000 who received the placebo in that vaccine trial suffered severe COVID disease, and none of those who got the vaccine did. Not only is that a less than an underwhelming number of afflicted even from the placebo, but “severe” COVID was defined as having oxygen saturation under 93% which why nearly everyone qualified. Out of the 30, nine were hospitalised, and one was admitted to an ICU. 

Meanwhile almost one in five had Grade 3 or Grade 4 adverse effects after the first shot, and 2.5 times more people had “unsolicited severe adverse reactions” in the treatment arm. Why do we never read a full report like this and a proper discussion flowing from this, that reads like exploratory medicine and not commercial medical PR?

SARS-CoV-2 overall, comorbidities all in, has a fatality rate of between 0.1% and .05%. We can probably confront and transcend this, through a plethora of responses, including natural immunology aided perhaps by vaccines. By contrast, Spanish Flu was 34.1% fatality(!), Measles had 8.7%, Anthrax 19.4% and Smallpox a whopping 37.8%, to showcase the calibre of challenges we have dealt with, coped with, and moved beyond, without any global lockdowns, mass incursions into civil liberties, or 24/7 fascination, with an inevitable diversion of our creativity and entrepreneurial drive and everything else besides.

If we take a sober look at overall mortality for all ages in all countries from 2017 to almost the end of 2020, in winter there is the expected increase in deaths. In 2020 we had the initial COVID-19 “spike” around week 15 starting late March but it was pretty much over by mid-May. Summer was unremarkable, and autumn has been a “case-demic” with nowhere close to Spring mortality. That “disconnect” leads virologists to call where we currently are a “fake pandemic.” The current winter spike taken all in, is about the same size as 2017/18, falling once more. 

Go to Euromomo the website which tracks these stats and taking Europe as a test case:

England essentially no standard deviation over 2020 overall, though numerous waves and bumps.

Sweden: virtually nothing (no full lockdown, no mask mandates, largely open economy)

Northern Ireland (as opposed to rest of UK which is peculiar): no waves, no pattern at all, no surge in autumn.

Slovenia was earlier touted as a model of mask wearing rectitude and a success story for being seemingly impervious in Spring, and now they have the biggest spike of all. I await the research that points out that mask wearing is most successful in months beginning with “M.”

Then if you look at severity of restrictions (lockdowns etc.) and compare it with the Z score (standard deviation from the mean), you cannot tell Northern Ireland from Finland, and there is no correlation between restrictions and results if taken annually. If there is a so called “second wave,” on the data it is of no greater issue than a moderately bad flu season. The pandemic is actually proving to be a model for mass panic stupidity from government bureaucrats.

Here in Lanka, other than the “counting” of deaths, I have to applaud the evolving playbook from government leaders, which is allowing a focused approach and latitude for recovery, despite medical posturing and doomsday scenario extrapolations which keep being proven wrong. On that front, bravo!

A new religion was born

Rob Slane suggests that 2020 saw the birth of a new religion, “Covidianity.”

Prophets include persistently inaccurate nuts like Neil Ferguson whose autobiography should read: “Wrong about Everything and Still Pontificating!”

Priesthood of Experts: Fauci, Whitty and Vallance, our own medical fraternity here. Fauci has even confessed that he changed the narrative because he wasn’t sure how much the US public could handle. In more prosaic times that is called “fraud” or at least “lying.” His interviewer adoringly lapped it up, as if Moses was shielding our vulnerable eyes from the literal glory of God.

Soteriology (branch of theology dealing with salvation), the “salvific” Vaccine God is coming!

Evangelists: Mainstream news gorging on the blood and circuses of never having to do investigative journalism again. Journalism school will soon be “teleprompter” reading classes.

Eschatology: The “New Normal” whereby we give away so much that we valued and revered.

Heretics: All credentialed people who want a debate, the Great Barrington authors (Oxford, Harvard and Stanford no longer confer any right to even be fairly heard), lexicon of experts, doctors who have gone on record from Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK, US, and farther and wider.

So we have landed with an obsession with “safetyism” and a general sterilisation of life. Every flashing, untested statistic, every warped headline to be kowtowed to as “the science.”

C.S. Lewis warned us years back that we may confront a planned technocratic oligarchy that will lay its claim based on claimed knowledge. “If we are to be mothered, mother must know best.”

President Dwight Eisenhower warned us not only of a military industrial complex (presciently) but that “Public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific, technological elite.” Ironically, in our attempt to eliminate risk (a new fascination with no prior pedigree in our civilisation), we have given our lives to “fake safety” (from something nominally dangerous to most), while sucking out joy, meaning and purpose at large. Zoom now has a greater market cap than Boeing, and that sums it up in many ways.

As C.S. Lewis again said, “Now I care far more how humanity lives than how long.” He suggests “progress” has to mean increasing the goodness and happiness of lives, not just their longevity. If again we were in a plague that wiped out 60% or even 30% of humanity, a temporary suspension of life may be called for. But for a coronavirus, which even with mathematical machinations, if we push definitions of “infection,” has an infection fatality rate of 0.2 to .26% at the upper end?

For a mess of pottage, we were almost ready to ditch our heritage and liberties. And still re welcoming travel between jurisdictions we think this paltry pathogen is akin to invading Visigoths. Edmund Burke taught us that society is a contract, it has to be renewed. It is between the living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. Mr. Slane in his analysis quotes Tolkein who had one of his characters say that she feared neither death nor pain, but instead, a cage. “To stay behind bars until use and bars accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire.”

Invitation for Lanka: Let’s focus on Life not “Non-death”

I read recently in the UK of sons being told to stay six feet away from their grieving mother in the crematorium as their father was being put to rest. Hellish and absurd! 

Here in Lanka we must renew our rituals, they define our humanity, and we must make any “COVID management” secondary to that. What if 2021 could be the period we led the way in “celebrating” judiciously and stopped being “berated” for not mindlessly cowering before “Covidianity?” 

Let’s make our peace with it. Lockdowns are not sustainable, they don’t work, countries have to function economically and socially. Nor, until we flip the paradigmatic switch will the world wish to “travel” to us if treated as a walking biohazard even if you have no symptoms. This silly “test mania” has to be jettisoned. 

It really is not “life or death” it’s realising that “non-death” is not life. Lanka needs a chance to live again, as we are starting to. If biological survival was really the Grail, let’s see how many would vote for being entombed in a box as Lord Sumption in the UK asked, intravenously kept alive as a “triumph” of public health. 

How many would consider a disease that largely threatens you once past life expectancy to justify throwing humanity, conviviality and creativity out the window? How many would rather take “acceptable risks” to deploy these treasures towards rebuilding and bolstering their society and country?

We have not only neglected our human faculties, we have “demonised” their expression this last year. Time to turn that page! Why, for example, does everyone keep reporting on “the new strain?” Viruses mutate, it’s NOT news! And by all accounts, it has been circulating for seven months or so and is less lethal. Again, milder variants circulating is good news!

Imagine if this paradigm is sustained, with future pathogens that may land. Anything not directly bolstering survival as per the “gamebook” gets ditched or deferred? Museums for example, despite how large they are and the ease of distancing, nature reserves, where we can breathe and be “treated” to germicidal sunshine all get shut. Why? Why are services in large, airy Cathedrals being banned worldwide – because this new theology is upon us? 

Conviviality and interaction are under assault, and we can be grateful Lanka may have initially buckled, but has not, and did not capitulate.

By this logic, if “virtuous survival” gives us non-death, then actual living becomes a “vicious indulgence.” But who determines that? Living then just becomes a technical survival program? If that prevails, why would anyone buy our products, or do business with us, or travel to us, if all lives and aspirations become secondary to some insistence of “risk free living” that is quite so monochromatically unhinged?

If no touching during mourning, what standing has any ritual that underscores the purpose and energy we call life? Speaking to a youngster about “school” a week back I heard how they “didn’t mind” it being virtual. But then they have no comparison case, and I almost saw them retreating into themselves as they “resigned” to this “normality” that no science mandates and no known medical caution or experience with C-19 requires. Isolated, and living lives of “quiet” and rather “private” desperation, what are we going to produce in this generation?

There is no pandemic in Lanka, there is a case-demic. The “mortalities” aren’t plausible and as pointed out, are far less than car accidents even during curfew and lockdown. The country has real issues and challenges not “invented ones” dictated by WHO and other mad downward spiralling economies. So, let’s address our debt, create an imaginative approach to safe tourism, rebuild education, incentivise enterprise, restore our financial credibility. 

And to get the drive to do this, to get the emotional fuel, we need to safeguard and revive our battered humanity. So what of birthdays, and religious celebrations, hobbies and sports, marriage and children, what of businesses and careers? What about all the options and abilities that allowed us to face death during civil wars and natural disasters or the ravages of truly killer diseases, knowing we will hopefully have done our utmost to have lived to the fullest, however bittersweet and impermanent our joys may be?

When some external authority tells you who can visit you in your final days (even being in the most sterile environment on earth, completely at odds with all rational understanding of transmissibility), how you can be comforted as you die, then far from death giving rhythm and urgency to life, it’s won. We’re already dead or might as well be.

Oh, but hang on, that vaccine is coming! 99% recovery rate and we need a vaccine, untested, rushed through? What a herd of supine snivelers we’ve become if that’s it (other than the legitimately vulnerable of course who we can safeguard without blowing up the world). And next pathogen, here we go again. How did we make it this far over billions of years?  Surely all that evolution and sacrifice and progress was not so that we can now devolve into sheep and jettison everything won for us and given to us?

Average age of death from this is 82, younger deaths have had desperate comorbidities. Non-death = no nuance, no context, no qualification. By contrast, all real civilisation is about “quality” of life and our right to take a sane chance at living to the fullest extent we choose – that is what “freedom” means. 

Would we have thought we couldn’t get on a plane, drive wherever we wanted, expanding our interests and experiences through engagement even a year back? That we would have sustenance delivered by masked delivery drivers, having interactions rationed and then told we are to “thank” people for doing this to us on the flimsy stats shared? We surely would have concluded this is not life at all.

We have to reclaim and advance living. Lanka has taken steps to do so, it must frame the challenge and aspiration in that way, keep taking the high ground, state a vision we all want to live into, and we must all come together to celebrate and advance that possibility.