INDEX Tuesday March 23, 2021
Another milestone/ tombstone
Three people I knew quite well have died during this epidemic, I presume from covid. Each one of them had severe medical conditions before they got the virus. They were not the only people I knew who were in the very high risk group, but most of the others seem to have been isolating themselves irrespective of the lockdown.

So what has the lockdown achieved? Today we have a minute's silence at noon to remember the 126,000 who have died in the UK since Boris Johnson ordered everyone to stop seeing friends and relatives and only go out for essential shopping, whatever that might be. The UK is top of the pox, when it comes to death toll.

How many would have died had we ignored Boris and carried on as usual? Clearly the number would have been higher but I struggle to think of a vast number of high risk potential victims, since none of the people I know under the age of 60 have died so far.

This is important because whilst there is a great deal of hope that the vaccination programme will conquer the virus and it is widely believed that Boris has committed the government to avoiding a fourth lockdown, in fact he said the opposite. He would not rule out another lockdown because we are battling unpredictable nature.

What does that mean? Right now it is probably a reference to the third wave of the virus sweeping across Europe and expected to reach these shores any time soon.

But whether that happens or not it remains highly likely that come the winter a variety of the virus that can sidestep vaccination will be causing mayhem, filling our hospitals and driving our poor NHS to breaking point.

All it takes is a handfull of cases. It started with no more than a handfull in a Chinese city.

Of course, the vaccines could quickly be modified to cope with the new strain and some might even leap all the regulation hurdles in less than a couple of months (since they have already cleared safety trials). We also now know that perhaps 50% of the population can be vaccinated in about three months.

That means that we could control a new strain in about five months, if you call what we have now 'control'. So first reports in perhaps October. Have it under control in March 2022. Only five months of lockdown!

In 1968 we had the avian flu pandemic in which more than a million people died worldwide (100,000 in the USA alone). The H3N2 virus, which caused avian flu, continues to circulate globally. Are you prepared for 50 years of lockdown?

There is an alternative. The World Health Organisation spelled it out: Test, test, test. We could do that. we are doing that. Add to that a really effective tracing system and we could save the NHS, or what's left of it.

In Britain our Government is so corrupt that we don't believe it is even possible to have an effective tracing system, yet one exists already. It is run by the security services who keep tabs on every single mobile phone, credit card and computer in the UK.

The security services don't sit there listening to people as they make love or visit the toilet. What they do is keep a database of all activities and then when something takes their interest they can search back to find details of activity and connections.

Exactly what you need to control a virus. If we tested and then used the existing system to track down any possible connections, we could abandon lockdown.

This is not as radical or original thinking as you might imagine. It's almost certain that this is exactly how the Chinese went about dealing with the virus.

People say that in China they can get away with doing things like that because they don't have the civil liberties we take for granted in the UK. But the whole point is that the system already exists in the UK (ask Edward Snowden). It's just a question of using it in a different way.
Posted by Jonathan Brind.
INDEX
Tuesday March 23, 2021