how to save the world

image by V Altounian in Science magazine showing some of the early discoveries about the widespread and serious effects of CoVid-19 on the body (other effects, and unique effects on some infected children, have been found since this report)

I said my previous post on CoVid-19 would likely be my last, at least for this “wave” of the disease, but I thought it might be useful to summarize what we now know (which is still pathetically little), and what we still don’t know (mostly everything) about this disease, as we head into the summer months. I’ll avoid proffering any advice, for a ton of reasons, but the common sense approaches to take at this juncture, erring on the side of caution, are pretty obvious.

What we think we know at this stage:

1. The Infection Fatality Rate (proportion of those infected, even if asymptomatic, who subsequently die — the IFR), and the Case Fatality Rate (proportion of those testing positive for the disease who have symptoms and subsequently die — the CFR), are probably about 0.6% and 1.0% respectively. This is many times higher than “normal” flu rates, but mercifully much less than those of some other viruses and coronaviruses in particular. Pre-peer review studies suggesting a much lower IFR have been largely discredited by the epidemiological community (the most popular of these low-ball studies was issued by a researcher who a few months ago was predicting only about 10,000 US deaths from CoVid-19). But due to inadequate testing, these rates are still only approximate.
2. The actual number of CoVid-19 deaths in developed countries, based on extensive “excess deaths” studies, is likely to be and will likely continue to be about 1.5x officially reported numbers, mostly due to people dying from CoVid-19 at home without ever being tested, and uncertainty in cases of comorbidity. The multiplier will be higher, in some cases much higher, in places with poor reporting and testing systems. Worldwide, a very rough estimate would be that actual first wave deaths have been and will continue to be about 2-3x officially reported numbers, which would produce an actual death toll by end of summer of about two million people (and reported deaths of just under one million).
3. If this IFR and excess deaths multiplier are close to correct, then by the end of the summer about 4-5% of the global population will have been infected; the rest will remain highly vulnerable to CoVid-19 infection in the fall or in later waves, in the absence of a safe and reliable vaccine, particularly as social distancing and other measures are relaxed or are no longer diligently followed. The infected rates by summer’s end will vary hugely — likely around 6% in Canada, 12% in the US, 15% in much of Europe, even higher rates in much of Latin America, perhaps 2% in India and much of Africa and the Mideast, and 0.1% in China and some other Australasian nations. None will reach “herd immunity” levels.
4. We are utterly unprepared in most of the world for the large-scale testing, contact tracing and isolation that would be needed to avoid surges in infections and deaths in the fall and thereafter. As a result, we are almost certainly going to have to get used to the severely restrictive social distancing, recurring shut-downs, and other economically- and socially-destructive measures that we have struggled with in recent months. Depending on vaccine success, virus mutation and wave severity, that could continue into next year and possibly the year beyond.
5. Based on serology testing, all age groups seem to be roughly equally susceptible to infection, but the rate of symptoms, hospitalization and death (the IFR) varies enormously by age and health (those >65 have an IFR an order of magnitude larger than average, and those <29 have an IFR an order of magnitude lower). The notable exception is that serology testing shows, surprisingly, that a relatively smaller proportion of seniors have been infected (though their IFR is by far the highest). There are several possible reasons for this — they could be being more careful due to their greater vulnerability, or they may have natural immunity due to recent exposure to other similar coronaviruses, or there may be other reasons. We don’t know. But it does mean that the most vulnerable age group actually has the lowest rate of infection (and hence future immunity) to date, which is concerning.

What we really don’t know at all at this point:

1. The biggest and most important unknown is that we still have no idea how this virus kills us, and what its long-term effects are. Tests of people who have tested positive for antibodies (serology tests) but who were asymptomatic or suffered only minor symptoms have found substantial evidence of significant lung and other organ damage, whose cause and future prognosis are completely unknown. This disease affects not only the lungs, but also the heart, brain, nervous system, kidneys and other organs in ways we are only just beginning to understand. You may be completely asymptomatic or seemly unharmed by infection, and yet have already suffered damage that will, later on, lead to chronic and debilitating illness or premature death.
2. We have no idea how effectively or for how long immunity will be conferred on those infected. Early research suggests that CoVid-19 antibodies drop off quickly in the weeks and months after infection, though some immunity seems to be present in some infected people even with no measurable antibodies. This makes the challenge of developing a safe, effective and affordable vaccine, and the challenge of re-administering it when it wears off, even more difficult.
3. Of course, we have no idea when such a vaccine may be available. It is likely that the first vaccines will be less than fully effective and it will take additional time to fine tune them to the ever-evolving strains of the virus. There are already several different strains of the virus, with apparently different IFRs.
4. We have no idea how this virus will mutate, and if it will mutate to a less lethal form or, like the 1918 pandemic virus, into a much more lethal form.
5. We have no idea what, if any, pattern of seasonality this virus will present, and hence when to be most alert for new outbreaks.
6. Currently reported cases are spiking in many jurisdictions that have relaxed social distancing, notably in the US. We have no idea to what degree this is due to increased testing versus increasingly risky behaviour; it is likely a combination of both, along with other, unknown factors. We do know that average age of those being tested, and of those testing positive, are skewing sharply lower than during the first months of the disease. We don’t know why, though the high vulnerability of older people (who were most likely to be symptomatic and hence to be tested earlier) is certainly a factor.
7. As a result, we have no idea to what extent this increase in cases will translate into increased deaths in the weeks to come (there is a lag of about 3 weeks on average between disease onset and death in fatal cases). There is already evidence of increased hospitalizations, but reported deaths so far continue to trend downwards. And with younger cases, we should expect lower mortality rates. No one knows, and it will take until the end of July, or longer, to find out.
8. The IHME (UW model) now predicts an upswing in deaths starting slowly in September and then rising sharply by the beginning of October in the US, Latin America, UK, Italy, Germany and Russia (their model excludes much of Africa and Asia). At this stage they are not making any projections past then, because everything depends on the behaviours of both governments and citizens especially in the most-affected countries. Isolation fatigue could play a significant role, though IHME has factored into their projections expected shutdowns where they forecast hospitals will exceed their ICU capacity by October 1st. It is worth noting that in its projections IHME more or less ignores the officially reported case counts as being highly unreliable and incomplete, and instead uses its own model. According to that model, actual new infections have been about 10x the reported case numbers, and actually peaked in the US in late March (working backwards from the smoothed peak in reported deaths there in mid-April), and have sharply dropped since then and will continue to drop slowly until schools reopen in late summer. This tells a very different story from the “official” new infections data showing new cases in the US at record highs in late June*. If IHME are wrong in this assumption, their death forecasts could therefore be wildly off. (Their forecasts for Europe are based on the same assumptions, with slightly earlier infection peak dates.)
9. And of course, we don’t know how our adaptation to this virus is going to affect national economies and the global economy. Stock markets are, ludicrously, at or near record highs, which demonstrates that they are no longer useful measures of our economic health, if they ever were. Unemployment remains historically high, and there’s a strong resistance from many to a return to business as (obscenely unequally) usual. At the same time, new data shows that while incomes for most have plummeted, consumer spending is returning to near “normal”; people are just going, endlessly, deeper and deeper into debt. Will CoVid-19 create the inequality and precarity “flash point” to produce long-term social unrest and political upheaval? And even if it does, will that be enough to collapse an economy we all depend so heavily on? And what would all that mean for the trajectory of the pandemic? No one knows.

*Here are the smoothed (moving average) data for reported new daily US cases (red), compared to the estimated actual numbers of new daily cases (yellow) that IHME uses in its forecasts. While the late-June “surge” in reported cases looks alarming, it may just reflect that finally a larger proportion of actual new infections are being tested and reported. As noted above, that doesn’t mean reopening is wise: 70,000 new cases a day is still dangerously high and the projections could change quickly if social distancing, event-size and business opening rules are eased too quickly or not followed. And 70,000 new infections a day means a million Americans will be infectious to others each day through the summer.

PS: June 29 addendum: just in, from Michael Greger on CoVid-19’s apparent effect on the immune system:

[The cytokine storm reaction of some of those infected with COVID-19 who have healthy immune systems] has led some to consider immunosuppression [eg steroids] as a treatment for severe COVID-19, but of course immunosuppression for hyperinflammation in COVID-19 might be a double-edged sword. So, when you see that broccoli sprouts can whip up natural killer cell activity within two days, is that a good thing or a bad thing for COVID-19? It was good for seasonal flu, but who knows with this new coronavirus.

Young children have relatively immature immune systems, and normally suffer disproportionally from viral infections such as the flu––but not, apparently, from COVID-19, or SARS or MERS, for that matter, the other two deadly coronaviruses. It’s interesting; one theory as to why children seem protected suggests that greater pre-existing exposure to common-cold coronaviruses offers kids some cross-protection against the new virus. But ironically, a competing theory suggests it’s their lack of exposure to similar viruses that’s safeguarding them. There’s a phenomenon known as ADE, antibody-dependent enhancement, a phenomenon first described more than 50 years ago. In most cases, the antibodies our bodies make to target pathogens neutralize them or, at the very least, tag the invaders for removal. Sometimes, though, antibodies can actually facilitate viral infection and exacerbate disease.

This may be the case with SARS, where antibodies generated against the viral spike proteins were sometimes found to promote infection. In monkeys, an experimental SARS vaccine resulted in aggravated lung damage. Now, vaccine developers are well aware of this phenomenon, and would work to ensure any commercial vaccine would be free from this failing, but it has been used to venture a guess to account for the unusual age distribution of severe COVID-19 cases.

Perhaps similar coronaviruses circulated silently decades ago, and those old enough to have been exposed to them are now experiencing exaggerated responses to COVID-19. But young people never saw them, so they don’t get the over-reaction. I’m not suggesting this speculation is true. I just use it to illustrate the complexity of our immune interactions. Viruses attack, we counterattack, and then viruses sometimes evolve to use our own counterattack in their favor.

2018 photo from the Kremlin website

The malleability of the human mind, and of “popular consensus”, is both fascinating and terrifying. At a time when the last humans who witnessed the atrocities committed with the full consent of their armies’ citizens during WW2 are dying, we have seemingly learned nothing about the process by which popular opinion can be warped through the use of propaganda and misinformation.

The occupation and slaughter of millions of Iraqis in 2003 was possible only because the news media almost without exception parroted unsupported intelligence agency propaganda that Iraq’s government had WMD and planned to use them. Afterwards, few of the media admitted they’d been duped and exploited by “flawed” intelligence, and they pretty much learned nothing from the experience.

Both before and since then, the media have been endlessly conned, in their search for “exclusives” and for “information” that supports their editorial leanings and readers’ and sponsors’ worldviews, into repeating reams of outrageous falsehoods from “credible sources”. And in turn they have conned us. Whatever ideas we may have about what is happening in Syria, in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ukraine, in Iran, or in China or a hundred other countries, those ideas are probably heavily influenced by what we have read in media that rely for their information on “the intelligence community” and the vested interests it serves.

This is increasingly so as these media, hemorrhaging from the loss of ad revenues to the execrable “social media”, have slashed investigating reporting and international bureaus. In the process, they have turned into little more than second-hand gossip-mongers and PR flacks, throwing up their hands in “we didn’t know it wasn’t true” denials when their “reporting” turns out to be utterly, criminally (leading to millions of deaths and untold misery) wrong.

And they wonder why we don’t want to “subscribe” to their shoddy publications.

So it’s no surprise that millions of people believe absurd conspiracy theories, such as that CoVid-19 was deliberately manufactured in a Chinese lab with the complicity of Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. After all, unnamed “reliable sources” citing other unnamed “reliable sources” said it was true. And it was “shared” six gazillion times. So it must be true.

The media claim they have to protect their unnamed sources because whistle-blowers, once named, face death and worse for speaking the truth. I’m sure this is so. But that doesn’t mean that the media do not have a responsibility to obtain highly-persuasive evidence that a whistle-blower’s information is correct before they present it as truth, as “news”, in their publications. A mere rumour, even from a “usually reliably source”, is just a rumour, and it is no better than a lie.

And while we’re learning not to expect much from the media, much less politicians, we have come to expect more from the scientific community. Sadly, these days they are letting us down as well. There have been several “research studies” on CoVid-19 that have been retracted, some almost as soon as they were published, others too late to stem the flood of misinformation and conspiracy theory “I told you so” blather in social media that continues, oblivious to the retractions, for years afterwards. Other “research studies” are so strident, so blatantly political motivated or biased by personal, reputational or profit incentives, that they shatter your confidence in anything you read afterwards in scientific journals.

The reasons for this scientific misinformation are pretty obvious: Big Pharma and Big Ag companies and other corporate sponsors will pay you bucketfuls of money for research “results” that promise them a big payday, and they’ll squelch or dis any research you publish that shows them to be charlatans, drug- and addictive-food pushers, and opportunistic predators. There is no money, and no research grants, offered to do research that shows for example the incredible health benefits of eating well and exercising, and the staggering cost of eating what you so love to eat now and of continuing your horrifically unhealthy lifestyle.

Meanwhile, if your self-serving “research” tells people what they want to believe (eg that social distancing isn’t that necessary to prevent CoVid-19), everyone will love you, and the media will rush to promote your “findings”, regardless of their legitimacy, integrity or substance.

And if some researcher beats you to the punch with newsworthy (reputation- and fame-making) research, well, there’s an obvious motivation to criticize it. Especially if you don’t have to provide anything of your own to counter it; just cite your previous credentials, badmouth and undermine the report, and promise that you will soon provide more credible research. Or alternatively, if the ballyhooed research angers the political or scientific establishment, tweak your own research so that it helps the powers that be perpetrate their lies, and you’ll get a ton of publicity and support.

There is, alas, no motivation for doing the hard work of legitimate, objective, investigative research, and publishing the results regardless of whether the recipients want to believe them or not. There is no money or fame in it, and there is enormous risk. There is huge motivation for superficial and sloppy, biased research that results in those consuming it thanking you for confirming their beliefs, whether or not they have any basis in truth.

The latest example of sloppy journalism is this week’s claim that Russian operatives (how many, under whose authority?) offered and paid bounties to Taliban militants (how many?) in Afghanistan for killing American and British troops. The unsubstantiated claim originated with the NYT and was soon reposted in self-congratulatory terms by the WaPo and WSJ, who apparently got calls from the same “sources”.

Caitlin Johnstone had the same response I did:

All western mass media outlets are now shrieking about the story The New York Times first reported, citing zero evidence and naming zero sources, claiming intelligence says Russia paid out bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for attacking the occupying forces of the US and its allies in Afghanistan. As of this writing, and probably forevermore, there have still been zero intelligence sources named and zero evidence provided for this claim…

The fact that The New York Times instead chose to uncritically parrot these evidence-free claims made by operatives within intelligence agencies with a known track record of lying about exactly these things is nothing short of journalistic malpractice. The fact that western media outlets are now unanimously regurgitating these still 100 percent baseless assertions is nothing short of state propaganda…

All the three [newspapers] actually did was use their profoundly influential outlets to uncritically parrot something nameless spooks want the public to believe, which is the same as just publishing a CIA press release free of charge. It is unprincipled stenography for opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies…

The New York Times has admitted itself that it was wrong for uncritically parroting the unsubstantiated spook claims which led to the Iraq invasion, as has The Washington Post. There is no reason to believe Taliban fighters would require any bounty to attack an illegitimate occupying force. The Russian government has denied these allegations. The Taliban has denied these allegations. The Trump administration has denied that the president or the vice president had any knowledge of the spook report in question, denouncing the central allegation that liberals who are promoting this story have been fixated on. Yet this story is being magically transmuted into an established fact, despite its being based on literally zero factual evidence.

Why has this happened? Because it feeds our insatiable human need to be reassured that our beliefs are valid. For Republicans (like most WSJ readers), it confirms their belief that the war in Afghanistan was legitimate, and that the Taliban and Russia are enemies that hate Americans because Americans “love freedom”. For Democrats (like most NYT/WP readers), it confirms their belief that Russia is an enemy that would subvert American elections, that the war in Afghanistan was legitimate, and that Trump, who reportedly was briefed on the “bounties”, is in cahoots with Russia. Something in this “news” for everyone to love!

Republican hawks immediately called for a “proportionate response” against Russia,  without so much as a “if this is true” qualifier. Biden immediately jumped on the report, saying “I’m quite frankly outraged by the report,” adding that if he is elected, “Putin will be confronted and we’ll impose serious costs on Russia.”

What are the questions that critical thinkers (including any remaining responsible newspaper editors) should be asking when this kind of “information” is released?

• How is this different from what “intelligence sources” told us before the Iraq invasion?
• If it’s untrue, who stands to gain from perpetrating and propagating the falsehood (eg military suppliers and other war profiteers)?
• Why would the Taliban need to be bribed to attack what they believe to be a foreign army invading and destroying their country? (The Taliban’s response to the “report” was that they are not “indebted to the beneficence of any intelligence organ or foreign country”.)
• Why would Russian intelligence leaders be so stupid as to offer such bribes to insurgents, knowing they’d be impossible to keep quiet and knowing that their discovery would be very embarrassing to Russia?

I could go on, but you get the idea. Caitlin asks some more damning questions, but I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, and instead try to figure out how and why this happened. Not because I believe it won’t happen again (and again). But because I really do think we’re all doing our best, and I want to know how we all get so easily and dangerously conned by misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The title of this post (the enemy of my enemy is my friend) is an ancient proverb that provides a clue to one answer to this question. It explains how Republicans have become reluctant apologists for Putin, and how Democrats have come to embrace CIA “press releases”. It explains how China, for all its atrocities against its own people, has become an intermittent hero to all sides, and the largest economy and largest creditor (and worst polluter) in the world. When we really want to believe something bad about one “side” on an issue, it is all too easy to become strange bedfellows, for a while, with monsters who share that belief.

So do we just give up seeking the truth, and just believe whatever bullshit theories, unsupported reportage and opinions those in our particular circles uncritically believe? Do we let the “view-from-nowhere” both-sides everything to the point that any kind of moral clarity, and any kind of search for and belief in, fundamental truth is lost?

I don’t think it’s necessary to do that, though I do acknowledge that most people lack the time, access to resources, and (thanks to poor education and propaganda conditioning) the capacity to critically unpack and think through what passes for information and insist on unvarnished truth. I think it’s completely understandable that most are so bewildered by the endless firehose of misinformation and conspiracy theories that they no longer know what to believe, or cease believing that anything is absolutely true, and/or opt for simplistic beliefs that are consistent with those of their particular circles. Even when those beliefs hurt others and lead to massive cruelty, suffering and war.

I think there still is such a thing as absolute, verifiable truth. I have to believe that, because it is the only way I can make confident assertions about our teetering economic “system”, our collapsing climate and ecosystems, and about what seems to be human nature. We may only be able to know and believe things on “the preponderance of evidence”, but that can and must be enough.

It can be enough to enable us to discount, and (if we can wean ourselves off our new addiction to social media) not even expose ourselves to time-wasting, self-interested, and sometimes dangerous misinformation, rumour and conspiracy theories. And when such nonsense infects those we know and care about, all we can do is keep restating the truth and the importance of never giving up the search for it.  And when we find ourselves infected, all we can do is keep challenging what we believe, not to the point of not believing anything, but to the point we know, as best as we can, that what we believe is based on substantiated evidence of the truth, and not on what we fear, or what we ideally would like to believe.

As for the rest of the world, and their beliefs, we cannot hope to influence them, or prevent the tragedies they lead to.

Moral clarity — the kind that finds cruelty, dishonesty, hatred, fear-mongering and racism, and pandering to these traits,  instinctively repulsive — comes, I think, from a combination of our insatiable passion to know the truth, our capacity for critical thinking, and our innate biophilia — our acceptance that we’re all one, all a part of Gaia, and all doing our best. Our responsibility to help the world “do better” starts and ends, I think, with pursuing and helping others find and see the truth, even as we know most of them will not or cannot see it.

Our real “enemies” are ignorance, fear, credulousness and gullibility. They transcend beliefs and worldviews, and are pandered to and perpetrated by social media (and too often, now, by struggling and inept mainstream media), by self-interested politicians and corporations, and by our own hapless, bewildered and overwhelmed peer groups.

They can never be defeated, only worked on, endlessly, a bit at a time. It would be nice if some of the once-reliable media, and the scientists, would get back on board.

This is a bit of a Straw Man thought experiment. It suggests that economic collapse might only occur when we can no longer keep generating more and more cheap energy, rather than when we realize that the current global mountain of debts can never be repaid, or that profits cannot possibly increase forever. It is probably a deeply flawed argument, and I’d love to hear what economists think about it.

Alberta Tar Sands, soon to cover an area larger than NY State; its toxic sludge ponds alone are large enough to be visible from space. Photo by Dru Oja Jay, Howl Arts Collective, for The Dominion CC-BY-2.0

So here’s the thing. Your argument about economic collapse being inevitable and overdue shows that you just don’t understand just how fictional the economy really is. It’s really just an agreement, mostly among those with wealth and power, on how that wealth and power is to be distributed. Like any fictional movie, it never has to end. We just keep adding sequels, upping the ante.

You say there are limits on how much debt can be accumulated before the economy collapses. That’s only true if the psychology of the market is such that those with money believe that the debts cannot be repaid, and therefore no one is willing to advance any more money, credit dries up, buying dries up, business dries up, profits plunge, and so on.

But the point is, the debts don’t ever have to be repaid. For those of us who have wealth — the 10% of us who have 80% of the net physical assets and 90% of the net financial assets — we’re content to just let those debts ride forever. Just keep rolling them over. We don’t even care if they’re worthless, as long as we, the 10%, agree not to call them in. After all, the Fed lets us borrow as much money as we want at 0% interest, so it’s not like we need the cash. We’re actually getting a pretty good ROI on what we’ve loaned out — an average of 16% when you weigh in the unsecured lines of credit, the 30% credit card interest, the car loans, the second and third home mortgages. So even if half of that interest is defaulted on, we’re still getting 8% on the money we lend out, which we borrowed from the Fed (essentially, the taxpayers) at 0%. What a great time to be rich!

And it’s the same with stocks. We own 90% of them, so we basically dictate the market price of them. We’ll never panic, even if the P/E ratios soar to 100 or more, which they’re at for Apple and Tesla and most of the other ‘prime investments’ we’re into. Because as long as we agree that the shares are worth that, they’re worth that. The peons can panic and sell, and their 10% won’t even cause a blip in the market. What else are we going to invest in with all our money, more Jaguars?

If the P/E seems to be a bit too high for comfort, we’ll just borrow some more money at 0%, and use it to buy back a bunch of the shares, until the P/E is back in an acceptable range again. No problem. A simple accounting trick and the prices are primed to climb again. And you won’t hear a peep from the peons about this. After all, while their 10% of the market is just a pittance, for most of them it’s their entire life savings, their retirement, their pension, their kids’ university fund. They’ll cheer when the price goes up, even if it makes no sense.

Yeah, I know, you’re worried about them drowning in debt. They’ve been drowning in debt for 30 years now, getting ever deeper into it. The median net worth of a family in this country is less than zero. They’re used to it. We’ve changed the laws so they essentially can’t declare bankruptcy anymore, so they’re just on the hook, for a lifetime. For their descendants’ lifetimes. Two incomes instead of one, now, per family, and longer and longer hours for (real-inflation-adjusted) less and less money per hour, every year. Deeper and deeper. We won’t let them go under; we just want to keep their shoulders to the grindstone, and not think about anything except the next thing they want to buy to feel a bit better about themselves and their situation. They may have a negative net worth, but they’ve all got two cars now, and a bigger house, so they think they’re better off than when they had equity, and savings, and only one of them had to work.

And why in the world would they ever aspire to have savings? To invest it to earn 0%, or worry about investing it in real estate or stocks whose value they have no control over? Nah, they’re happy. Well, they’re not happy that they have to work so hard, and they’re not happy about having no security, and they’re not happy about social and political and ecological collapse, but we just have to keep pitting them against each other over how to deal with those things, and then we can pretty much ignore them.

It was a bit of a challenge through the ’80s and ’90s to adjust the economy to keep the profits growing, I admit. We had to basically outsource and offshore all the labour costs and all the manufacturing, so we could cut out all those annoying costs and stop worrying about unions and environmental regulations. Now the only asset we have to worry about managing is the Brand, so the only costs we have to monitor are marketing costs —keeping all those peons salivating for the newer, faster, sexier everything. As long as they keep spending like good little consumers, we’re laughing. And everything we sell now — speed, sex, salt, sugar, both types of oil, drugs, escape, lifestyle, self-esteem, entertainment, thrills, self-gratification, 15  minutes of fame, creature comforts, more, more — is totally addictive, so we hardly even have to market. They sell each other on the next thing they need to buy, on social media, with just a little prompting from us.

Yeah, I know, because we got rid of all the decent-paying jobs (except ours, of course), it’s taken some work, and a lot of strong-arming of the politicians and preachers on the whole it’s-your-fault-you’re-poor/unemployed/sick thing, the whole responsibility-to-look-after-your-family thing, so that the peons sighed and agreed to do the really boring minimum wage service jobs just to eke by — often two or three jobs, part-time, with no costly ‘benefits’ for us to have to pay. But look at all the paper-shuffling jobs we’ve created that pay modestly more than minimum wage, that the peons can aspire to. Hundreds of thousands of jobs working for the HMOs alone. Millions more working for the banks, the insurance companies, the courier companies, and of course our latest bit of genius, “security” jobs. Instead of job security they have security jobs. Funny, huh?

You think they’re going to get fed up and revolt? On what basis? They’ve never known anything else. And it’s not like the education system’s going to wise them up. They’re not starving; in fact, thanks to the malnutrition caused by our Big Ag businesses, they’re overweight and feeling like they have no right to complain, and they’re too sick with diabetes and heart disease and cancer and depression and all the other stress-triggered diseases our various enterprises have given them to think straight anyway.

Yeah, I admit, there’s a bit of a problem there. They’re so sick they’re clogging up the hospitals and dying on us before they’ve finished their consumer lifecycle, and then they try to declare bankruptcy when they can’t pay the medical bills. Kind of a fly in the ointment there. But you know, we have a few tricks up our sleeve yet. After decades of telling them there’s no such thing as a free lunch, we’re going to give them one. We’re going to give them free medical care. We’ll have to have a flat tax to pay for it, of course. But are they going to be grateful! Even though we’re giving them what most of the affluent nations already have, they’re going to think we’re the most generous people on the planet.

And if they can’t pay the flat tax, we’ll allow them to take out reverse mortgages on their homes, or reverse loans on their cars. No, not so we can repo their assets when they die, are you crazy? The kids just take over the debts. We don’t care if they’re ever repaid. We have assets backing them, so we just borrow the money from the Fed — from the peons, really, if you look into it — fully collateralized, and we have all the cash we need.

You’re worried about the virus, aren’t you? You still don’t get it. We can fund that as well. It’s not as if they were doing anything of value before they lost their jobs anyway. The only reason we didn’t automate, or just “make redundant” most of their jobs, is because we need to keep the engine going. We need consumers, consumers with cash to buy more and more stuff to keep revenues and profits growing. Grow or die, my friend. The consumers are the hands that feed us, so we don’t want them starving or permanently unemployed. So we have kept all these Bullshit Jobs so they don’t feel ashamed to take money for doing nothing; we have to leave them their pride. And every penny we pay out for these jobs comes right back to us as soon as they get it. Gotta get that addictive spending cranked up again.

It astonishes me that the rabble among the peons have been calling for a guaranteed annual income as if this were a revolutionary and unthinkable thing. We’ve already introduced it for most of them with all the Bullshit Jobs, all that seemingly important work by the flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters that’s actually completely expendable, but which we’ve maintained so the peons can keep their sense of self-worth. We’re perfectly willing to introduce it for everyone else; after all, the money we pay them is going to come right back to us anyway. We just need to introduce it in a way that it won’t seem ‘unfair’ to the Bullshit Job workers, and so it’s not taken as some kind of shameful ‘welfare’, though that’s what it is.

The recent riots have given us some ideas. What if we reinvent the police forces as the Social Mediation forces, for example? We’d have to find something to do with all the extra armaments of course, but we could let the peons create unarmed Citizen Councils where each community would take over collective, consensual responsibility for the social wellness of the community. Maybe they’d even find some way of managing addiction, family violence, gangs and some of the other problems of the chronically poor, homeless, physically and mentally ill, unemployed and underemployed. You know, the people the police have to deal with now. They’d have the complete police budget to work with. And we could throw in some more money if they could actually succeed at reducing the costs of homelessness, illness and despair. Hardly rocket science. Everyone not otherwise employed would get a guaranteed minimum wage job with the Citizen Council. They could sort out who does what.

So they’d have this sense of more local power, whether it was actually real or not. They’d have the pride of doing seemingly useful work to earn a living. They’d get to know each other better. They might even solve a bunch of problems and pay for themselves, and maybe even reduce our philanthropy costs.

And the wonderful thing is — for us in the 10%, this wouldn’t change anything at all. We’d keep raking it in same as always. Every penny earned comes right back to us. The peons stay in economic thrall, working like hell to buy more and more of what we sell them, and ignoring all those big nasty issues like ecological collapse and the end of cheap energy.

‘Cause I know you were going to get around to that, my friend. Yes, those are the two issues that we actually don’t have a solution for. We’ve been stalling them off for more than fifty years now, but ultimately you can’t deny that, unlike our economy, which is just a fiction, the physical world does have limits to growth. The virus has probably put off the energy crisis another few years, but there are only so many frackin’ rabbits we can pull out of that hat. Growth is dependent on ever-increasing extraction of cheap energy; every barrel of oil does 4.5 person-years of work, producing stuff that generates revenues that generates profits that keep the growth cycle going. And make no mistake — what we call the ‘economy’ absolutely depends on continuing growth, which in turn depends on continuing increases in production and consumption of oil. If we can’t afford to extract it, we’re fucked. Eight billion humans we can handle, my friend. The end of cheap-to-extract energy we cannot.

And yes, we’re well on our way to ecological collapse. We can’t handle that either. But the interesting thing about humans is that we will believe what we want to believe, no matter what. And just like us, the peons don’t want to believe that the Human Experiment on this planet is inexorably coming to a ghastly and miserable end. At least not before they finally get theirs!

So the world is on fire, but no one wants to recognize it. So we can keep dancing. Until it doesn’t matter, to any of us, anymore. You want to get off, go ahead. I got mine, and I’m riding it to the end of the line. Too much to lose to stop now. No matter what the stakes, I’m all in.

The numbers above are my own second-guessing of published data on CoVid-19 as at June 8th, 2020. For reasons explained below, they may be wildly inaccurate, but they’re my best guesses at this point, based on the sources cited.

This is my eighth and likely final update on what we know and don’t know about the first wave of the CoVid-19 pandemic. Those of us who’ve been following the numbers are getting increasingly disenchanted with the quality of data reporting, and it’s looking as if our wild guesses on how it’s proceeding will only get wilder as the data gets more and more suspect.

Spain, for example, presumably eager to jump-start its collapsed tourist industry, has essentially just stopped reporting new deaths. So has Brasil, a little more blatantly. And even in countries that have tried hard to report accurate data, much of what’s happening now is what in the wooly world of accounting is called “prior period adjustments” — jurisdictions reporting higher cumulative death totals but asserting that almost all the recent deaths actually happened a week or two earlier so there are almost no “new” deaths to report. Of course, given delays in reporting, this seemingly good news will give rise to further restatements a week or two hence, when today’s deaths are likewise revised sharply upwards. This has definitely “smoothed” some of the numbers for past months, but it dramatically understates some of the actual daily death totals for the most recent days, giving unwitting cover to those proclaiming that the risk has passed and that economies should be fully reopened.

Here’s some of what does seem to be true, however:

• The mortality rate for CoVid-19 Wave One continues to look to be around 1.0%, based on retroactive data on excess deaths and on serology tests that estimate the proportion of populations that (symptoms or no) have been infected with the virus. The chart above, as of today, takes a stab at what the final actual Wave One death counts will be in various jurisdictions. Sources of the data for each column are shown, and as you can see some of them are pretty wild guesses, but it’s doubtful with the current obfuscation that we’ll end up with anything much more accurate in retrospect.
• The actual likely deaths from the virus are continuing to average about 50% more than official reported figures even in the most diligent jurisdictions, for several understandable reasons I’ve mentioned in earlier posts. In countries with less advanced monitoring and reporting, it’s likely, as some reports have suggested, that actual death tolls could be as much as ten times official reports. The worst offenders are not necessarily the usual suspects however. There is some compelling evidence that China actually did, with its draconian measures, essentially halt spread of the virus so that only 0.1% of its population was infected. And while Russia is likely understating its numbers, its low male life expectancy means that less of its population is in the most vulnerable age groups; and Russians travel less than Western Europeans so we would expect less exposure to the virus especially outside the big wealthy cities. India’s data is a big question mark as well, with its young population less vulnerable to the virus, low reliance on the hospital system, and few funerals. And Brasil is anyone’s guess: Latin America (and Latino Americans in the US) seem especially vulnerable to the virus.
• Probably about 3% of the world’s population will be infected by Wave One of the virus by this summer; but that number hides some huge variations both between and within countries. It’s likely that over 20% of people in some big cities will have been infected, more than twice the infection rates for the rest of the country. (Highest proportion is 57% in Bergamo, Italy’s hardest-hit city.) And in some places in these same countries infection rates are less than 0.5%; and less than 0.1% — under one person in a thousand — is likely still infectious. Therein lie the hazards of early relaxation of restrictions. Nowhere is the number who’ve been infected (and presumably are now immune) anywhere near “herd immunity” levels.
• According to a report today from the WHO, research now suggests “it seems to be very rare that an asymptomatic [infected] person actually transmits [CoVid-19] onward to a secondary individual”.[EDIT June 9th noon: the WHO just walked back this assertion, saying it was inaccurate to say this was “very rare”; these guys just can’t seem to get their act together. Here’s a taste of the staggering damage this reckless WHO statement has done in just a few hours]. That means almost all transmission is from people visibly suffering from symptoms of the disease, which reinforces other evidence that this disease is less infectious than we thought, and more deadly when it is transmitted than we thought. And reinforces that, alas, the vast majority of us have zero immunity if the relaxation of restrictions leads to new spikes in cases, and to the next wave.
• Anthony Fauci reported today that, even when a vaccine is developed and safely introduced, “it likely isn’t going to be a long duration of immunity.” The level of rigour needed to vaccinate everyone not just once but regularly is going to be an ongoing challenge. Some coronavirus research has suggested we may all need to be inoculated more often than once a year.
• Two new as-yet-not-peer-reviewed articles pre-published today in the journal Nature say it’s likely that (imposed and voluntary) restrictions on contact have already reduced the number of cases by more than half a billion in just six nations studied, including 285 million in China and 60 million in the US. With a 1% mortality rate that’s five million lives saved. The second study says three million lives have been saved in a dozen European countries (an 82% overall reduction in cases and deaths), equating to a reduction of 300 million infections in those countries. At least eight million lives already saved in fewer than 20 countries studied; probably worth the social and economic sacrifice, no?
• A group of 511 epidemiologists surveyed about their personal plans for the next year said the following activities are off the table for them until at least next year:
  • attending weddings, funerals, church services, sporting events, concerts or plays
  • going out with people they don’t know well
  • hugging and handshaking
  • not wearing a mask when not social distancing
  • the same group will mostly also not do the following at least until the fall: dinner parties, picnics, camping, day care, play dates, buses, subways, airplanes, gyms, dine-in restaurants, shared office spaces, visiting elderly relatives, visiting friends in their homes
• Those on the west coast of North America who were feeling a bit smug about their low infection rates relative to the rest of their countries might be chagrined to know that it appears most of the west coast cases are genetically closer to the European variant of the virus than the Chinese variant. That suggests that despite some very early first reported cases in California, Washington and British Columbia, the virus probably made its way from east to west, so west coasters actually had a few extra days to shut down and social distance relative to hard-hit New Yorkers and Québecois, rather than the other way around. More possible evidence for just how effective the Asian actions and preparedness were compared to the rest of the world’s.
• And though it probably needn’t be repeated, it’s still absolutely true that we don’t know how CoVid-19 kills us. And we also don’t have any idea why some countries with big crowded cities (Sri Lanka, Lebanon), lots of travel, lots of old people (Japan), lots of poverty (Haiti), and few restrictions (Cambodia) have largely been untouched, while others that have locked down early (Peru), whose people travel relatively little (Dominican Rep.), have low poverty levels (Belgium), have young populations (Ecuador), and are less densely populated (Bolivia), have been hammered. It has to be more than luck, and perhaps the next wave will be an equalizer, but I’m not so sure: there must be a reason.

I got passionate about this when I worked with a group of epidemiologists for a while after the SARS virus emerged. I realized then (and wrote about) how great the danger was and how unprepared we were for it. I wish I’d been wrong. I still think this is just a test run; it could have been, and eventually will be, much much worse. Ready or not.