May I introduce JC. Not that JC, another one. I won't say how I know him just that I don't know him well-well. I've had to interact with him in my life to know him by his deeds. But in the glory of social media his beliefs are more apparent. He's probably a hippie of old. Identifies as an anarchist. Generally a genial guy and despite the despotic role I sometimes find myself in his life, he hasn't shown his anarchic side in a professional setting. Older anarchists need something to retire on.
Outside of work, on social media, he is big on climate change conspiracies and protesting 5G. Climate change denial is big among people, who are suspicious of government control; it so fits well into the suspicions that make anarchy appealing, even though I've heard of such a thing as enviro-anarchists as well. For him, and others I've met, there is a belief that people in the government have a driving conviction to control population size because of the science of the 1970s, which suggested that we'd run out of resources if there was continued population growth, and thus the governments of the world, led by the UN, were currently fabricating or deludedly interpreting current science, and restricting the freedom of people. That is a convoluted sentence, and I'd say it reveals much about the sense in the belief thereof. Or, they see climate science as a cynical tool for the governments to control the lives of the people to suit their economic interests. Either way, you can see the kneejerk belief of an anarchist to control from an authority.
It's with case studies like him that you see how beliefs colour perceptions. And so while I was in self-isolation, I saw onn social media him proclaiming he didn't believe in coronavirus being a threat. Now, I can understand some disbelief in epidemics because so often infectious health crises, hyped up in the media for consumption, have often fizzled. (Or apparently fizzled: Ebola never arrived right, but still zapped off only 11,000 souls due to the efforts of the global community; Swine flu eventually killed in the hundreds of thousands, though it spread so widely without the death rate to really cause people to head for the hills.) I can understand the kind of reaction that repeated tsunami warnings without a Fukushima evokes. But this did not seem to be his reason.
It seemed that he thought that governments would embrace the coronavirus, or any incipient pandemic, as an excuse to increase their own control over people's lives. Control of the populace is the government's raison d'etre, according to an anarchist, and not as some beneficial function to order society. I'd say this is a fair lens to skeptically evaluate the actions of authorities. But it's also backwards: a theory of the world does not define objective reality. Objective reality informs our theories. And there is plenty of evidence to dispel the theory that covid-19 is a hoax by those in power.
Firstly, taking China as an example, the state is harming itself to fight this, seemingly in order to save as many people as possible. People can have their views on the corruption of the authoritarian governance but, the "cure" has been a massive blow to their economy. When the dust settles, this will be a historic bad year in China's resurgence as a global power. And it was having a difficult recent year to start off with. To be clear, China has crippled itself with economic "own goals" in the past: the Cultural Revolution was such a case where it put China backwards, but that did have clear political ends so you can understand the ends that ridiculously led to the means. (It was to eliminate Mao's enemies within the Party.) In China today, President Xi has no contenders for power. Hubei didn't have any real political weight. There is no detectable utility in the state keeping the populace at home, not working and stifling consumption. Economic faltering is probably the only genuine risk to Xi's power and he has made absolute eradication of the virus primary and economic activity secondary. Probably because not handling the virus would have had a bigger economic impact, and would have been an even bigger shake to his power and that of the Party.
Never trust the Chinese numbers, they say. But if you don't trust these numbers then they can only be even worse as there is no benefit to exaggerating the mortality rate. Iran has nothing to gain either from transparency of numbers but they now easily have the second most Corona brand body bags for a country, even if it is a profitless understatement.
I didn't respond to him on social media. I just let it go. But a few days after I was released from my quarantine I was with him and others and the topic came up at the lunchroom table when another Iranian minister fell ill. (We have an Iranian on our team.) Someone asked my views on the outbreak and I said that I thanked goodness that some countries had penned it up and wish others did so, too; that it was in the league of the Spanish Flu. JC murmured that it is nothing like the Spanish Flu, but I'm not sure if he was reacting from His Theory or any real checking of facts.
With basic Wikipedia checking: Spanish Flu, without modern medicine or a clear understanding of how diseases travelled or how to effectively sanitise and quarantine, killed 40-50 million people. Currently there is no comparison but it's early days and we're in the land of the hypothetical. Spanish Flu's kill rate is estimated between 2-3%. If it had occurred in our present medical landscape it may have had a different outcome. Spanish Flu coming out of nowhere would have presented bigger difficulties than coronavirus. There was no testing possible. But even with the tests, isolation, centralised health systems, rapid communication, Hubei and Wuhan have 4.2% and 4.5% respectively. My only conclusion would be that if this bug had been the one that all the WWI soldiers took back to their countries, it might have sent things back to the nineteenth century. China, exerting its full Hobbesian Leviathan state power, with sacrifice and a daring gamble, still currently has had 3.67% of the confirmed cases as eventual fatalities (3,000 deaths/80,000 cases). The force of the response means now there are only 15 cases outside of Hubei, i.e. just over 1 case per 100,000,000 people in the rest of China. Almost all provinces in China had the advantage of an "early start" and on average have a death rate in 0.8% but with smothering restriction on movement.
Stating the obvious, the speed of response and then the strength of the measures to control seem to be what determines the fatality rate between 0.5-4%. Iran, Italy and possibly even the United States have all given themselves "slow starts" by not noticing the extent of the infection and essentially having deaths from the community infection before really mobilising. The early start approach isn't difficult if a country is primed to expect there is infection. They basically track every case, find the chain of transmission and isolate, and give the populace in particular cities and towns a boring month at home, maybe two months. The reward? A fatality rate less than 1%, an intact medical profession and you get to keep your grandparents. Internationally, Japan and South Korea are a good example of a reasonably early start, despite Japan being dicks about the people on the cruise ship, and Korea having a leftfield cult ruin its numbers.
After his disagreement with me, I didn't challenge him further. For his sake, and his age group, I pray he's (a) right and/or (b) New Zealand's glorious solitude and responsible attitudes hold us in good stead. Because otherwise a power-hungry government is almost the least of his worries.
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