Bleeding Edge

Americans, Britons, and all the Peoples of this world, have had enough …

… and are marching for justice in unprecedented numbers. In small towns and big cities across the country, thousands of people are giving voice to the grief and anger that generations of black Americans have suffered at the hands of the criminal justice system. Young and old, black and white, family and friends have joined together to say: enough.

The unconscionable examples of racism over the last weeks and months come as America’s communities of color have been hit hardest by the coronavirus and catastrophic job losses. This is a perfect storm hitting black Americans. Meanwhile, the political leadership suggests that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. The president who promised to end the “American carnage” is in danger of making it worse.

The past three months have been a global experiment to test whether modern economies built on social interaction are compatible with methods for tackling a pandemic that haven’t changed much, since the Black Death epidemic of the middle ages, or since the 1918 influenza — the infamous Spanish Flu, that was truly just another annual Chinese strain of the flu virus that had proved to be particularly potent and unusually lethal emanating from that country where people are customarily eating live wild animals and avian species.

Live sushi anyone?

Aside from China, and North Korea, for the rest of the world that still produces some reliably true statistics — the grim reaper has spoken and the economic results are now in.

Lockdowns are toxic.

Home incarceration, house arrest, shutdowns, lockdowns and social distancing, is what really killing us.

Killing us truly and figuratively.

And this is the tragedy for a shut-down world, where the memory of people used to driving every day to their work spaces, and come home after some shopping or entertainment, or where people commuted to work on the underground, on buses or riding commuter trains, just to spend eight hours with their colleagues at the office, go to the neighborhood bodega or a fast food lunch spot, and at the end of their workday, perhaps doing a bit of shopping, and then heading off to the pub, the theatre or the football … is now a distant dream.

Both America and Great Britain have imposed severe restrictions towards the end of March, and by the end of April, according to initial estimates by the Office for National Statistics, the economy had shrunk by 25% in Britain and by a similar percentage in the US.

Unemployment in the United States has skyrocketed with some states like Nevada clocking in at 30% and the same being true in most US states as well as England and the rest of the United Kingdom.

Of course, now we have to be optimistic, but the data tells us a grim tale, and yet even these grim statistics under-represent the problem, because of the difficulty in getting data from cities and states where companies and shops and all other enterprises have been forced to close down, amongst the many that have shuttered their doors forever…

Little by little, restrictions are being lifted, yet life is not going to return to normal for quite a while, at least as long as face masks are obligatory on public transport, diners have to stay six feet apart in restaurants and all customers are discouraged to browse in shops, to use public transport, or to even fly.

For the rest of 2020 and even this decade and beyond — any type of recovery will be even slower in the event of a second wave of infections, or of an annual return of cases — something that the history of past viral flu pandemics suggests that it is quite likely to happen.

So if the recurrence of this massive problem is probable — then we are truly and royally screwed.

This Wuhan Covid-19 epidemic is bad enough, yet the resultant panic seems to be the sort of mental virus that sticks around for a long time, if not ever…

And although the number of new cases has been on a downward trend for weeks as a result of the severest curbs on the UK and the US populations ever imposed during peacetime, and the arrival of warmer weather — one has to wonder about what happens in the autumn when restrictions have been further eased and climate turns cold as worldwide temperatures in the Northern hemisphere start to drop again?

And what if the downward trend of infections and disease, is reversed, does the government lock down the economy a second time?

The answer is almost certainly not.

No, the governments will not impose this type of Draconian restrictions ever again.

Just the thought alone for the possibility of a second wave of Wuhan Coronavirus in the Fall — spooked financial markets last week, and saw share prices crashing, much like in the early stages of the crisis, because investors understood that measures taken to control the pandemic would result in much weaker corporate profits.

Markets subsequently rallied, because the tentative easing of lockdown restrictions raised hopes of a V-shaped recession, but then they had second thoughts after an increase in new Wuhan Covid-19 cases in a number of the United States, mainly in the south.

As an example, the city of Houston in Texas is mulling the possibility of ordering people to stay in their homes under lockdown, in a form of “Collective House Arrest” all over again.

Yesterday a complete shutdown has been imposed in Beijing China, after the city reported many new cases of Covid-19 after almost two months of relative calm and quiet…

This see-saw response and erratic behavior of this epidemic, is likely to be the template for the months ahead, to be alternating between complete lockdowns, a shutdown, and also a more targeted or localized approach to shutdowns, rather than a blanket ban on all socioeconomic activity throughout the country.

It is now evident that political leaders are going to be wary of reimposing full lockdowns, as they have every reason to be.

For a start, it has become clear that there is no such thing as “the science” when it comes to Covid-19. Immunologists have different views about infection rates and possible mortality outcomes in the same way that monetarists and Keynesians differ over economics.

Governmental ministers feel that they have no option but to adopt a safety-first approach and order a complete shutdown as they did when this pandemic crisis first broke out in March because there was a genuine risk that an uncontrolled pandemic would overwhelm the health care sector.

Mainly because simple analysis showed that every single person who had contracted the virus — was infecting three others.

Of course, now, three months later and with the benefit of hindsight — things look rather different.

The Health Care Systems coped well, and the extra capacity installed through the hospital sectors was not even needed.

The R number – the reproduction rate at which the virus spreads – has come down from three to one or just below one in the past months and now people are mainly asymptomatic as “Herd Immunity” has kicked in.

Additionally, massive evidence of the nasty harmful side effects of the lockdown and Collective House Arrests have also emerged. The number of suicides is way up, and indeed it is so high that the cities supress it and do not report it under pain of death!

Predictably domestic violence has increased hundred fold, as have spousal murders and “murder-suicide pacts” that see whole families decimated fully.

Communal mental health is suffering beyond belief.

Unemployment figures are out of this world, and the new figures released this past week illustrate the human cost of a 29.4% drop in national output in just one month.

In England alone, the jobless total is heading for 3 million this summer, despite the fact that the government is currently paying a third of the workforce.

As the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out last week, the crisis has deepened Britain’s class, ethnic, gender and generational divides. Young people are the least likely demographic group to be infected with Covid-19 but they are being particularly hard hit by the lockdown. The cost of school closures for all children, but especially those from poorer households, will be high. The 18-24 age group are most likely to end up unemployed because many of them work in hospitality, retailing and leisure.

The likelihood that Covid-19 will resurface a second and perhaps a third or fourth time makes the case for a measured approach to future lockdowns even stronger. All the evidence is that six months without going to school is more than twice as damaging as three months. The same applies to youth unemployment. The longer the time workers spend out of work the deeper the scars.

Getting young people to abide by a second lockdown would be not just problematic, but downright impossible.

Because naturally, they want to go to work.

People want to go out and play.

They thirst to go to the local, in order to meet their mates.

They harken to go on demonstrations and express their anger and disgust at the racist attitudes of the Police state that kills its citizens wantonly.

Still many just want to go out and have some fun.

And because the younger generations know that they are at a very low risk from infection — they will never be willingly and compliantly sequestered again, under any governmental order for Collective Punishment via House Arrest.

Lockdown or not — our American freedom loving people will do their own cost-benefit analysis, and will not comply Government orders again.

At any rate, it is quite clear already that most people have decided that Covid-19 is a risk they are prepared to accept as part of daily lives like automobile accidents, and drug overdoses or even the seasonal flu that altogether kill far more people than the Wuhan Coronavirus ever could.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

And now it is the Economic War that we have to win against China, and because of that — countries such as Britain and the US must let their societies open up fully and start operating as near to normal as possible, or they will be shut down permanently as economic powerhouses.

And if they haven’t already done so — governments all over the Free World, will conclude that the economic, social, health and educational costs of full lockdowns are just too high and that somehow we have to learn to live with Covid-19 as normal free & Democratic societies all over again.

Because when governments take strong decisions for all of us — we the Free Citizens end up being killed by the minions of the obedient bureaucracy who have run amok, like the unjustly and untimely destroyed thousands of people inside the nursing homes of New York State where Governor Cuomo, sent all the Covid-19 patients of New York, in order to be sequestered in the most egregious example of Criminal Government Bureaucracy in America since the Trail of Tears and Extermination against our First American nations’ brothers and sisters.

If that’s not an example of Mass Extermination like the German Nazi “Final Solution” that we now know as the Holocaust — you tell me what it is.

Please do not ever forget that.

So if the government comes knocking — go out the other way to save your children and do not even think of obeying mass vaccinations from those that want to thin out the human “herd” of sheeple.

Because there is such plan to be enacted by my good and errant ex-friend Bill Gates and the evil WHO along with the likes of those evil doers who have the ear of those executives in Government — who think that they know better what’s good for you and for your children than yourself…

And this is exactly what happened in Germany of the 1930’s and all over Europe and the World in the 1940’s through the rise of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan, along with the Axis of Evil partners and allies that harvested humans for burning and extermination in an orgy of bloodlust and evil doing.

Let us not forget the white panel vans that pulled outside of the nice bourgeois German homes where the Mothers of autistic children turned over the child to the nice Doctor and the nurse who swiftly placed that person inside the back of the van and closed the door securely while raving up the engine to cover the cries of the kid inside as the Doctor turned on the valve, unleashing the cyclone gas that killed the child inside amidst horrific cries for his Mother and for Help.

Then the Nazi Doctor and the nice German nurse, walked up to the House and gave the Good Fraulein & proud German Mother, a receipt for services rendered and asked for the payment for the Extermination Services offered…

Do we want to see that again?

Well, it seems that we already saw it in new York state.

The nursing homes death camps are as close as we got to that inside these United States in the year of the Lord 2020.

PPS:

And for the Great Conspiracy Theorists amongst us — here are some more crumbs…

But do not fret, because …

Because our Great and Loving God shall come again.

He shall come and he shall not keep silent.

And he will order a great fire to devour all evil doers in front him.