It feels like we are in a James Bond movie where Dr. Evilirus manages to terminate 007 before he could grab the vial of virus and foil the Doctor’s world domination plan. Once we are all locked down in our homes with military roaming the streets Dr. Evilirus appears simultaneously on the screens of all our devices to tell us how wonderful life will be under the new One World Overlord. All our banks have collapsed and the evil doctor knows everything there is to know about every one of us that uses a computer, tablet or smartphone. Resistance is futile.

The virus is upon us and its worst consequences are created by our fear of it and expectation that the state protect us completely from the pandemic. Perhaps we would be better off to cautiously let this rip through the world and be over it. Whatever harm Covid-19 ends up dealing us will be multiplied several times over by the damage caused by government measures taken to protect us from it. It seems like the cure is designed to kill the patient.

Twenty years ago how many of us had ever heard of the 1918 Spanish Flu? We knew of the terrible First World War, deaths in the trenches and poison gas. Scars were imposed upon our culture and the maps of the world. But flu? In one year it killed an estimated 50 million (estimates vary), over twice the lives lost in that world war, but left no scars in the memory of humankind. It was a naturally arising virus that was caught by a third of the world’s population. Approximately 2-3% of those infected died, while over 97 in a 100 survived. That is the average with typical ranges from 0.5% to 5%. Japan and China were at the bottom levels while Fiji lost 5% of its total population, with just 95 in a 100 surviving.

We are not sure where Covid-19 came from and whether it could mutate, as did the Spanish Flu which came in two waves, then disappeared. Covid-19 may well have originated in China’s only lab authorised to work with high-level dangerous pathogens, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WHCDC). A convoluted theory is out there that it originated in a US lab. The wild bat theory falls apart since the carrier species of bat is not sold for meat in the market and the nearest colony is 600 miles away. Those bats are kept in the lab, however, for use in its virus research. There are just over fifty such labs worldwide and, as with nuclear power stations, the risks are immense and therefore the security is very high. But on rare occasions accidents can happen.

So this could well have been an accident, but in today’s well-manipulated world we should at least consider the possibility of purpose. Yes Dr. Evilirus we are onto you! If it was a pre-planned event then one would look for the beneficiaries of such a global catastrophe. First let us flashback to 2008, when catastrophic failure of the global financial system was faced. At the time bank and government chiefs who were working through the night called their wives from the bathroom telling them to pull their max out of cash machines before it all crumbled. Then, by the morning they had managed to sell our futures to the central bankers in exchange for kicking the problem downstream.

We’ve been paddling downstream ever since, knowing that eventually 2008 would revisit a world economy stretched to the limits. Seeing this as imminent and rather than let it all fall apart in a ragged unpredictable mess, far better to implement a sudden controlled demolition of the world economy. By shutting down the world’s major industries, destroying jobs, devaluing savings and investments, those unseen powers can oversee the collapse of their financial house of cards while dodging the attendant blame.  They can also insulate their own substantial financial, industrial, agricultural and pharmaceutical interests across the globe, selling stocks at the peak and mopping up at the bottom. Big Pharma gains strong ammunition behind their drive to vaccinate every human being on the planet, protecting the lives of 1% to enrich the lives of another 1%.

Nobody will be blaming bankers or oligarchs for their immoral and often mendacious activity or governments for flushing our taxes down the toilet of war, corruption, and wasteful bureaucracy. We were brought down by a fucking bug!

Yet that bug’s ancestor in 1918, with a far higher fatality rate than Covid-19 caused little financial distress worldwide. People were careful and where they were not, particularly in indigenous communities, infections and deaths were higher.  Most businesses and shops kept functioning, sometimes with limited hours. People played ball games, sometimes against the rules, and newspapers gave it passing coverage. At the time it was clearly stressful but it was over quickly and disappeared from the scene entirely, through no action of ours. Neighbouring cities St Paul and Minneapolis had different policies, with containment through isolation prominent in St Paul, while Minneapolis was more open, so suspect cases could go visit their doctors, but in a tram with all the windows open. There were twice as many cases per capita in Minneapolis as St Paul, with a death rate of 0.5%, but the death rate of St Paul’s fewer cases was 15%, thirty times as high.

But for a moment forget Dr. Evilirus and his crew to just imagine that it was a strange naturally occurring virus that flew in like a squadron of black swans.  This isn’t 1918 and we are far more equipped with ventilators, IT, and modern life-saving equipment than then. Against that there are more of us on the planet. So what is the threat according to the figures we have?

• COMMENT in Nov 2020 – The risk numbers given below are up to 10 times higher than they actually turned out to be.
  

The average death rate for those infected with Covid-19 is 0.9%, just under 1 in a 100.

It varies considerably with age and up to the

age of 20 the rate is well under 1 in 10,000 of those infected

Aged 20-29 is 3 in 10,000

Aged 30-39 is 8 in 10,000

Aged 40-49 is 15 in 10,000,

Aged 50-59 is 60 in 10,000

Aged 60-69 is 220 in 10,000

Aged 70-79 is 510 in 10,000 – this is my age band and it might look like a lot but it means that 95 out of 100 of us will survive it. Is the glass 5% empty or 95% full?

Over ’80s are the highest at 930 in 10,000. There, just 91 out of 100 will survive the infection.

Note: Though Italian cases show higher death rates 99% had up to three serious pre-existing conditions, with an average age of 78.5.

If people were left to take their own precautions and still interact then while taking some measures to not cross infect, a higher number of people would get Covid-19 and most would brush it off like a light flu or suffer a heavy flu with a different flavour.  Some will need hospitalization, particularly those over 60 with underlying conditions. More than 9 in 10 of the elderly cases will survive it and like the rest of the population, be immune to it from then on. Covid-19 could then die off as did the 1918 pandemic, swine flu, sars and the rest.

The numbers add up though, and if 70% of Britons caught Covid-19 flu the death toll could almost equal the number of UK deaths from all other causes in one year, which is 500,000. And then it’s over, done and gone. 730,000 new people are born every year in the UK, which number could rise with many being confined to quarters.  Worldwide, if 60% contract Covid-19, deaths could reach a staggering 40-50 million added to the annual 60 million deaths worldwide. Both figures combined are still overtaken by 140 million annual births. Ten years later it will be no more than the sad memory of a family member prematurely lost to the Great Flu.

The practical problem is that extra cases of flu would not be spread more or less evenly across the months, but concentrated in peaks. This would put huge pressure on the health services, whose life-saving interventions could not be provided in all cases. We could see covered sport stadiums and school auditoriums filled with well-spaced hospital beds attended by health staff (as happened in 1918). By flattening that peak some lives would be saved, or at least extended a while, but the death of so much of the economy will lead to far more lives being lost, literally as well as figuratively.

Unlike in 1918, the government has now taken full responsibility for our health and we demand that it protect us from things like this pandemic when in practice the NHS can barely keep up with existing health demands. Of course, with tens of thousands of probable carriers in the population by now, numbers will rise whatever they do to smooth out the peak. Even if they halve the speed of transmission hospital beds will be overwhelmed. With a lot of luck they might cut deaths by half, giving up to 250,000 souls with pre-existing conditions another few years to meet their maker.

In order to do this they will have killed off a tragically high proportion of businesses in this country, creating unprecedented job losses leading to inability to pay rents, utility bills, food costs and the usual commitments of life.  Hospitals and GP clinics will be far less accessible. Heaven forbid that, like other countries, the free people of Britain be confined to our houses, requiring papers to leave on authorised trips, with military and police patrolling the streets. What will become of those members of society living on our streets?

What will be the effect of this unprecedented disembowelment of our culture? There will be no parties, no pubs, no sports, no cafes, no restaurants, no cinema or theatre, no shopping malls or shops, no schools, no dinner parties. No life except that fed to us through screens on our devices. It may ‘only’ last a few months but there are no promises, and thousands of small restaurants, cafes and other small businesses may never re-open. How many of those features will return and with what will patrons support them?

The consequent joblessness, evictions and bankruptcies will push despair and depression to unprecedented levels. This would lead to a surge in opiate and anti-depressant use, alcohol abuse and accidental overdoses, not to mention suicides. Will banks and our imaginary fiat money survive? If they crash, it will of course, be blamed upon a virus so small that 20,000 could fit on a pinhead.

If half the population is isolated enough to never encounter Covid-19 then they will not be immune to it come the winter. The government’s strategy is largely shaped by the need to smooth out the case workload for the health services, even if this means destroying the economy. Boris Johnson magically conjures up a promise of  £330 Billion to ease things – some three times the taxpayer’s bill for Britain’s crippling HS2 rail project. Donald Trump is conjuring up a trillion – an entire year’s worth of military expenditure or enough to build 50 of his unaffordable walls. The EU wants to manifest €770 billion – nearly 5 times the annual EU budget for 2019 and almost 20 times Britain’s Brexit divorce bill. In the unlikely event any of them delivers on this, where would the money come from – bankers. Who would pay it back – us, and our grandchildren. Rampant inflation could follow. Those soulless psychopaths play a long slow game.

If we are upset by this savaging of our society, culture, community and civilization, we cannot even go out in the street to protest. Throughout history people have taken to the streets, sometimes in numbers large enough to change the laws or even replace their tyrant with, all too often, another. In the 21^stcentury the tools of social media have helped spawn unprecedented street protests in major cities on every continent of the globe except Antarctica. Most are responding to the corruption and oppression of hugely unpopular regimes. Other European states must look at the 1 year 3 months of weekly Gilets Jaunes yellow jacket demos across France and shudder as they did during the French Revolution.

Having now successfully used Covid-19 to test this totalitarian shutdown of society, kettling us all in our homes, it can be implemented in the future to quell any protests over drastic measures ahead. We have already seen this happen with UK Terrorism Act powers being used for all manner of other purposes.

I have not got any words of comfort or “It’ll all be alright” on this one. This applies even if the state’s extreme reaction is coming from the heart in response to a natural virus.  If the situation was engineered from the start or even just an engineered response waiting for a global pandemic to break then it was fiendishly clever and has been flawlessly executed. If only Mr. Bond had grabbed that vial of virus seconds before the aerosol was released. They are already declaring it worse than 1918 and in this instance there is no quick fix for the virus fuelling the collapse of life as we know it. Covid-19 will soon be the secondary problem but it will be the patsy taking blame for the primary problem: global collapse triggered by state-mandated shutdowns. What will follow?