Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*
The Bloody Virus
- So, why does Belgium have 36% more deaths/m than even the 2nd worst country, the UK? See the 1st article below.
- The latest scientific observation: Some experts believe T-cell immunity is likely to be more important for fighting coronavirus than antibodies. If so, this would explain why you have no antibodies when tested. Which would question the conclusions re infection-rate stats based on antibody tests.
- Times columnist Mathew Parris has some questions for scientists in the 2nd article below.
Life in Spain
- Spain will welcome visitors from all EU countries in the Schengen Area from 21 June. Except, oddly, our next door neighbour, Portugal. For which the date is 1st July. These folk will no longer be required to stay in quarantine for 2 weeks. No one seems to know yet how Brits will be treated, either when they come here or return home.
- Pestilential consequences of the virus here in Spain.
- María's Comeback Chronicle, Day 35.
- HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for the tidbit that the disgraced ex king of Spain has self-exiled himself to a doubtless comfortable life in the Dominican Republic.
- Which reminds me . . . If you can read Spanish and want to know a lot about corruption here, then the book for you is judge Garzón's El Fango.
- A couple of examples of brutal modern Galician architecture. How not to use granite:-
TBH, it beats me that anyone would pay an architect to design houses like these.
The USA
The Way of the World
- A dangerous mix of an ascendant China, revanchist Russia, isolationist America and supine Europe is destabilising international security to a degree unknown for 30 years. Throw in a global recession linked to the pandemic and suspicions that the American president — who seems to look up to Putin, accused of meddling in America’s 2016 election in favour of Trump — may be “soft” on resurgent Russia, and the world’s alliance of democracies has never seemed more fragile.
Finally . . .
- Last night,. for the first time, I got 4-5 messages and 3 computer calls (from the USA and the UK), telling me someone was trying to get my WhatsApp verification code, and giving me the latter. I decided to ignore all this but am left wondering what it was about. There doesn't seem to be anything on the net re phishing in this way.
THE ARTICLES
1. Coronavirus: crowded and affluent, Belgium has been hit hard. Peter Conradi examines how one country had to think creatively to combat the disease.
When Belgium was in the depths of the Covid-19 outbreak, Tristan Van den Bosch, who works for a company near Antwerp that cleans the facades of high buildings, was passing a care home when he saw a man shouting up at a third-floor window.
The man was shouting at his elderly mother, the only way of communicating with her after a ban was imposed on visitors when the country began to go into lockdown on March 13.
It gave Van den Bosch an idea, a characteristically surreal Belgian one. The cleaning company’s cherry pickers were lying idle in the depot because of the crisis. Soon they were redeployed to hoist visitors up several floors so they could talk to their loved ones at close — but not too close — quarters. The machines toured the country, and Van den Bosch was hailed as a hero. “Yes, OK, it costs money, the operators cost money, but the machines are all used,” he told reporters. “We’re happy that we have been able to help people.”
It was a rare moment of joy in a country that has been hit hard by the virus. According to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University, Belgium has had 9,650 coronavirus deaths — which, at more than 84 per 100,000 people, is the highest rate in the world.
The high figure was seized on by President Donald Trump in April, when he stood in front of a bar chart showing that Belgium’s performance was four times as bad as America’s. Negative headlines followed across the globe.
Steven Van Gucht, who chairs the Belgian government’s scientific committee on Covid-19, has dismissed the comparison as the “political abuse of data”. “It was comparing cats and dogs,” he said in an interview. “You can’t compare a densely inhabited region or country such as Belgium — where the Brussels and Flanders region has the highest population density in Europe — with the entire United States.” Belgium, he pointed out, also counted cases differently. Unlike most countries, including America, it includes in its Covid-19 death statistics those where a link is only suspected, regardless of whether the victim was tested.
While many countries — Britain included — are thought to have understated the number of people killed by the virus, Belgium’s tally closely matches excess mortality figures, which give a more accurate impression of the disease’s impact.
So, is Belgium a victim of its honesty? As a small, densely populated nation of 11.5 million people in the heart of Europe, it was necessarily going to be at risk in a way that, say, the Scandinavian nations or those of eastern Europe were not.
Brussels, the capital, is home to more than one million people and the seat not just of many of the European Union institutions but also of Nato, all staffed by affluent, well-travelled people who are likely to have picked up the virus in the first months of the year when it was spreading unchecked. Nor did it help that the virus struck at a time when Belgium was locked in one of its periodic bouts of political instability and had only a caretaker prime minister, Sophie Wilmès. She nevertheless put the country into lockdown just two days after the first death on March 11.
Asked the following week by King Philippe to form a permanent administration, Wilmès put in place a coherent strategy for fighting the virus — no mean achievement given Belgium’s complicated federal structure.
“Wilmès played a blinder,” said Nigel Gardner, a former European Commission spokesman and long-time Brussels resident. “A country with five parliaments, three languages and a prime minister without a parliamentary majority came together and forged an effectively managed common approach. “The divisions that so often paralyse Belgian decision-making seemed to spur the national security council into the kind of meaningful policy debate and consistent decision-making that seemed painfully lacking in the UK.”
As with much else in Belgium, the strategy was a compromise between those adopted by France to the south and Holland to the north. Although, as in France, people were allowed out of their homes only with good reason, there was no requirement to fill in a form each time and there were no constraints on exercise. But the regime was not as liberal as in Holland, where all shops were allowed to remain open and restaurants permitted to offer takeaways, which also allowed people to pick up soft drugs from Amsterdam’s coffee houses.
To prevent its citizens being lured to Holland, the Belgian government sealed the 280-mile border, which in normal times is largely invisible. This was not always easy, especially in Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau, which are in Holland but peppered with Belgian enclaves. One branch of Zeeman, a budget clothing store, straddles the border. While the Dutch side could remain open, the shelves that were in Belgium had to be sealed off with red and white tape.
Although it seems to have done all the right things, Belgium appears to have been hit slightly harder than Holland, even after its method of counting is taken into account. In contrast to its neighbours, its cases were evenly spread across the country rather than concentrated in particular regions.
Van Gucht said many Belgians had become infected during skiing holidays in the Italian Alps at half-term, which began on the weekend of February 22-23, when the virus was already well established there. Their return the following week coincided with carnival, which is celebrated across Catholic Belgium. “We have these parades in the streets, and usually after these parades people go and party inside. They drink a lot, they sing a lot and are very touchy-feely — which is the ideal environment for the virus,” Van Gucht said. “These were two things that really catalysed the outbreak in a very short period of time.”
Especially hard hit was Sint-Truiden, a town of 40,000 people 40 miles east of Brussels renowned for its carnival. It was the one place in Belgium where hospitals ran out of intensive care beds at the peak of the epidemic.
Largely Catholic southern Holland, which also celebrates carnival and had its half-term at the same time, was the worst affected part of that country. In the rest of Holland schools broke up a week earlier and carnival is less of a tradition.
As in other countries, it was Belgium’s care homes that proved especially vulnerable — accounting for just over half of fatalities. The first to die, a female resident in her eighties, is thought to have been infected by family members who visited after returning from Italy.
Such visits were subsequently banned, but the virus was apparently still being brought in by staff. “They were not really trained for infection protection and control, like the staff in a hospital,” said Van Gucht. At the beginning the emphasis was also on getting masks and other protective equipment to hospitals rather than care homes.
According to Van Gucht, most of the victims were people in their late eighties or nineties who were frail and suffering from other diseases. In some cases the virus may have hastened death by only a few weeks, which would explain why overall mortality rates have fallen in recent weeks to lower than usual. “But unfortunately we also lost a lot of people who had months or years to go.”
The government found itself under fire from medical staff. When Wilmès arrived for a visit to the St Pierre hospital in Brussels last month, employees turned their backs on her car. The protest, against low salaries, budget cuts and the hiring of unqualified staff, was widely shared on social media.
Since last month Belgium has been relaxing restrictions step by step, with the mayors of the 581 communes that make up the country given considerable latitude to decide the speed and manner. In Brussels, for example, masks are compulsory in some of the 19 communes but not others; in one, Etterbeek, rules differ from street to street.
Three policemen who were meant to be checking motorists crossing the Dutch border were caught having an impromptu barbecue at which several bottles of rosé were consumed. A few days later drivers hoping to get to France for the long Whitsun weekend were turned back after a minister erroneously reported that the borders were open. In fact, the one with France does not open until tomorrow.
The Belgian royal family have not been spared embarrassment: Philippe’s nephew, Prince Joachim, who is on an internship in Spain, was fined €10,400 for breaking lockdown rules after attending a party in Cordoba when he should have been observing a 14-day quarantine.
With the number of Belgian cases falling sharply, and the daily death toll barely in double figures after a peak of almost 500, the end is in sight. “At the beginning, we started by banning everything,” said Wilmès, announcing the latest relaxation of the internal lockdown, which came into force last Monday. From now on, she told her compatriots, “everything will be allowed, except the activities that are specifically forbidden”.
2. If scientists are wrong about Covid, they must be held to account: If the economic damage caused by lockdown turns out to have been needless, it’s not just politicians who’ll be to blame: Matthew Parris, Times
The world has panicked and the British government has panicked worse than most. We scared ourselves and our fellow citizens out of rational thought. By losing our sense of proportion I submit we have crashed our economy, crashed our education system, our performing arts, our tourist and travel industry, and blighted the life chances of a whole generation. Before too long, commentators, politicians and scientists may be blushing at the mess we made of our national response to the coronavirus pandemic. Commentators will duck. Politicians will be blamed for everything, and who can doubt that political leadership has been a shambles?
But how about “the science”, those men and women, academics, doctors and mathematical modellers, in whose expertise ministers once placed their trust? The doomsday scenario that scientists unveiled to government nearly three months ago was the direct cause of the indiscriminate and economically devastating lockdown that followed.
Ministers must be losing confidence in these scientists now, because Britain is being led out of lockdown before our test-trace-and-isolate system is properly functional. There is no vaccine and only a small minority show immunity. Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London told the government in March that, unchecked, the pandemic would rage out of control and up to half a million of us could die before the tide would turn. This high tide (he said) would not occur until some 60 per cent of us were testing positive. We’re nowhere near that. It must follow that government no longer trusts the science.
I certainly don’t. Professor Ferguson and his Imperial team have been associated with nightmare predictions of possible casualties from mad cow disease (BSE), swine flu and bird flu, none of which came to pass. Their advice on foot and mouth led to the slaughter of six million animals, most of them uninfected. Their predictions will have been professionally hedged with “might” and “could” (just as shock headlines in middle-market tabloids take care to insert question marks) but a pattern emerges in this team’s modelling.
I began this column by claiming a sort of terrified unthinkingness in our nation. Brains have gone to jelly. Everywhere we see or hear death tolls for leading nations rendered in crude totals: America, “leading” with 115,000; Brazil, 41,000; Ireland, 1,703. Such information is almost useless, because (do I really have to write this?) some countries have more people in them than others. The useful measure is deaths-per-million. On that score (for example) Ireland is about the same as the US, Brazil is doing better than both and we British are doing much worse than almost all of them. Japan, where there was no real lockdown, has lost only seven citizens per million. Spain had a draconian lockdown yet tremendous loss of life.
Even this oversimplifies. Some countries are behind the curve and face many more deaths later. Others are probably under-counting. But you cannot survey the whole field, asking first, “How many deaths per million?” and second, “How much of a lockdown?” without being led to this conclusion: something big is wrong in our understanding. Whole sections of the science jigsaw are missing. There seems to be no simple correlation between lockdown and death rate.
Now, I do not doubt that lockdown must suppress the rate of transmission. Nor that to some degree, facemasks would. Or that two-metre distancing offers more protection than one-metre distancing, as four-metre distancing would protect better than two; or that if schools had not been closed, some people would have been infected who otherwise wouldn’t have been.
But it’s a matter of what weight should be attached to particular lockdown measures. Of course extra protection is achieved by brutal lockdowns, but how much? Evidence is emerging that in Britain the pandemic had peaked before we went into lockdown. Simon Wood, professor of statistical science at the University of Bristol, says that the data used by the Ferguson group “are also consistent with fatal infections being in decline several days before lockdown, rather than exponentially increasing. Data from other countries also suggests that measures short of full lockdown can halt epidemic growth.”
Norway, which went early and hard into lockdown, is an example. Their prime minister, Erna Solberg, said last month “I probably took many of the decisions out of fear”. She now questions whether “it was necessary to close schools. Perhaps not.”
You see where my argument is heading: we allowed some scientists to panic us into a bludgeoning response. So now let me confront four big challenges you’d be right to put to me. First: “Hindsight’s fine, but did you say this before we knew what we now know?” Yes, if tentatively, on this page on March 21, just before the lockdown.
Your second question: “How can you recommend taking any risk with people’s lives?” And I admit that more people might have died if our lockdown had been designed (as I wrote) “to keep grandparents safe without closing down the economy”. But, though any death is a cause for sorrow and I apologise if this hurts some who read it, livelihoods matter as well as lives, and these lockdowns will cast a long, dark shadow forward, not least over our health service. Some deaths are indirect.
Your third question should be this: “How might the modelling that led Ferguson and his Imperial team to their catastrophist predictions be wrong?” Well, I believe they paid insufficient attention to possible variations in the potency of infected people to spread infection, or variations in the infectability of uninfected people, or both. In short, we can be more or less resistant, more or less infectious: it isn’t all-or-nothing.
Potential infectors and infected don’t seem to be behaving like a child’s game of tag — touch another and they’re It — or why does the virus appear to have all but departed from London, when only an estimated 20 per cent of Londoners would test positive for the Covid-19 antibodies? My guess (and I’m not alone in this) is that the virus begins to encounter some kind of resistance to its spread at a much lower level than Ferguson’s 60 per cent.
Your fourth question should be: “What if we’re hit by the massive second wave of infections that the Imperial model always predicted?” My answer is that I’d expect localised secondary waves but not a tsunami. If it’s a tsunami then I shall have been proved wrong.
Will Ferguson and his team show the same humility if the near-certainty these scientists offered ministers proves unwarranted? The cost has been astronomical. Politicians are not the only professionals who should be held to account.
* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.