#where is he now... still writing conspiracy theories about corona i wonder? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bloggerblagger · 5 years ago

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90) Why aren’t the government listening to the one person who has been proved right? Me.

Robert Young, aka Marcus Welby MD, from whose mouth, the word’s ‘I’m not a doctor’ first came.

I am donning my white ‘lab’ coat to write this post, and I have a stethoscope hanging around my neck. I am wearing a reassuringly silvery toupé and a pair of half moon glasses over which I look benignly, a little condescendingly, yet with suitable gravity. In the best traditions of misleading advertising I am here to announce that yes, I am not a doctor.

Not only that, but I have no medical qualifications of any kind nor, indeed, beyond 5 O’levels’, any qualifications at all. (And none of those were for anything remotely connected with science.)

And yet.

Sometimes - actually most of the time - I think I may know better than THEY do. One thing, perhaps the only thing, that life has taught me, is that the prevailing wisdom is often total bollocks. (An alternative explanation of my habitual questioning of any authority might be that I am an arrogant, deluded twat. Guilty as charged, but that doesn’t mean I am not right, at least some of the time.)

And in the case of Corona virus, I already have one big win. On March 3rd I posted the following note on Facebook. Six weeks later most of the world agrees that I was right. (Not yet the perennially slow off the mark UK government but it’s only a matter of time and a few thousand more dead.)

Suitably emboldened by the successful slaying of that holy cow, I now ready to move onto another.

One day, at the very beginning of the Coronalamity, before we were locked up but when the tsunami was clearly visible on the horizon, I actually counted the number of contacts I had that day - which I took to be the number of people I spoke to.

This is what I did. (As you will soon see, the stuff of my daily life is not likely to inspire the next Netflix blockbuster, but please suffer the boredom if you can.) I chatted to Wilma, my lady wot does, before leaving the house to stop first at Gail’s ( 50 yards from front door) for my usual poison - an oat milk latté - where I spoke to the girl who took my money, to the barista who handed me my coffee, to a girl standing beside me waiting for hers.

Next I went across the road to drink my coffee whilst chatting to my friend Sid in his (highly recommended) optician’s shop and there I also exchanged ‘hellos’ with one of his assistants. After that I walked to the Virgin Active gym in Ladbroke Grove, on the way speaking to a man in corner shop from whom I bought a bottle of water. I spoke to the Virgin receptionist, to a chap with an adjacent locker, to someone on the next door treadmill, to the chap who made me my after-session coffee and to the different receptionist on duty as I left.

So far we are up to twelve people. The rest of my day was every bit as uneventful, possibly even duller, as I spoke to only another eleven. So, in all, I had face to face, words exchanged, contact with twenty three people that day, and, basically, I did fuck all. Tumbleweed blew through my diary - and I still spoke to twenty three people.

My (heretical) point is this:

We are told that testing, testing, testing is the answer, and, after that, contact tracing. But if I had Covid 19 that day - which I might well have done as a couple of weeks later I developed symptoms, although as I couldn’t get a test, I can’t be sure - how would all those contacts have been found? And would they have confined themselves for two weeks? Who would police that?

I could understand the tracing idea when there were a handful of cases, like that chap from Brighton, the first super-spreader who caught it on a skiing holiday, because there weren’t that many people to track down. But now, almost certainly millions of people have had it, and there are millions of other people who they will have infected who may or may not be symptomatic.

Presumably one is infectious for several days and even at my rate of 23 in a relatively empty day, that’s over 160 in a week. You see my point: the numbers now are so overwhelming that tracing and confining would seem to be a completely impossible task.

A Tracer Calls.

Here is an imaginary conversation between a government tracer (I wonder who and where they are by the way) and one of my twenty three contacts.

‘Hello, Gail’s Queens Park.’

‘I need to speak to the person on the till and the barista who served Richard Phillips.’

‘Who's he?’

‘- with an Oat Latte on - let’s see now - about Feb 28th.’

‘How on earth would we do that? We have lots of different people working on the tills and three or four baristas every day, and you don’t even know exactly which day.’

Etcetera.

Have I missed a trick? Is there some ingenious idea behind testing and contact tracing that I have missed, Well, helpfully, a day or so ago the Guardian published a guide to Testing and Tracing and the ratIonale seems no more complicated than I thought: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/coronavirus-contact-tracing-explained

I can sort of understand the point of testing in the sense that you would get a big enough sample of who is infected to extrapolate the overall infection rate. If immunity after infection is as likely as with most viruses, you might then get an idea of when the famous herd immunity might be a possibility. But otherwise, what is the point? That is my point. Will someone PLEASE explain whatever I am missing.

Ah yes, you say, I can explain. What you are missing is the App, the famous App that tracks your every move that they have in South Korea and China and can interact with other people’s phones so it knows who you are in contact with at every moment. But presumably the government would have to download this on to our phones without our knowledge and ensure it can not be removed. (An Orwellian world on steroids.) Otherwise, I would suggest, vast numbers of the population would not voluntarily download it for reasons of laziness or of principle, so it would be of partial help at best.

Anyway (exasperated harumph from author) whether I can see the point of it or not, Testing and Tracing is about to be restarted - as the Guardian reported. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/uk-to-start-coronavirus-contact-tracing-again

So, could this be the answer?

What I can see the point of is the anti-body test. (Also known as serology testing.) If you’ve possibly/probably had it - as I have - and assuming you do get immunity, as with most viruses, this is absolutely key. Because if you test positive and you have a very low risk of contracting it again then you can begin to resume some sort of sort of normal life. Only one problem: the government keeps telling us that none of the anti-body tests are reliable. (Although on Friday, Roche, the Swiss pharma giant announced that they had now developed a test. They presumably think it’s reliable but we wait to see.)

One key question, it seems to me, is in what way are they unreliable? If they are providing false positives they are obviously useless. If, on the other hand, they are providing false negatives - telling some people they haven’t had it when they have - then they are a lot better than nothing. Even if you got a false negative half of the time, 50% might be stuck indoors for no good reason but the 50% who tested positive would know that they’d had it and could move on with their lives. And the unlucky 50% could be retested as the test was improved.

Did I say only one problem? Silly me. It seems there are far more. Check this out. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/antibody-tests-wont-end-social-distancing-anytime-soon.html

Oh dear, and one more thing. The WHO has now told us there is no guarantee that you can’t get it again.

I am not also not a financial adviser - but....

Which brings me to the markets and the fact that having dropped by about 30% they have now recovered about half of that.

Nobody I know - and I regularly take expert advice over the fence from my next door neighbour - has got the faintest idea why things have bounced back,

Although yesterday, apparently, the 3% rise in the Dow was triggered by the overnight leaking of a report saying that the Remdesivir drug was successfully treating seriously ill Covid-19 patients at the University of Chicago. Shares in the company that makes it, Gilead, went up 11% even though this was not a proper randomised control study. (Something well dodgy about that leak. I’m not one for conspiracy theories but I’d bet somebody made a few bob out of that.)

For what its worth, and as my face-mask victory shows, its worth a lot, my guess is that the search for a ‘cure’ is, in the absence of a vaccine, the likeliest means of giving people the confidence to go out and start living again. Not sure any guff about testing - especially from this government - is going to get me in Gails anytime soon.

And here is my invaluable tip re: the markets. Buy, buy, buy. I say this because I have sold. Got rid of as many shares as I could without paying tax. Taken the losses, taken the pain. And the one inviolable rule, the ThickAsDick Principle as it is known in the highest circles of financial theorists, is that whatever decision I’ve made will always be the exact opposite of what you should do. Right about face masks, absolutely, but shit on shares.

You have been warned.

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