Whatever else you can say about him, Chris Uhlmann sure has a way of getting the crowd on his feet. Two days ago, the headline of his op-ed piece — “blah blah grandparent loving embrace blah kill them who are we to stop them?” — shot around social media, the only public sphere remaining.
As the pelted rocks bounced off him, Uhlmann took to Twitter — a medium he purports to despise — to denounce people for not reading past a sensationalist headline (if only he had some sort of, I don’t know, editorial position which allowed him to control the pitch of Age/SMH headlines).
He was right, in that the article itself was somewhat more tentative than the headline.
Trouble is, it was also vacuous. On an issue that it is crucial to get right, Nine’s political editor could offer no statistics or grounded argument, only a rollcall of cliches about lockdown as “the cure worse than the disease”.
The piece was just another example of what has occurred among the ideological right over the last two weeks.
As the left, progressives, centre and most of the institutional right has remained committed to erring on the side of caution in supporting lockdown, the ideological right has peeled away, taking up a position that is pure “politics-first”, a simple rejection of inconvenient facts and forces that appear from outside the political realm.
This is inevitable, because the ideological right has, for some time, not been a political formation that is in a relationship with external reality.
The Thatcherite world they wanted — a strong state enforcing traditional values and a “free” market within that — has been blown to pieces over the last decade as politics has been realigned.
One side is now a multicultural progressivism attached to the most dynamic parts of the economy, while the right relies on the rhetoric of a statist economic nationalism drawing support from the near-defunct, subsidy-dependent industrial base.
COVID-19 is a more insistent real than they have so far had to deal with, which exposes the inadequacy of their arguments, and their unwillingness to talk about the real problems all the more.
The position supporting lockdown is this (it is necessary to repeat it, since none of it appears in right-wing articles): COVID-19 appears to have a basic reproduction rate (R0) of around two, which means that anyone with it will infect two other people under normal conditions.
That is a basic exponential rate, doubling for every step of infection spread. If that period is, say, a day, then the population of Australia could be infected from a single case in a 25-day period.
The object of lockdown and social distancing is to detach the effective reproduction rate (RE) from R0, and push RE below one, at which point the virus will eventually die out under maintained conditions (so far as I understand it).
Lockdowns imposed early in the virus’s spread — by Australia, NZ, Denmark and others — appear to have pushed the RE sharply below one quite early, thus saving thousands of people from nasty deaths and many thousands more from debilitating lung damage.
The right have latched onto this achievement and argued that it is evidence that forecasts of exponential growth were wrong.
In fact forecasts of exponential growth were acted on, thus turning an exponential progression (one, two, four, eight…) into an arithmetical (one, two, three, four…) one, in which only three or four new fatalities are added per day.
The corollary to that is that if a process of arithmetical growth is then allowed to return to exponential growth, it will immediately trash any advantage gained immediately.
If it takes you 10 steps (with a step as a day) to slow the exponential growth, then you’ve hit 1000 cases (1024 to be exact, two to power of 10). If that is allowed to resume growth, then it is 2000 on the next day, and your 10 days preventive work has been wiped out in one day (even with a time lag of effect). The RE has rejoined the R0.
In other words, there’s an asymmetry in the process (in terms of human interests; not mathematically), which can wipe out hard won gains immediately.
Hence the wariness about coming out of a lockdown. It’s not something you can try and then reverse your decision with no great cost. And the maths shows why that is.
Now here’s the thing, with the ideological right’s claim that these low rates would have happened anyway or that an exponential process will not revive itself: it is impossible to tell whether people like Adam Creighton and Andrew Bolt simply do not understand the maths of the situation, and how swift action altered it.
It’s impossible to tell whether, in concluding that it’s been a beat-up and “no worse than the flu” they are being (dimwittedly) honest, or if they do understand it and are being duplicitous to a cynical and nihilistic degree almost beyond belief.
The same goes for Uhlmann’s fact-free piece — there is no indication within it that Nine’s political editor has even considered the maths associated with the virus, or understands it.
There is a strong undertow of fatalism in Uhlmann’s piece, and one can’t help but wonder if such arises from his Christian literalist views, scorning science altogether.
There is one piece of the “back to work” mob that has some figures, and that’s Sam Lovick’s piece in Wednesday’s AFR, in which Lovick — an economist, not a public health expert — using “authors figures”, suggests an “accelerated removal” of lockdown would see 3000 extra deaths, largely from a shortage of ICU beds as a mini surge occurs.
So, near 3000 triage death sentences of people who might otherwise live, something Lovick doesn’t really spell out.
Also omitted from the piece is the real counter-strategy that is being talked of: that of bringing COVID-19’s RE down so low that virtual eradication becomes possible. That would put his death calculations in a starker contrast.
The problem, then, with the ideological right is not calculations of unit cost per human life, mortality curves, etc. All that has to be done, and some sort of modifying of lockdowns may be necessary fairly soon.
What is largely absent from its discourse is any acknowledgement that this is an actual, sodding virus, with a process of replication that has the mathematical capacity to overwhelm us, to reverse all gains rapidly, and — not yet much talked of — to not only resurge, but mutate.
How does that occur? Because their legitimation of global capitalism demands that nature be constructed as a passive and dominated force, bent to our ends.
The reverse cannot be credited. That is the root cause of climate change denialism, which persists because the full catastrophic effects are decades delayed.
COVID-19 is the nemesis to that hubris, immediate and unsparing, and in the face of it the ideological right retreats into cliches, rubbery figures and pious hopes, rather than asking hard questions about how we get out of this and what needs to change before it all happens again.
Guy, it the R0 is 2, then the subject infects 2 people, but during the entire cycle of infection, incubation, symptomatic, isolation. That period would be typically about 2 weeks. So R0 = 2 means doubling every, say, 2 weeks. It is always an exponential process until R falls below 1, wn you have exponential decline, or the number of people with immunity becomes a significant portion of the population, when the curve goes through a point of inflection and begins to plateau,
Thanks, Andy – yes, i should have said ‘step as, say, one day’ to make clear i was illustrating that ‘step’ meant time period. Wasnt meaning to suggest the time period for covid-19 was one day.
Perhaps the position of the ideological right is not fully mad.
Infection rates are one thing, death rates are another. Just because you get infected does not mean you die. The truth is the statistics upon which the policies are built are unreliable.
We do not really know how many people might have had it and not been symptomatic or recovered after what felt like a slight flu. We are not testing sufficient numbers of people to know and the statistics are incomplete.
For every alarming report of the horrendous death rates in New York and Italy there are a whole range of contextual circumstances that are beyond the capacity of the experts to analyse.
Information is coming from everywhere and it is chaotic.
We do know certain things, like COVID-19 is very contagious, came in from overseas, and strikes at the vulnerable, but we do not know the true infection rate and no-one is talking about the comparison rate at which the vulnerable might be struck by an ordinary bad flu.
Or at least, a lot of people are talking about a lot of things, but if you are talking about gross numbers you should immediately start talking about the numbers of people around the world who die every day of AIDS related illnesses, dysentery, tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition, and a whole lot of other diseases.
The true nature of CIVID-19 will emerge over time, but it will not be in Australia. It will be in developing countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh and Mexico that have no capacity to enforce social distancing on those who need to leave the house to work to eat daily. The health systems in most countries are inadequate to cope with current needs let alone a flood of infected people.
The truth of COVID-19 will out, the true numbers will become apparent, and we will come to see what herd immunity means whether we like it or not.
While we can and must quarantine the frontier and increase the rate of testing and enforce quarantine on the infected and put in place strict social distancing to protect the elderly and vulnerable, maybe, just maybe, the wholesale collapsing of the Australian economy will turn out to be the greatest disaster of the 21st century.
While Trump may be a fool, history may prove there are bigger fools out there.
If you collapsed or caved in the medical/health/hospital systems by an inundation/flood of viral units ,the social/political/economic units, being based on, modern scientific/medicine/technology, would soon collapse too . A bit extreme ,I know ,but the connection between a healthy modern economy & a healthy physical modern society body politic, are inescapably intertwined …There’s really not much wiggle room, in a highly technological scientific modern society, for ‘bring out your dead’.
To quote Arne Akbar, the President of the British Society for Immunology, when he wrote to Johnson’s Health Secretary (Hancock), Chief Scientific Advisor (Vallance) and CMO (Whitty), when they were off down the ‘herd immunity’ road;
“We don’t yet know if this novel virus will induce long-term immunity in those affected as other related viruses do not”
He then went on to mention; “severe consequences”.
Coronaviruses are RNA, not DNA, viruses and, as such, present a completely different set of difficulties to develop vaccines.
No vaccine has ever been developed that provides long term immunity against a coronavirus. And, if you can’t vaccinate a population to long term immunity, you sure as hell won’t get there by cross infection.
To quote NBC News, in the last 24 hours;
“Immunity from COVID-19 antibodies not certain, HIV co-discoverer cautions
Dr. Robert Gallo talked to NBC News about what’s needed in an antibody test for the coronavirus.”
“………Sometimes the antibodies are positive and the person is still very infectious. So, you have to remember that.
I’d like to say there are antibodies and there are antibodies and there are antibodies. Some are nothing at all. Some are protective indicators. And sometimes, though not so commonly, they can make matters worse….”
Most of what you’ve said is simply wrong, Exactly. The science doesnt simply work off raw numbers judged retroactively; it combines knowledge of the virus’s structure and action, with its R0, and death numbers to arrive at approx. numbers, which we then use to steer policy. That’s why lockdowns have worked, and ‘herd immunity’ strategies have failed.
There is another factor that’s been neglected in the endless claims – from some, that this virus/disease is just like the seasonal flu.
Reasoned estimates have the incubation period for COVID -19 at around 12 – 14 days (with some recent analysis suggesting around 10 -12 % of cases have an incubation period beyond 14 days). But, that science is nothing like ‘settled’.
The seasonal flu has an incubation of 2 days!
So, while flu sufferers can remove themselves from circulation just 2 days after infection, those infected with the COVID -19 virus can infect people for an extra 12 odd days before they get the disease signal to remove themselves from circulation.
And, that says naught about the effect from those who are asymptomatic.
There is one outfit who are dishing out a new test kit that they claim can detect very, very small amounts of ‘viral load’ meaning, if that’s right, they’ll be able to detect the viral infection about a day after the carrier has been infected.
Meanwhile, we and most of the rest of the world are still stuck at prioritising (e.g. health workers) who gets tested after symptoms of the disease appear.
I think you have to be aware that what some people refer to as “flu” is actually more a heavy cold. I’ve had the real flu and that was pretty horrific and left me weak as a kitten for weeks after. And that, I think, is the problem with people being told it’s just the flu and not understanding how bad a true dose of flu can be.
Last August I got another bad case of flu and was almost sent to hospital because it was such a struggle to breathe the wheezing could be heard across the room. That was bad enough that knowing covid19 is worse and something I do not want to be lax about protecting myself and my family from.
Guy replied!
Wrong?? All I am saying is that history will give us a more accurate picture of what herd immunity means and what the accompany death rates are. It will not be a history written in Australia but in the developing world and we won’t be able to do anything about it.
In retrospect, rather than going down the path we have, what we needed to do was immediately quarantine the frontier, increase the rate of testing, enforce quarantine on the infected and put in place strict social distancing to protect the elderly and vulnerable.
In further retrospect, this is where we may get to.
From that vantage point, the wholesale trashing of the economy may come to look foolish. Brasil’s Bolsonaro and Chris Uhlmann are not made right by me pointing this out.
Yes, Exactly, but we know most of that now. Lockdown is a response to the failure to early test, track and trace, etc. So now we need to work out what to do next. From here. Its in that context that the right is being stupid or nihilistic
I am looking forward and then back from a point in history where we know the facts about the virus and its lethality.
If our virtuous social distancing controls COVID-19 in Australia, that won’t mean it will not be a killer in the developing world because the poor cannot socially distance and not starve.
If this tragedy happens, then COVID-19 will become another poor person’s disease that white people do not get like malnutrition, dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis etc.
Goodbye holidays in Bali and domestic servants if we sojourn to the developing world, at least until a cheap vaccine is developed.
But if it does not become a killer, then all we have done is damaged our own economy.
I am not an expert, but then not even experts are experts. The epidemiological
science is not yet well enough developed because reliable data does not exist, and the mass of other information coming at us is chaotic. Very haphazard rules are being imposed based on unscientific understandings and in the face of continual fear mongering by the media and on social media.
At the end of the day, I would hate for Trump and Andrew Bolt to be right, but it would be preferable to them being wrong.
“Exactly” what? Magical thinking? You really think of all the people looking at this problem that Trump and Bolt are going to be the ones who are right?
I hope you are just a very bored troll and don’t actually believe what you are saying …
Exactly, your first post was entirely wrong. Guy has covered it without going in hard. Your later posts indicate a slight backtracking which which is more accurately described as a backflip. Damn the economy, the best thing we can do is go for eradication, everything else is cant.
Dog’s Breakfast
Wrong and back tracking are a bit harsh!
I never said let the free market of herd immunity rip, just pointed out some truisms about the confusing data upon which current policy decisions are being made.
What I did say is that we will soon see what happens when the “live and let die” policy of herd immunity rips through the developing world.
In time we will get a proper statistical answer to the level of lethality of COVID-19 as opposed to its virulence (which is in fact the issue Guy wrote about).
While I called Trump a fool, we want him to be right as less people will die.
You disagree with this?
The left needs to think this through more carefully as the economic decisions being made now may in fact throw living standards signficantly back.
Hi Bob the Builder
I am not a bored troll or a magical thinker, sad to say.
The Left should not attempt to second guess the Epidemiologists and the Government and should not adopt a position on the Virility Vs. Lethality debate (in case we turn out to be wrong). Sorry Guy.
The Mad Right can have that argument amongst themselves, as the death rate (however big or small) will be upon their heads.
What we can do is focus on getting better and more universal social policies out of the crisis. If we can kick the Mad Right at the same time that is a benefit.
We should also start to consider the impact of Government decisions to shutter the economy on the poor and excluded now. Then, should COVID-19 turn out to be not as lethal as everyone first thought, we may have made some gains.
This is like an insurance policy in case Trump turns out to be right.
Now is this the comment of a troll or someone who is WRONG?
I think you are a troll myself!
Covid is not that infectious at all, it runs riot in the very sick, obese and very old but apart from that it touches almost no one. 2 million cases in a population of 7.8 billion is not even a minor statistic.
Most of the problem is the nonsense peddled by idiots making models bases on the 1918 flu which was a global epidemic, this is merely a tiny pandemic without a single country getting remotely close to a large proportion of their populations.
If you’d like a bookend to go with Uhlmann’s rubbish, GR, you should visit the same ‘news’ organisation, and have a squizz at Pru Goward’s offering online today on ‘herd immunity’.
To say she has been smashed by the readership, who bother to offer comments in response, is to understate the reception her vacuous trash received.
But, hey, Pru’s a ‘Professor’!
Of ‘Social Interventions and Policy’.
Nuff said.
It’s all very well to pile on to Goward and Ulmann, but what are the alternatives ? As other’s have pointed out, there is quite likely never to be a vaccine (and as an aside, all those waiting for a vaccine, be my guest to be the guinea pigs to test whether there are no edge case side effects e.g. polio vaccine, Thalydomide etc).
Even if Australia can eradicate the virus, I gaurantee Indonesia won’t, and what happens when some Indonesian fisher boats enter Australian waters and maybe come ashore ? Our “stop the boats” Border Force has shown to be only effective in brutalising refugees.
When counting deaths, are you going to count the future suicides from despair of many, many young people, or the almost certain increase in domestic violence from the lock downs. How many deaths of abused women, or women who have had their long term health destroyed by a violent partner are you going to count ?
There are a lot more nuances. My own belief is that long term people will have to live with the virus and be meticulous at social distancing and personal hygiene. There is no silver bullet.
I agree with your final paragraph – it’ll be fortunate indeed if we can simply revert to a world comparable to pre penicillin when a dental abscess or scratch when gardening could be lethal.
Any left over hippies from the east of Istanbul daze will be familiar with social distancing and never, ever touching anyone not known to you intimately.
There’s one very big ‘alternative’ many, including Uhlmann and Goward, ignore – treatment!
Headline and grab from a recent report;
‘Striking’ evidence emerges that TB vaccine may be effective against Covid-19 — countries that use it have TEN TIMES fewer cases”
“..But at last one correlation has emerged: countries with BCG vaccination programmes are having fewer cases than those without. In this study, 178 countries were included, of which 131 have national programmes of BCG vaccination, 21 do not, and 26 have an unknown status. Interestingly, the USA and Italy are among the rich, developed countries to have never had a universal BCG programme. Spain also does not have one, but their Iberian neighbours Portugal do, and they had only 209 deaths at the time of writing. The UK ran a modest vaccination programme that ended in 2005.
From data gathered over 15 days of the current pandemic, incidence of Covid-19 was 38.4/million in countries with BCG vaccination compared to 358.4/million in countries without. The mortality rate was 4.28/million in countries with BCG programs compared to 40/million in countries without such a program.
Therefore, there are roughly 10 times fewer cases and deaths in countries with BCG vaccination. One of the paper’s co-authors, Dr Ashish Kamat, said that “While we expected to see a protective effect of BCG, the magnitude of the difference (almost 10 fold) in incidence and mortality (of Covid-19) between countries with and without a BCG vaccination program was pleasantly surprising.’’….”
Note the 3 countries that didn’t have a BCG program – the US, Italy and Spain – the top 3 countries on both the no of cases, and deaths from COVID-19.
BCG acts by getting into the bone marrow, and giving the immune system a boost. Ergo, it’s already used to help treat – not ‘vaccinate against’, a number of other illnesses and diseases, such as measles, malaria, bladder cancer, and it also decreases respiratory infections in older people.
Decreasing respiratory infections in older people has a certain ring to it!
A few days ago, Hunt announced a trial involving booster jabs of BCG to SA health workers.
Bjb
There’s no reason to suppose there wont be a vaccine, given the resources being thrown at it.
What we’re criticising uhlmann, goward and others for are their discounting of the way in which lockdowns have worked, and their seeming inability to understand how the virus would spring back, if the transition out is too fast – indicated by their unwillingness to quote figures
There’s one very big reason to suppose there won’t be a vaccine, Rundle – understand the nature of RNA viruses!
This really is getting boring! Read what Arne Akbar wrote to BoJo and Co – understand what it means!!
Yeah, yeah, what a first!! Not ever, and not yet. ‘Hail Marys’ are not a ‘strategy’.
And, if you really want to get ‘analytical’, understand;
1. The outbreak in NY comes from Europe.
2. There is endless research on coronaviruses found in bats in Northern Italy, similarly in Spain.
3. Italian doctors have been explaining how they saw ‘strange pneumonias’ in patients last Sept and Oct.
4. A Californian medico (and public official) this week said this virus was “freewheeling” in his community as late as early December (and, if you do a time line off what he said, you’re back in November.
5. The immunologists thus far have little consensus on how rapidly, and how frequently (they’re different) this virus mutates.
6. The mortality rates are differing enormously and, as I noted earlier, is something like previous vaccinations, against other diseases (like TB), influencing those differences?
7. If you can’t test for when people are initially infected, and have to rely on testing when the disease manifests, how many get infected in the meantime?
In summary, there IS reason to suppose there won’t be a vaccine, and any suggestion to the contrary is in defiance of the available evidence.
Bjb, the only alternative is eradication, and international travel is suspended for years or until a vaccine is found.
Every other option is a dream based on a whim inside an afterthought.
As mentioned elsewhere, there is no gaurantee a vaccine will ever be found, and total eradication, if even possible, is a long way off. How long did it take to rid the world of smallpox ?
bjb medicine and science have improved a long way from the days of finding a vaccine for smallpox…a very long way
Steven – it’s not the the time to find a vaccine, it’s the time to vaccinate EVERYONE in the world. No small task.
YOU made the comparison to smallpox..not me. I pointed out that science and medicine have improved . People are still contracting small pox but the vaccine helps reduce the numbers.
There cannot be any “herd immunity” without a vaccine
Asymptomatic people – carriers of the virus without symptoms – are still out there. Giving current testing is restricted to high risk groups they will not be identified.
Before the lockdown
little to no availability of sanitisers
little to no availability of face masks
no identification of asymptomatic carriers one variant of the virus
No evidence people who recover are immune
After the lockdown/lift the restrictions
little to no availability of sanitisers
little to no availability of face masks
no identification of asymptomatic carriers
now two variants of the virus in Australia .
what has changed? How are things better?
The curve has flatten because of the lockdown – NO other reason
Pru Goward was a major believer in ‘wind turbine syndrome’, so her brain is of the highly cooked variety.
Let’s hope its the families of these herd mentality rednecks that’s are hit first and hardest if they are successful in unlocking the virus beast too early, they hide in their luxurious bunkers in safety while sentencing otherwise healthy people to an early and lonely death, people like Jones and Bolt are heroes behind their microphones and cowards in their bunkers, Jones once said that Julia Gillard’s father died of shame over her actions, I`m sure the real truth is Jones parents had more reason for shame than she did, and even more, if they could see what the evil little fat bastard is advocating for on behalf of his master black Rupert.
The contortions of all these right-wing commentators is amusing. What they cannot and will not face is that COVID19 has laid bare the system of government and the economic system they have long advocated is clearly not fit for purpose. To admit that will, of course, mean an admission of grave error committed over 30 years.
Up to the recent past, fractal evidence of unfitness-for-purpose could always be rationalised, often dishonestly, away with the puerile jargon and idiot ‘certainties’ of neo-liberal economics. But when faced with the a sudden and necessary halt, none of those subterfuges fly anymore. There is now some real certainties that have emerged: Unrestrained globalism is not an any national interest. Government must be big enough to help its citizens in times of crisis (and we have had 2 crises in 6 months). The health system must be built with lots of redundancy. Medical, education and ‘menial’ real jobs contribute more to the national interest than do all the CEOs combined.
How is ‘fractal evidence’ not puerile jargon? ‘Unfitness-for-purpose’?
No. It’s English.