The current Covid19 Emergency, has brought forth a lot of responses from various commentators. Some of the commentators and informational online channels have been measured, sensible, responsible and as accurate as they possibly can be. For me the coverage and comment that most closely meets the standard of being measured and sensible etc are coming from the Medcram channel, which concentrates on the epidemiology and biochemistry behind Covid19 and from Sargon of Akkad who has been commenting on the social and political aspects of the current crisis.

Medcram has been my ‘go to’ channel for background information on the Covid19 crisis and appears to publish every day apart from at weekends. On there you can find information about infection levels, death rates, the geographical spread of Covid19 and information about medical research that is either being directly carried out on Covid19 or previous research into the biochemistry of viruses that is now becoming more relevant than it may have been in the past. If you want informaton about the science of Covid19 then Medcram is run by medics and is much more scientific in its approach to Covid19 than many of the more ‘quack’ type sites and channels that have set up.

Sargon of Akkad on his channel Akkad Daily has been providing sensible and measured coverage of the Covid19 emergency. Although I do not agree with every single thing that Sargon says, I’m less of a secularist than he is for example, he’s been brilliant in calling out and condemning panic buyers and profiteers which he does in the video below.

He’s also called out those who are trying to exploit the current emergency for their own ends. He pulled up a good instance of what I would call the Bad. For example in the video Sargon calls attention to a social media post that is going around of the world foods chilled section of a supermarket. The image was captioned ‘plenty of Asian food available’ as if to imply that some people are, on the grounds of race, religion or culture, getting better access to food supplies than others, something that is plainly NOT the case. As Sargon pointed out, this was an image of highly perishable foods on display, stuff like Sushi that has to be replaced daily and therefore of course the shelves were full for that reason. I’d also like to point out that the sort of stuff that Sargon is talking about is the very last thing I’d buy if I wanted to hunker down for a bit therefore it is a part of a supermarket that is going to be ignored by panic buyers. I would like to echo Sargon’s advice to the public which is to keep calm and be sensible and not to do anything stupid.

Religious groups of all kinds seem to be being sensible as well. Churches are taking steps to contain this infection and so are other non-Christian groups. I’ve come across a number of mosques who are restricting entry for over 60’s and who are also curbing the size of religious meetings or even cancelling them altogether. I may dislike the ideology of Islam immensely but I have to be consistent and give praise where it is due, voluntarily shutting mosques is the right and proper thing for the Muslim community to do. As for my own lot, the Jews, there’s been cancellations of Purim and after Purim parties and also cancellations of religious services going on for a while now. I’m hearing also of Jewish charities and communal organisations moving to teleworking where they can in an effort to reduce the staff in offices and thereby slow the infection rate. Passover is coming up rapidly on the horizon and I can see that there’s going to be a great many cancellations of communal Seders and of services as this would be the sensible thing to do. Some Jewish groups are experimenting with putting their religious services online, an innovation that will not be taken up by the Orthodox due to the use of computers on the Sabbath, but something that will be a lifeline for many non Orthodox Jews.

We’ve seen examples of the sensible and the bad now we need to look at the Ugly. There’s a video going around social media showing the results of a panic buying spree by an Asian family. This video clip is being accompanied by the phrase or a variation on it of ‘Look the Muslims are hoarding food and toilet paper’. I’ve watched this video (which at the time of writing I can’t re-find) and there was nothing in it to suggest that this Asian family was Muslim, nothing at all. Of course I condemn such blatant hoarding at a time like this. There was enough toilet paper, food, cooking oil and other items to probably keep the crowd at Glastonbury festival fed and cleaned for a day in that house. However, there was no indication that I could see from either the décor or layout of the house, or the way that the person’s children were dressed or any other thing that could possibly suggest that this hoarder is a Muslim. There’s no picture of Mecca on the wall and nothing with the sort of Arabic text on that would lead me to believe that these hoarders are Muslim. They could be Hindu or Sikh or Buddhist or anything else, even atheists and the claim that these hoarders are Muslim are innaccurate and irresponsible. There’s plenty of true stuff that can be brought into play to criticise Islam, there’s really no need for bullshit and lies. There’s two levels of Ugly in this video, the first is the boastful nature of it, a form of shouting ‘look what I’ve got’ and the second is the dishonest use to which this video was put.

As for the Quackery. We are seeing loads out there. It ranges from the scaremongering put out by publications like Natural News in between trying to sell gullible punters varous dietary supplements to a shamed Televangelist peddling silver as a quack cure for Coronavirus. Members of the Q-Anon conspiracy theory cult have been telling people that drinking bleach cures Coronavirus (fact it doesn’t it just burns the persons insides). It seems that another cult, this time one that claims drinking bleach cures autism has come into the Q-Anon cult (a cult that believes that President Trump is secretly trying to take down a cabal of high profile paedophiles) and the Q-Anon cultists are now promoting something called ‘Miracle Mineral Solution’ which is a form of bleach as a Coronavirus cure.

I don’t know whether the reason is cultural or political, but America seems to be more afflicted by these quacks than is the situation here in Britain. I’ve not seen for example the British government having to put out notices to the public, as the US Food and Drug Administration has had to do, to warn consumers not to drink bleach as a Coronavirus ‘cure’. Maybe Britain’s relative immunity to the sort of quackery that afflicts the USA is an effect of legislative restrictions that exist in Britain, such as the Cancer Act of 1939 and subsequent legislation. This is the legislation that prevents the advertisement of quack ‘cures’ for cancer and stops alternative practitioners such as homeopaths and other similar individuals from making other outlandish and innaccurate claims about their products against both cancer and other conditions. That’s not to say that we don’t have quacks, the appalling David Noakes and another quack who told his followers to drunk turpentine, are both British but they have at least been either prosecuted or shut down for their dangerous idiocies, but America appears to have many more of such charlatans.

If I was you I’d stay well away from Natural News, televangelists, bleach drinking promoters and other similar quacks and stick with established medical science. These quacks will do nothing for you, may injure you and get rich off of you in the process. Whilst I’m probably the first to admit that medical science is not perfect, it’s a damned sight more reliable than the stuff that the large number of ‘woo peddlers’ are trying to sell you.

I have to keep telling people, because it is self evident, that this is not 1918, we have far better medical knowledge than back then. It is also not 1665 or 1350, or 441. Even in 1918 there was no knowledge of the pathogen that was causing the influenza pandemic, the ability to even see let along sequence the RNA of a virus just did not exist then. There were no antibiotics to treat opportunistic infections and obviously no antivirals of any kind. This is one crisis where the tools are available to fight it effectively, tools that were not available before.

I’ll do a future article on the emergency legislation and its effects as well as other articles on this current emergency, but the upshot of this crisis may well be that a lot of people are going to have to quarantine themselves in order to try to stop the spread of this virus. Many of us, my family included, have done so already and have placed ourselves in semi quarantine as our son was sent home from school on Monday by a panicky teacher who thought he had a high temperature combined with a cough and a spot or two. So far he has not exhibited any high temperature that we can ascertain and the cough sounds just like that a normal childhood cough. He’s thankfully been his usual lively self although we are keeping a closer eye on him and not letting him mix with other children for fourteen days.

At present he’s enjoying the extra time available to play in the mud that has been created by the recent storms and wet weather The school has advised us to keep Laughing Boy off for seven days which we will do. We’ve got about a month’s worth of food both frozen and tinned in the house and 30 toilet rolls which we believe is sufficient but not excessive. I’ve picked up another 2.5 cwt (140kg) of coal from our coal merchant and 55lbs (25kg) of potaoes from a local farmer so we will now hunker down only taking Laughing Boy to the park when there’s no other children around. I think today’s parents need to start thinking like previous generations of parents did when faced with things like Polio outbreaks which is to keep our children away from either the disease itself or environments where the disease is likely to be more easily spread.

We are at present under self imposed siege and I’m itching for this period to be over so that I can get to some sense of normality and also get out and help those who require it. I grew up with those who suffered the deprivations of World War II and who also had a sense of duty, I’ve inherited this sense of duty and want to assist my community in dealing with this crisis and recovering from it. I want to, as they used to say, ‘do my bit’. Until that time comes I will have to be satisfied with, along with my wife, homeschooling our son.

I’m also bingewatching a series that may seem perverse to some but one that also makes me realise how further on medical science is today than it was in 1975. I’m watching the BBC drama series ‘Survivors’ (the original not the shitty woke remake from the 2000’s) about a small group of survivors of a world wide bubonic plague pandemic that has decimated Britain, leaving alive only 1 in every 5000 people. I’ve got nearly the complete three series that were broadcast in the mid to late 1970’s. Whilst in no way do I believe that Coronavirus will be anything like as dangerous as the plague featured in Survivors, we know more science than we did back then and now even Yersina Pestis is to a large degree controllable and treatable. The main danger that comes from Coronavirus is that it is novel and there is little or no natural resistance to it which is why it is mostly killing and doing major harm to those whose health is already compromised. Panic is also a big risk here and it is likely to be panic that in the current Coronavirus emergency is going to be the biggest of our problems. ‘Survivors’ reminds me that even in disasters there are decent people and complete arseholes and these are encounters that are part of the human condition whether there is a big disaster or not.

Some difficult times for all of us are ahead. Times that we need to get through just as previous generations had to cope with the challenges of their times.

PS The title of this series is taken from a brilliant book I once read about the life of a medic in the Vietnam war called ‘Journal of a Plague Year’ by John A Parrish. It’s well worth a read. I hope Dr Parrish does not mind me borrowing his title but it seemed to be most appropriate for this occasional series which I’ll write when I’m not otherwise engaged.