LOST IN SPACE

A few years before his death in 2012, I had the huge honour to meet Neil Armstrong, the commander of the Apollo 11 mission and the first human to stand on the moon in July 1969. What do you ask the 20th Century's Magellan that cannot possibly have been asked before? But Armstrong was gracious, self-deprecating and amusing in the face of my trite enquiries and was completely without any aura of self-importance. We talked about boredom amongst the crew as their elaborate tin can ground its way towards the sphere of dust in the distance and Armstrong confirmed that Buzz Aldrin did in fact utter a variant of the "Are we nearly there yet?" question at one point. Armstrong also talked about fear and revealed that all three crewmen had been asked to consider odds of 15% that they wouldn't be coming back. It's easy to envisage three healthy astronauts being stuck in space, their life support systems dwindling towards their extinction, and absolutely no chance of rescue. Yet all three took those odds for, as Armstrong put it, they had an 85% chance of nailing it: which indeed they did.

As the spluttering rocket of the UK struggles to escape the gravitational pull of Planet Lockdown with traces of Covid still on board, the calculation of odds is also at the forefront of minds back at Mission Control in Downing Street and Whitehall. As the futility of "lockdown" became increasingly clear, the equation of the known risks of contagion was neatly solved for the citizenry in the cheap seats by the 2 metre social distancing guidance, a snappy little rubric that further upended vast swathes of the economy, normal family life, employment, leisure activity and the education of children and adults. Although the UK is one of only a tiny handful of countries to have promoted this guidance (in the teeth of WHO advice), it was repeated so often that it morphed into a "rule". 

So what did the "rule" (which has no statutory backing) say about the chances of infection? Presumably the government and its advisors on SAGE didn't think the proles would be able to deal with simple probabilities, so the threat was rationalised as a binary metric to bolster the rationale for "lockdown" and to underpin continuing restrictions. And you could only justify such draconian measures if there was a statistical match of infection to death. So it was promulgated that at two metres the incidence of infection was half that at one metre - stan's to reason, dunnit? The further link with mortality was left hanging in the air. Yet the immutable truth of 2 metres was  unquestioningly drummed in by the media: in particular, the BBC News's "Science" Correspondent David Shukman and "Medical" and "Health" Correspondents Fergus Walsh and Huw Pym were on hand almost nightly to explain matters in that  style of BBC exposition that elsewhere is reserved for the educationally sub-normal.

But the "rule" was a bit like saying to the crew of Apollo 11 that "There is a chance that you won't come back and a chance that you will". It said nothing about the actual probability of infection from Covid-19 as it would have said nothing about survival on a space mission. The chances of infection from an uncovered person who has Covid, and who coughs at you, is 13% at one metre. It is 3% at two metres. In other words, you have an 87% chance of avoiding Covid if an infected person clears his or her throat in your general direction at a distance of a little over three feet. You have a 97% chance of avoidance at two metres. There have been just over 300,000 cases of confirmed Covid-19 infection in a UK population of 67 million. Just under 43,000 have died. As they say, "Do the Math".

The public health impact of Covid -19 has been fearsome. Yet arguably the official response to it has been absolutely catastrophic and in no way mitigated by the knowledge that other countries have also struggled with their various approaches. The idea that there are "so many unknowns" about the virus is just a poor excuse for not getting to grips with what was known about the pathology of Covid 19 at an early stage and acting accordingly. Amid all the obfuscation about Chinese "secrecy", Johns Hopkins University of the USA established quite early on in the pandemic that the elderly were the most at risk and that infection was mostly determined by sustained proximity in confined spaces. Death from Covid was far more likely to result in patients with pre-existing medical conditions such as heart disease, respiratory illness and dementia. This was all borne out by  subsequent experience and confirmed by outliers such as the miniscule proportion of fatalities amongst young children and infants. Yet infected elderly patients were discharged into care homes early in the pandemic while the task of getting children back into the class room has caused a collective official seizure throughout the UK.

Debatably, as much fear has been generated by the official response to the pandemic as by the virus itself and the inflation of these fears by the media and especially the BBC. The civil service moves extraordinarily slowly and it is simply not enough to assert that everyone has been working their socks off within processes and procedures that are incapable of swift adaptation. After all, no senior civil servant, departmental leader or director of one the vast battalions of quangocrats was ever selected for their spontaneity, non-consensual thinking or single mindedness. We live in an era of "equalities audits", "access agendas", "stakeholder consultation", "vulnerabilities"  and "safety protocols" which have led to a steady bureaucratisation of our culture beyond the boundaries of those departments and local authorities that promulgate them. Ministers might bang on about "moving at pace" (the latest bit of jargon to contaminate public briefings), but all this faux activity is nearly always qualified by the word "appropriately", which has itself moved beyond cliché into the realm where language truly dies.

As the UK government and devolved administrations are discovering, it is a lot harder to coax people out of lockdown when they have only so recently been terrorised into it. But this is the inevitable result of a cultural conditioning that has encouraged citizens to confuse risk with uncertainty and a belief that adversities in life must always be the fault of someone else or the consequence of impersonal forces which ought to be negated. Now, political and administrative action has been stymied by the desire to get a scientific imprimatur for every decision that is made, a level of approval that the scientists are understandably reluctant to give. Yet some of the recent measures, such as the quarantining of travellers into the UK, seem bizarre not least because they have come so late in the day and seem to have been driven by the "focus group" style of reaching political conclusions. But there is a world of difference between running for office and actually governing. Too often decisions seem to be driven by the consideration "Does this look good?" rather than "Is this right?". Some of the initiatives look thoroughly embarrassing too: the Health Secretary's bombastic ambition to create a "world beating test and trace system" foundered almost immediately, the victim of official UK's obsession with centralising everything within its purview. Naturally, the providers of the kit were reluctant to have their actual world beating technologies re-organised for them by the men and women from the ministry.

Certainly it is a season for superlatives: the highest level of national debt since WWII;  the biggest downturn in the economy since the early 18th Century; the greatest loss of liberty for the private citizen since the 17th Century etc. etc. The bills are absolutely staggering and keep mounting. You can be sure that the NHS will be back cap-in-hand to deal with the stupendous backlog of cancer therapies, heart procedures and hip replacements that have been denied attention even as vast swathes of the NHS have lain idle in expectation of the "second wave" of Covid infections. Government IOUs are being sprayed around with abandon and there is a creeping consensus that the debt can simply be monetised. But Modern Monetary Theory (or the Magic Money Tree) is just a sophisticated way of saying "inflation" and the Bank of England has warned that there are limits to its abilities to backstop the spree, even if it wanted to. 

Natural or even man made disasters should prompt a thorough re-appraisal. The Covid pandemic has somehow managed to combine the two. Criticism is not just the application of hindsight and the  crisis has thrown up plenty of examples where the failure to take the right turning could easily have been  anticipated had the map been studied more closely and logically. What is clear is that government, both at the level of the politicians and their officials simply lacks the intellectual or practical bandwidth to do all the things that it is attempting to do. There is undeniable truth that the costs of the crisis will have to be met but a rather lazier consensus that we will have to go on paying for more-of-the-same. Some are calling for taxes on wealth, justified by the dubious logic that the costs of dealing with the pandemic were mainly aimed at the elderly, as if we would tax parents had the pandemic mostly affected children. There is a broad consensus that consumers will need incentives to get spending again. After a brief reprieve from stimulus measures such as lower VAT and employers' National Insurance, it will be fingers crossed that growth will somehow see us right. Otherwise...

But all this assumes that we were well governed before the UK went into the crisis. We were not. Surely it is time to radically rethink the state, its purpose, size and cost? We can't go on like this, or we really will burn up on re-entry.