States of Panic: Covid 19 and the New Medieval

By Brian Pottinger

The world shut down in 2020 for the first time in 700 years due to a plague. A novel virus out of China was threatening mass fatalities among the human population. The closure had immeasurable economic, political and social consequences.

In States of Panic: COVID-19 and the New Medieval, journalist and author Brian Pottinger examines the reasons for this extraordinary act of self-immolation and comes to a chilling conclusion: the threat was never the virus, it was the humans.

In a readable and incisive style, the author explodes one by one the great myths of this tragedy: the severity of the virus; the integrity of the official statistics; the efficacy of total lock-downs; the quality of the science; the wisdom of the political leadership and the competence of the media.

He finds neither conspiracy nor malice in this bizarre story: only powerful and unaccountable institutions, the institutions of fear, pursuing power, privilege, publicity and profit by doing what they have always done, exploiting a crisis.

This time, however, they created our new medieval. And the world will never be the same again.

Brian Pottinger is a South African based journalist and author with extensive experience of developing world societies. He was educated at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Harvard, where he was a Fellow of the Nieman Foundation. He is a former Editor and Publisher of the South African Sunday Times. This is his eighth non-fiction work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Pottinger
• Release date: Jan 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005990848

Brian Pottinger

Brian Pottinger is a South African based journalist and author with extensive experience of developing world societies. He was educated at the University of KwaZulu Natal and Harvard where he was a fellow of the Nieman Foundation. He is a former Editor and Publisher of the South African Sunday Times. This is his eighth non-fiction work.

Book preview

Tables

Table 1:COVID-19 Infection and Fatality Toll At Time of Unlocking Versus June 30 2020 In Nine Countries.

Table 2:Infection Path South Africa: Jan – June 2020

Table 3:CFR and IFR (total and excl comorbidities) for Ten Countries As Of April 30 2020

Table 4:CFR and IFR (total and excl comorbidities) for Seven Countries: August 30 2020

Table 5:Gross Mortalities UK January to June from 2017 to 2020

Table 6:UK Excess Winter Deaths. 2012 to 2020

Table 7:Influenza Fatalities United States 2017-2020 As

At June 19 2020

Table 8:Covid-19-linked Fatalities versus Top Natural and Unnatural Causes of Death in 2019 (Eight Months)

Table 9:Comparison WHO Standard Modelled Flu Season Versus COVID-19 at August 30 2020

Table 10:Covid-19 versus Great Disasters 1348 – 2020.

Table 11:Cases and Deaths April 30 versus September 30 by

Region and Population

Table 12 :Swedish Model versus Five Western Countries:

August 30 2020

Introduction

As the Great COVID-19 Panic marched towards its northern hemisphere peak in late March of 2020, I sent a WhatsApp to a cousin in Canada estimating world-wide infections and deaths by the end of the northern winter. I derived the numbers through a primitive algorithmic model.

I was wrong. Fatalities that could reasonably be directly and solely attributable to the virus by the end of April 2020 exceeded my estimate by several thousand. Reported cases were three times my guess.

Yet I was much closer in my projections than the millions of infections and fatalities scoped by the experts and pundits that had dominated the news for weeks and driven politicians into decisions that would change forever our future.

I am not a virologist, epidemiologist or scientist. I have only the vaguest notions of actuarial algorithms. So how was it possible for me to penetrate the miasma of confusion to reach an assessment of likely infected and dead that was much closer to the reality than that presented by so many of the experts at the time?

Through 30 years of involvement in journalism, business and writing in the developing world, I have observed the non-profit organisations, research institutes and public health institutions at close quarters and have few illusions about their capacity for institutionalised alarmism. I have developed an acute nose for hype. And the Great COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020 was rich with it.

There was a second reason I was sceptical. I had been through it all before while living in a small Cornish village. We all had in the Swine Flu N1H1 panic of 2009/2010. That too was billed as a killer disease. That too caused widespread fear and dire warnings of collapsed health services. The public, as always, stockpiled essentials while armies of experts, health workers and allied hysterics ran around warning us of massive looming fatalities. Huge warehouses of an anti-dote, the Roche-manufactured Tamiflu, were sold.

And when the dust settled it was found, with sober analysis, that Swine Flu was no worse than a common form of influenza and was accordingly downgraded. The killer pandemic was a pussycat. And Tamiflu, it turned out, reduced the symptoms of the illness by, at most, six hours.

There were a number of troubling questions for me about COVID-19’s orthodox narrative that unfolded from early February 2020 onwards. What was so novel about COVID-19 that we had to close the world when three to four new or novel viruses hit us every year and at least once a decade our species is subjected to a virulent infection of some nature that claims millions of fatalities?

Why was this virus so catastrophic we had to adopt methods unused since medieval times when early on we knew its transmission rate was slower than the common influenza and its Case Fatality Rate (CFR) and Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), calibrated for regional and demographic differences, ranged from the equivalent of a normal to a very severe influenza outbreak.

Why were we so terrified when we knew very early on that more than 80 per cent of those infected would get it so mildly they might not even notice and that less than five per cent would suffer seriously enough to need hospitalisation, that its target group was overwhelmingly the elderly and that 77% of the fatalities had prior severe underlying conditions, the category of patient that was in any case sadly predisposed to die from complications?

Why did we ignore the fact that total fatalities from COVID-19 linked deaths six months into the pandemic were still within the range of annual influenza-related deaths according to the World Health Organisation’s own models and were lower than the fatalities of the Asian Flu of 1956-58 and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968-69? Let’s not even talk about the real communicable disease killers such as AIDS-HIV at one million a year and Tuberculosis at 1,3 million.

Why were we so panicked when very soon it became apparent that aggregate global mortality numbers would not be affected by this killer pandemic and why did we swallow claims of a Second Wave when even a cursory reading of the World Health Organisation’s amended clinical and epidemiological criteria for the virus would have shown the real reason for the spiking infection numbers? Why did we fall for the same old hype and exaggeration we had already been through in 2009/10 with Swine Flu (N1H1)?

This book is neither a scientific tract nor an attempt to write the history of great pandemics. Those looking for one should rather access the vast vaults of research profitably published on the virus since its outbreak. This book, rather, is a modest effort at answering a simple question: how was it possible for a supposedly post-modern world to self-immolate through over-reaction and panic? What led us to such extraordinary acts of self-harm?

The immediate challenge by the sceptics will no doubt be to ask by what authority I write on such a complex issue. Am I an expert? My thankful answer is no, I am not an expert but I can think for myself, ask questions and analyse data. Besides, being an expert is no guarantee of being right, as history so often attests. If one considers the needless devastation the so-called COVID-19 experts have wrought, it is surely time for the common sense amateurs to step forward.

This book will track the tragic combination of errors, misunderstandings, mischief and gross failures that brought us to these States of Panic.

It does not argue that COVID-19 did not exist. Obviously it did. Nor will it suggest the virus did not infect millions of people and kill hundreds of thousands. Of course it did. It will certainly not suggest it was a mild infection: COVID-19 was very nasty towards elderly people and those with underlying severe conditions. And of course this book will not claim that the politicians and health leaders charged with the care of nations should not have triggered pandemic control measures of some nature. They had no option.

But COVID-19 was not a killer disease on a scale that remotely justified closing down the world. From its outset, certain epidemiologists and health care institutions, the deeply discredited World Health Organisation (WHO) at the centre, moved well beyond ascertainable scientific fact, both in the diagnosis of the disease and in their pandemic reporting and management strategies. They unleashed a firestorm that with rare exceptions consumed all nations.

The central charge in this book is thus:

The early epidemiological mathematical modellers had no idea of what they were dealing with and yet presented dread scenarios and options to the policy-makers. Worse, as the nature of the virus became better understood they failed to accordingly moderate their analyses and recommendations on pandemic control measures. Indeed, they exacerbated the initial errors.

The public health officials in nearly all developed world countries unquestioningly acceded to these inflated estimates of fatalities and called for extreme containment measures to camouflage the unpalatable fact that they were incapable of managing even a middle-level pandemic, despite the vast treasures in public money sunk into them over the years.

The agencies responsible for collating and publishing the data on the pandemic, primarily the WHO and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States, adopted reporting policies that consistently over-stated the real case and fatality numbers. They did this because of fear of being accused of underestimating the true toll of dead in what was being punted as the worst viral infection since the Spanish Flu of 1918 and, secondly, because as the European fatalities began to fall far short of their initial projections they had huge vested interests in over-emphasising the severity of the pandemic.

The public in the Western World surrendered themselves to fear and hysteria and forewent age-old personal and economic rights without challenging the suppositions or those who made them.

The politicians failed in their essential role of giving calm, considered and determined leadership at a time of great national trauma.

And, finally, many elements of the media succumbed to the easiest and laziest pack journalism possible. Triggered by the magic word crisis, their analysis was all too often superficial, gullible and without context or proportion.

Only two groups emerge from this saga with honour.

The first is the frontline medical staff who had to contend with a virus of unknown severity and alarmist academic epidemiological modellers, irresolute politicians, decayed health administrations and an over-heated media. The second are the hundreds of millions of ordinary people who volunteered their time to help their fellow citizens; whether designing novel and cost-efficient breathing apparatus, caring for the vulnerable or raising support and aid. The COVID-19 panic brought out some of the best in our humanity. They are all due every respect.

My story begins with a China desperate to make amends for its failure to take the SARS outbreak of 2003 seriously and then moves to the ill-fortune that saw this novel virus make landfall in Italy, possibly the worst place in Europe in terms of demographics, mild prior year influenza seasons and dysfunctional healthcare systems. The optics were terrible.

Enter then the celebrity epidemiologists, some with unbroken records of comically wrong and alarmist modelling, using outdated and flawed software. Then, Stage Left, a clutch of political elites with neither the knowledge to challenge the fantasies with which they were presented by the experts nor the courage to face down the rising howls of hysteria and paranoia from social and other media.

At the centre of it all stands the World Health Organisation, mired in internal corruption inquiries and still smarting from the Swine Flu Fiasco a decade earlier when it was accused of purveying hyped fatality numbers and of having dodgy connections with a pharmaceutical company trying to sell an anti-dote that fell far short of its promise. It needed the opportunity for redemption, no matter what.

And so to lock-down and unimaginable collateral damage, suffering, death and lost opportunity. The denouement: the realisation by the elites that they had made a grave mistake with incalculable political, economic and social consequences. Commence then the long and fraught process of extrication, cover-up, lies, blame-laying, denial and the manipulation of statistics and science with which we are still engaged and will be forever.

The participants in the cover-up, or perhaps more accurately described as the post-facto Great Silence, were numerous: the epidemiological classes, public health authorities, the politicians and large tracts of the media. Nobody wanted to be revealed to be mistaken. None had an interest in post-mortems or even the truth.

There was no vast conspiracy afoot in 2020. The cock-up view of history always beats the conspiracy one, as far as I am concerned. But if Marx is able to suggest that history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims, I can surely suggest that the Great COVID-19 Panic of 2020 was nothing but institutions and individuals pursuing their own objectives in a way so thoughtless, reckless and dangerous, that it has changed the very course of our future. There was no special malice or criminality here.

That is perhaps the narrow and most depressing story of COVID-19 as a pandemic: the remorseless pursuit of self-interest by the epidemiological modellers and virologists outbidding each other to grab the headlines and the research funds; the politicians, in an age of popular democracy too afraid to risk the truth with institutionalised mob neurosis; social media ramping the hysteria; professional fear organisations like the WHO egging it all on, popular media falling into default panic mode and, finally, the pharmaceutical and health care bureaucracies grabbing their slice.

All of these, individually and collectively, added to the momentum. Like the troop trains of World War One, once rolling, they could not be diverted from reaching their dread destination.

I have looked at six events in all as backdrop to the events of 2020: two real disasters, the Black Death (1347-1351) and the Spanish Influenza (1918 – 20), two serious infectious outbreaks, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012 and two epidemiological, social and media panics, Swine Flu (N1H1) (2009) and COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) (2020).

But it is the last outbreak that attracts the most attention, not only because it was one of the most widely covered media events in the history of our species thanks to social media, but also because it achieved the unimaginable: it had no impact on gross global mortality yet caused the greatest social and economic dislocation outside of world war.

How was this possible?

The argument I will develop in this book is that COVID-19’s significance does not only lie in its medical aspects but in its social and political implications. It was, quite simply, the tip-over moment at which the contemporary developed world finally departed from its long history of rational and scientific habit and fell back into an earlier historical paradigm of medico-sorcery, superstition and irrationality. Back, in short, to The New Medieval.

The Great COVID-19 Scare of 2020 was an electrifying illustration of the collapse of the developed world’s core emotional resilience, intellectual vigour and independence of mind.

In 2014, I published an Essay in the United States titled The Rise and Fall of the Egalitarian Fantasy.

I will not canvas the main theme of the Essay but simply refer to the section which dealt with the emergence of the great non-profit, charitable and research entities and the extraordinary influence these unaccountable and unmonitored institutions have in the lives of modern humans today, more so in fact, than elected governments. The Great COVID-19 Panic vividly and tragically demonstrated my point.

The power and manipulation by these enterprises, the institutions paid to scare us to death, has not gone unnoticed or unopposed by swathes of ordinary people in the developed world. In my 2014 book I anticipated a backlash against these new, manipulative and disconnected elites and institutions. Two years later came Donald Trump, then Brexit and then Boris Johnson, and throughout Europe the evisceration of the centrist parties and the resurrection of the conservative and traditionalist right as major political forces. This swing will be greatly enhanced post-COVID-19.

It was these scare institutions, I call them here the Merchants of Fear, which brought us the Great COVID-19 Panic, which ran our States of Panic, which casually felled great economies and deprived us of our centuries-old personal liberties and rights.

The Black Death unchained huge social, artistic and economic consequences for the eventual good of humankind. I believe the Great COVID-19 Panic is just such a hinge moment in our history: a recall to sanity and common sense. This book seeks to explain the background to that moment and to anticipate its consequences.

It is necessary here to raise an obvious but often missed point. Epidemiology is by its nature involved with disease and death and numbers. It surveys deaths by the millions, and when we talk about statistics it is easy to forget the humanity that lies behind those numbers; to overlook the fact that every death leaves loved ones, gaps in communities, terminated existences and broken hopes.

In writing this book, I have tried never to lose sight of that fact.

Part One

Viruses and Modelling

There are more than 200 known viruses that are able to infect humans. They are grouped in more than 20 families and within each family there may be anything between one and 40 different species or strains. Coronavirus, subject of much recent interest, has at least seven identifiable species --- including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

These viruses arise from a variety of sources including animal viruses crossing the species barrier into humans. Of these only about half are capable of being transmitted between humans and only half of those again spread well enough to cause major outbreaks. Conversely, about two thirds of human viruses can be transmitted back into animals.

The rate of discovery of new viruses has been about 3.37 species per year although there has been a discernible decrease in recent years. The important point to grasp is that the emergence of a new or novel virus (one that has never been recorded before) is neither exceptional nor necessarily daunting. We have annually been discovering new and novel viruses on an uninterrupted basis since 1901 when the first filterable agent was uncovered in yellow fever virus. New and novel viruses have been hitting us every year for 120 years, but we have never found it necessary to close down the world. So why did we do it for COVID-19?

That brings us to the corona family of viruses.

Coronavirus is a disease that attacks the respiratory systems of humans. In some instances, these symptoms are mild, no more than a cold or flu, and in other cases they are more severe. In cases where they attack elderly people or people with an underlying respiratory or other condition, they can be fatal. (1)

The virus is spread by contact with particles of infected mucus sprayed from a victim when they sneeze or cough. These viruses can be picked up through direct person-to-person transmission or through contact with the virus lying on an open surface such as a table-top or elevator handrail. Close personal contact is thus essential for transmission and the advised distance of safety is 1.5 metres although, inevitably, other more alarmist authorities, against all known medical science, put it at four metres. Subsequently, as the research of Covid-19 intensified, some researchers suggested the virus may be airborne.

Then, as the COVID-19 pandemic entered stormy political waters, the symptoms and essential character of the virus was to be redefined by a series of ad hoc clinical add-ons based, for the most