First published, 28th March 2020
One thing Steven Pinker succeeds in doing very well in his recent book on progressivism, Enlightenment Now is to explore and expose how effectively and efficiently human beings are so easily self-misleading and, in more recent times, willingly and wilfully ignorant of data and facts, even though these are more freely and easily available than perhaps ever before. Why this should be the case is interesting and amusing and very much explored by Dr Pinker.
Whatever the causes, however, the effects are very much the same: people seem to be more easily confused and to find it increasingly difficult to construct senses of truth and reality as if they have lost or forgotten the tools given to them at least since the Enlightenment. Pinker’s agenda is, of course, clearly to reaffirm and reestablish the values of science, reason, humanism so beaten and battered in the postmodern age.
Certainly, I do not know if my claim here is a fact. It is an impression and I may well be wrong. My opinion is that people seem to be unwilling to check out the facts relating to the latest virus outbreak, preferring, instead, to submit themselves unquestioningly to the thought contagion promulgated by the mainstream media and amplified by the algorithms of social media. Cognitive biases are amplified by the virtual realities of the extended human brain. The internet increasingly does the ‘thinking’ for us.
Life has a mortality rate of 100%. This is a fact and a good starting point. Certainly, it should be a cause for concern but not to such a level that it must render joyless the journey from cradle to grave. It should not, I contend, be a reason for governments to lock their citizens away, though it might become one.
Never before in human history have rulers sought to bubble wrap their citizens in this extreme way. Not during plagues, smallpox, polio, meningitis,, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera or any of the many other far more virulent and deadly pathogen pandemics have we shut things down for ourselves like this.
Humans have, for thousands of years, lived alongside invisible killers. What has happened in 2020 is extraordinary not because there is yet another virus, but for the way governments have shut things down on the dictates of, one must suppose, a combination of WHO fatwas and the pressure of social media.
This year marks the first time in history that well established norms for quarantine have been turned on their heads. Before this year, those with infectious diseases would and should have expected to be placed in isolation. However, for some insane reason, things have flipped. Now, the world’s population has been put in quarantine. It’s the equivalent of passing a law to have all pets put into isolation because there is a disease called rabies. It’s almost as if humans have completely forgotten what quarantine means. Maybe this is what has happened. Who knows, but the lunacy we are all having to contend with is that the World Health Organisation has decided it’s passable and sensible to put 7.8 billion people into quarantine. (By the way, ‘lock down’ is a meme euphemism for ‘quarantine’).
Between 55 and 60 million people drop dead each year in current times, according to the World Health Organisation. We might reasonably accept this statistic as a sort of fact. Who better to count the global dead than the WHO?
If we accept this approximate number, certain useful statistical comparisons can be made. According to the WHO, about 3 million people die each year of lower respiratory tract complications of the sort caused by respiratory diseases such as SARS, MERS and other coronaviruses, caused themselves by cross species infection, along with other older influenza strains.
I checked out some more of those annoying and distracting facts on www.worldometer.info on the latest global death toll from COVID-19. As of today, the global total is just under 30,000 (though the BBC reports Johns Hopkins University’s much sexier 60,000. Fact is, no one knows the real facts).
If we begin to combine and compare figures, it is possible to get a better sense of things. What is interesting is how data relating to the present virus pandemic are cited by the media and governments as absolute, not comparative. Data and statistics are always more meaningful and real when contextualised and compared.
If we know about 56 million people are going to die in 2020, those dying from various strains of flu virus will be 3,000,000/56,000,000 which is 5.3%. In terms of a probability statistic of the 56 million people who won’t make it to 1st January 2021, there is just over a 1-in-20 chance this will be caused by ‘man flu+’. It might be worth adding that about 30,000 of these people have already died from COVID-19 within the first three months of the year. If we multiply the present figure by four, we might have a workable extrapolated figure for the year (ignoring the possibility that the present virus will spiral exponentially out of control): 120,000. Okay, why not, for fun, over double that figure to a beefy 250,000. This would mean that by the end of the year, 0.46% of the global dead population are likely to have died from COVID-19.
A couple of interesting observations can be made at this point. Firstly, the significantly higher proportion of the global population dying from non-Coronavirus-19 induced lower respiratory diseases are simply not on the radar. The significantly much smaller percentage of Coronavirus-19 ‘beefed-up’ population has been blown up into the equivalent of a World War Three mass missile bun fight. There is far more reason to close borders and isolate populations, close down schools and businesses etc. based on non-COVID-19 related deaths, yet these deaths are ignored, not mentioned and relatively irrelevant. That’s already a bit odd and confusing.
It is also worth mentioning that, of course, the human population dying this year is not the human population. This stands at about 7.8 billion: 7800000000. This means that about 0.78% of the world’s population will die this year. This means about 0.003% of the world’s population will die from COVID-19.
Keeping with the dead dudes for 2020, i.e. about 56,000,000, the World Health Organisation also has statistics for the top ten ways these people have so far and will have died by the end of the year. By far, ischaemic heart disease and stroke are the biggest killers with a combined 15.2 million victims in 2016.
Sure, flu and viruses that cause fatal lung conditions are up there, as the already quoted 3 million figure would seem to indicate. Lower respiratory deaths are the third or fourth most common cause of global deaths each year.
Well, this might sound obvious, but the top four main causes of death listed by the WHO are heart and lung related. It doesn’t take a great leap of imaginative inference to see that these causes of death are what we used to call ‘old age’. Basically, most of us die of old age. Or, put more accurately, we die in old age. Sure, there are plenty of other ways to shuffle off this mortal coil. Traffic accidents, for example, account for about 1.5 million deaths of which 74% are boys and men. (Jeremy Clarkson should be taken out and shot infront of his family?). And, before I forget, surely most people, old or neonate, die from poverty, I mean inpoverty. Whatever. Who really cares, when COVID-19 stalks?
What can sensibly be concluded from the present hysteria? I’m not sure. Perhaps I’ve already made my conclusion in having inadvertently referred to the behaviour and mentality of a large number of people I have heard and seen in recent weeks, as being hysterical. Some more intelligent and reflective friends have referred to the current situation as being ‘mad’.
More serious than the viral infection is the madness. This madness can be characterised as revolving around a sort of hack journalistic manic glee or delight in crisis, catastrophe and the collapse of civilisation, economic systems and the such like. It’s almost as though we want a disaster and god damn it, we’re going to make it happen! Shut down the airlines! Get out there and bang your saucepans and clap the brave and selfless emergency services. I don’t know, just go out and do whatever FaceBook tells you to do. Socially distance and socially conform. If you dare step out of line you’re no better than a murderer. Before long, women will be shoving their white feathers into traitors to the cause and those who threaten audience ratings.
Well, it seems strange to me that Boris Johnson should have locked himself in the toilet of 10 Downing Street because people, it would seem, are dying of old age. How on earth will the world’s leaders find ways to conclude this bizarre narrative? What is the exit strategy going to be? one muses.
I dreamt, the other night, that I had fallen into a coma in 2015 and that I had woken up in a side ward full of hysteria. Ignored by the nursing staff running manically round in face masks and rubber suits, I glance at the TV. That Boris Johnson character seems to be in Number 10 as the Prime Minister. Why is he hunched in a cupboard? Who’s that? Donald Trump? Why is The Apprentice coming from the Oval Office this week? Who’s fired? WTF happened? I’m still in a coma. I’m still in a coma…