Day: 27 May 2020

YouTube Censors Me Verboten! A few weeks ago I took part in a discussion about the coronavirus crisis organised by the Institute of Arts and Ideas. The other participants were David Alexander, Professor of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London; Anne Johnson, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at University College London; and Michael Levitt, Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Among other things, we discussed the pros and cons of lockdowns and I set out the case against, which is what I'd been invited to do. Afterwards, I extracted a four-minute clip featuring me and Michael Levitt – although he was nodding along enthusiastically to what I was saying rather than speaking – and put it on my YouTube channel, calling it "The Case Against Lockdowns". I also created a two-minute clip and posted that on Twitter which you can see here. This morning at 12.20am I received an email from YouTube which said the following: Hi Toby Young,As you may know, our Community Guidelines describe which content we allow – and don’t allow – on YouTube. Your video The Case Against Lockdowns was flagged to us for review. Upon review, we’ve determined that it violates our guidelines and we’ve removed it from YouTube. As regular readers will know, ...

As we tot up the unintended consequences of lockdowns across the world, it’s worth bearing in mind that the quarantining of entire countries for extended periods of time is a new and untried strategy for managing a pandemic. Historically, there are very few examples of lockdowns being used before. The earliest historical example I can find is Florence in 1631, when an outbreak of the plague killed 12% of the population. More recently, Mexico in 2009, during the first days of an H1N1 influenza outbreak, isolated those suspected of being infected, closed schools, banned public gatherings and cancelled a regional soccer tournament. But those measures weren’t replicated in other countries and Mexico abandoned them after 18 days, partly due to the mounting social and economic costs. We’re often told by lockdown enthusiasts that those US cities that introduced extreme social distancing measures during the Spanish flu pandemic experienced fewer deaths than those that didn’t. But those measures stopped well short of a full lockdown. For instance, in St Louis, which is often held up as a model of how to manage the current pandemic, churches and schools were closed, business hours were restricted and people were ordered to wear mask in public, but the city never issued a stay-at-home order and only cancelled business activity entirely for about forty-eight hours. ...

My European pandemic experience has been a tale of two vastly contrasting cities and countries. In early March, I flew from London to Warsaw, Poland, planning to stay for around ten nights before flying on to Minsk, Belarus. However, on the evening of Friday the 13th (a fitting date), and despite the fact that there were only sixty-eight confirmed cases of the virus in Poland, the Polish government announced a nationwide lockdown. All shops (except supermarkets), cafés, bars, restaurants, universities and schools were to close the following day. All flights and international rail services were suspended. Suddenly, I was stuck in Warsaw. My ten-night stay would turn into seven weeks. The following week, Poland tightened the rules further. Now, you were now only allowed outside if you were an essential worker, or going to buy food or medicine. A week later, the rules were tightened yet further. Amongst other things, there was now a two-metre distancing restriction in public (even for family members), under-18s were not allowed outside unless accompanied by an adult, strict limits were introduced on the number of people allowed inside a supermarket at any one time and it was mandatory to wear disposable gloves to enter a shop, to be supplied by the supermarkets. (Has single-use plastic ever been so popular?!) The army would now assist ...

1. Culturing a Pandemic A useful place to start when trying to understand how societies respond to pandemics is Lowell Carr’s catchily-titled Disaster and the Sequence-pattern Concept of Social Change (1932). According to Carr, the way in which “a community reacts to disaster is… determined by its culture, its morale, its leadership, the speed, scope, complexity and violence of the catastrophe itself.” What’s so interesting about Carr’s list of determinants is that it focuses not just on the obvious natural aspects to a disaster (speed of occurrence, scale of destruction and so on) but also on some of the perhaps less obvious social aspects such as leadership structures within societies experiencing disaster, the cultural values that dominate within such societies and so on. It’s this dual aspect to his thinking that makes the book’s core message so relevant today. If we want to understand how a society responds to disaster, Carr’s suggestion is to treat it not just as a natural phenomenon but as a cultural event too. The UK’s response to COVID-19, for example, has focused on developing an understanding of the virus as a natural, biological object: What is its genetic structure? Is it airborne? Can we create a vaccine? How does it affect the human body? But as Carr suggests, that type of knowledge doesn’t develop in ...