Day: 27 July 2020

Dead Souls

by Zugzwang Marc Chagall's illustration for Dead Souls The anti-hero of Gogol's Dead Souls, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, had his reasons for cultivating the nobility of a provincial Russian backwater, and buying from them, for a nominal sum, those of their serfs who happened to be dead. This saved the vendors an amount of poll tax (which continued to be payable for some time after death) and transformed Chichikov himself into a gentleman proprietor of some 400 serfs, potentially capable of raising a large loan on these assets and eloping (presumably under another name) with the Governor's daughter. When I first read Gogol, I found the whole idea totally obscure and mystifying, and I'm not sure that he ever spells out in words of one syllable how Chichikov's business model is supposed to work. There's a highly respectable view that the whole thing was always intended as pure shaggy-dog, and it's only fitting that it breaks off in mid-sentence, as an act of Shandyean surrealism. Compared with the COVID-19 mortality statistics, however, Gogol provides us with a paradigm of lucidity. Chichikov had found a way of monetising actual serfs who merely happened to have died. We have a Government agency, Public Health England, which seems to be busy manufacturing statistical deaths, to no purpose that makes even Chichikovian sense. The problem ...

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Fatties – You Don't Need to Worry About Dying From Coronavirus Shall I have just one more wafer thin mint? Matt Hancock has written an article for the Telegraph today in which he warns people who are "morbidly obese" that they are at a higher risk of dying from COVID-19. Obesity is one of the greatest long term health challenges that we face as a country.It not only puts a strain on our NHS and care system, but it also piles pressure on our bodies, making us more vulnerable to many diseases, including of course coronavirus.The latest research shows that if you have a BMI of between 30 and 35 your risk of death from coronavirus goes up by at least a quarter.And that nearly 8 per cent of critically ill patients with coronavirus in intensive care are morbidly obese compared at around 3 per cent of the country as a whole. He concludes: If everyone who is overweight lost five pounds it could save the NHS over £100 million over the next five years. And more importantly, given the link between obesity and coronavirus, losing weight could be lifesaving. So just how great is the risk of dying from coronavirus if you're a fatty? According to the latest ONS infection survey data, about one in 2,300 people had COVID-19 in ...

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