by Omar Khan
Sri Lanka opted to throw nuance to the wind and go for an outright 24/7 multi-month curfew. Announced with mere hours of notice, it threw everyone into desperate pandemonium. Touted originally as a “weekend curfew”, when it was extended and then briefly relaxed it had people desperate to get essentials, with open-air markets here resembling a COVID-19 petri dish.
Then, four days after it was first instituted, it went back on, and has not been fully lifted as of today, May 24th, though it has been relaxed in the last few weeks. Essentially, however, from March 20th the entire economic engine came to a screeching halt, imposing grotesque suffering on the daily wage-earners (roughly 40% of the economy) and the SMEs, except for those who were able to get into the business of delivering essentials, which later came to include Big Macs from McDonalds and birthday cakes, lest the elite be too troubled by any of this.
At the time of the curfew, Lanka had 66 cases of Covid-19, with seven fatalities. One month on, post curfew, there have been 271 cases and… wait for it… seven fatalities! But rather than throwing a success party, the authorities decided to double down, even though it was now clear that the healthcare system wasn’t being overwhelmed and that the fatality needle hadn’t budged. No one is quite sure why the most draconian option was chosen and then manically sustained, except that we all mistakenly thought that this was an “equal opportunity” virus, and it’s not. The fatality numbers testify to that, and some regions are relatively far less scathed than others, which clearly hasn’t always been down to the brilliance of their response. But as per all the model-spinners and prognosticators, it was only a matter of time before things exploded here. As of today, the fatalities are up to nine, and we have been curfewed longer than Wuhan was economically shut down.
A Rough Build-Up
After a 30+ year civil war, which conscripted Buddhism and Hinduism – despite these usually being more pacific faiths, as practised – Sri Lanka had blossomed on the tourism front in particular, being crowned by Lonely Planet as “The World’s Favorite Destination” for 2019. Then came the Easter bombing, from a splinter Muslim group, which tragically hit churches and hotels, killing locals and travellers alike.
Though this decimated the tourism industry for many months, by November/December 2019 and with a great deal of pluck, fortitude, commitment and imagination, the tourist numbers and profits were climbing up once again.
And then came COVID-19.
The Global Contagion of Panic Applied Locally
Despite very modest cases here, nevertheless China’s disastrous surge, the exploding numbers in Italy and Spain, the gathering storm-clouds over the US and UK, various Drs. WHO intoning in sepulchral tones the case for impending cataclysm and the hysterical Imperial College model exploding onto the scene – all helped ignite panic.
While most countries saw a spike in cases and went for “flattening the curve”, paradoxically Lanka had no real curve to flatten and thus was unable to consult any evidence to indicate they could “relax the brakes”. They too, like much of the world, segued to “eradication”, which is implausible if not impossible, particularly as you only have to open your borders to be at least vulnerable to fresh infections.
This misplaced and unfortunate global segue – never debated, never justified – has prolonged the suspension of life as we know it, with catastrophically mounting economic costs, particularly here for a developing economy with high debt even prior to COVID-19.
To get a sense of the Lanka response, keep in mind that the ability to go and buy food, medicine and take brief walks (even if accompanied by the odd drone) were considered around the world as the very minimal liberties that even under a penal concept like lockdown could be considered “unalienable”.
Here in Lanka, despite such tame statistics, you couldn’t do any of the above. Even those who could afford it were largely at the mercy of food delivery (including from fast-food restaurants) and pharmacy deliveries. Others foraged and scavenged and hoped somehow that essentials might reach them. For those millions not equipped to be able to order online or with instruments for payment other than cash, this was a greater terror than the virus.
Even liquor stores were closed and couldn’t deliver, so a robust “home brew” market and a black market for imported booze flourished, further impoverishing an already besieged exchequer.
The monthly revenue from liquor sales in Sri Lanka is roughly USD $8 million. Now, unfortunately, locking people indoors and asking them to drink their despair away may have other health consequences, but perhaps that should argue against curfew not alcohol.
At any rate, it was medical vainglory from a politically-motivated medical trade union put in charge of the medical response (not a virologist or epidemiologist in sight) which tut-tutted the government out of these desperately-needed excise earnings at the very time that at least a $1 billion a week was being lost from a national shutdown.
The extremely well-connected were eventually able to wangle “curfew passes” and then began leading an alternative lifestyle, pontificating about public health during weekends on family estates in the hills, while everyday citizens and workers sweltered in small apartments – if not outright tenements – unable to find food, and going broke.
Nostradamus or Science?
Around the world the infection rates and fatality rates simply don’t merit the mania. However, the mania proliferates faster than the virus, and feeds on itself.
Lanka, I fear, fell afoul of the “sunk costs fallacy”. The thinking is: “We blew up our economy, we don’t have even middling fatalities from this when 12,000 die per month from normally-occurring causes of mortality, but we must at least eradicate this threat – we have to get something from this.” And then, alas, a late-breaking Navy cluster (navy, armed services and their contacts – some 600+ cases!), isolated as it was, threw the optics of eradication out the window. This didn’t help the official narrative, as the armed services – almost uniquely here – were in charge of the management and administration of this curious home-brew curfew.
The South Asia Paradox
The French paradox is often cited in dieting circles. The French consume large amounts of fat, cream, drink wine, still manage to enjoy their croissants and still live longer than their nutritionally-paranoid American counterparts; they are more slender, and infuriatingly haughty about the whole thing. Or so the story goes.
Immunologically, it seems there is a South Asian paradox, but it may extend beyond South Asia, to SE Asia and perhaps even to Africa. When a Nepalese was asked about their seemingly-charmed COVID-19 immunity and what the secret was, the answer was, “Bad hygiene.” There may be something to that.
South Asia has 23% of the world’s population, and roughly 0.5% of the world’s COVID-19 fatalities. More Vitamin D from enriched sunlight may play a part (hence the silliness of locking people away from it), but also, doubtless, immune systems hardened by lack of hygiene and food less-than-ideally stored that brings with them viruses, pathogens and strains of this and that, and more. When the Spanish flu raged, more than 20% of the global fatalities came from India. So, has something shifted? Have parts of the world so infantilized their immune systems?
Again, Sri Lanka, rather than leveraging its membership in these “elite” immunological circles, seemed hell-bent on punishing itself paradoxically for low fatalities by imposing the most punitive restrictions to economic functioning and social wellbeing upon itself. And then, when fatalities didn’t rise, post hoc ergo propter hoc came into full play: they congratulated themselves for their deft handling! If you then point out that countries with far less of a lockdown – or none – have fewer deaths still, including Taiwan and Hong Kong and Vietnam which never had any extended curfews and all with still-functioning economies, then fact-free outrage and sputtering contumely are rarely far behind.
A Smattering of Other Confusions
Writing unremittingly here throughout and seeking to relay the findings from such astute sober expertise as Dr. David Katz, Professor John Ioannidis, Knutt Wittowski (savaged and censored for promoting the “heresy” that sunlight and air might help, and it may be time to end this charade, go outdoors, and let our immune systems do what they are designed to), I found that such prosaic sanity fell flat in face of the torrential media hysteria that has been so forthcoming worldwide.
The same fatuous “economy vs. lives” bosh did the rounds here, until growing economic desperation, mass failures of SMEs, devastating layoffs in the apparel and tourism sectors (the life-blood of this economy) finally brought home the incontestable reality that the economy is lives, and that economic bankruptcy is not a medical strategy.
Confounding communication still held sway, however. The recent relaxing of curfew strictures are a prime example. We were officially told that businesses can be open, but that people should only venture out for work or to buy essentials. So, if you are a customer-facing business outside this “essential” sphere, being “open” means what, precisely?
Hotels had been advised they can “open”, but no restaurants, bars, health clubs, etc. Since no one is travelling in or out, if you could somehow transport yourself to an “open” hotel, what would you do there? Play a round of lawn tennis? No, actually – not yet allowed, either!
Clarity of communication, therefore, is so needed, and has been so globally missing. It was glaringly deficient in the UK Prime Minister’s rather incoherent, generic and inconclusive recent statement. It certainly is in short supply in the rambling pyrotechnics over the many weeks of the “Trump show” masquerading as a briefing. Such clarity becomes crucial in order to stress-test policy, to enroll support and to engage people – rather than to seek to bully and browbeat them, or to “order” them to do what you seemingly cannot persuade, much less inspire them to do.
And then there is Colombo, the capital city, which accounts for roughly 50% of GDP. The argument for keeping it curfewed has been that it was deemed “high risk”. This was not based on the number of actual cases but because of population density.
Tokyo has had roughly 160 deaths among 12 million people, Hong Kong has had 4 deaths among just under 8 million, the province of Sindh (which includes the teeming Pakistani city of Karachi) has about 45 million people and has had about 299 deaths. In New York, it was not Manhattan that was the epicentre of fatalities, but – other than in nursing homes – it was the economically-underprivileged areas of the Bronx and Queens that had the biggest surges. These statistics certainly throw the concept into question; but even beyond that, Colombo has 750,000 people and has only had 155 cases attributed to it (“cases” not “fatalities”). One has to blush to say it’s “high risk”.
Circuit Breaker
Hong Kong and Singapore have used versions of this, so has New Zealand. It is simply the argument for evidence-based thresholds and differing strategies, bowing to that evidence rather than prefabricated ideological fault lines.
So, you track types of cases, number of cases, growth of cases, nature of cases (isolated, local, community, imported) and then determine which strategies of suppression, mitigation, isolation or quarantining apply to each such “level”, how much of the economy and our mobility and personal discretion is temporarily suppressed in each, etc., and then you apply these strategies, based on evidence, to a street, a neighborhood, a city, a district, a region, and – only in exceptional circumstances – to a whole country.
Even the UN clearly stipulated that any such intrusion in our lives should be carefully targeted and for a limited period of time, and should be as minimally invasive as possible. I wonder how many varietals of intervention would pass that test globally.
But such an assessment – such a clearly-stated set of containment and mitigation strategies, triggered by evidentiary thresholds that have been debated and clearly shared – should surely precede even a single day of lockdown being imposed and asserted, otherwise.
In short, evidence-based thresholds, including a review of the types of cases (so you do not treat nursing home outbreaks the same way as widespread community transmission), each triggering distinctive, focused, brief, targeted strategies – and not some shibollethic “five tests” created by dubious witch-doctors – should actually guide policy and decisions.
Lanka, Calibration and Breaking News!
Everyone wants Lanka to win: it is a warm, charming, inviting place with a captivating culture, but there are turbulent, choppy political waters ahead. And there is what this reveals about gullibility and aversion to evidence; but Lanka is not unique on those fronts, just more acutely afflicted given how little the data has merited the over-reaction here.
Sri Lanka’s economic bungee-jump-without-the-bungee is a tale less about COVID-19 and more about how we can undermine our sense of balance and operational sanity, and how we can be seduced by the siren call of herd panic. We, as a human family, have somehow to outgrow our aversion to the inescapable leadership imperative of assessing the cost-benefit implications of our choices, being able to sift the essential from the incidental.
No one would – in that clarifying light – opt to destroy their economy and society over errant speculation, rather than opting for ongoing, careful, fact-based course correction as we march towards some clearly-defined and credible aim.
We have been advised here in Lanka now (and naysayers say this is as much about an upcoming election as COVID-19, but it is economically on the side of the angels nonetheless) that as of May 26th, a night curfew from 10pm to 4am will apply to the whole island. We are “at liberty” otherwise.
We shall continue to whittle away, hoping each day that facts and human values – and not COVID-19 “theology” – can increasingly hold sway.
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That data comes from the primary diagnosis supplement published by the NHS yesterday for patients in England being treated for covid (by the official definition not mine).
So yes those being treated ‘for covid’ are less than half of all +ve hospital patients as at 25th January and proportion still falling.
Both +ve hospital numbers and treated ‘for covid’ numbers clearly falling
Today
Met seeks limits to Sue Gray No 10 parties report – BBC News
My post of two days ago
‘Mrs Dick is repaying the trust placed in her by ‘investigating’ the Pig Dictator
The Pig Dictator welcomes ‘the clarity’ that the police investigation will bring
If the Gray report is published the plebs will be told that no action can be taken as they must await the result of the police investigation
The Gray report may not be published at all until the police investigation is concluded
How many years will the dragged out police investigation take?’
The regime decided some time ago that a wounded Dick was more advantage to them than an unknown prick
Remember where you heard it first
No that’s what I call a slippery pig
How many went to the parties? Fifty plus?
So that is 50+ investigations, and 50+ reports to the Crown Prosecution Service, and 50+ waits for the CPS to make a decision
Then if anyone is charged that’s 50+ court cases to be finalised (in a the middle of a court logjam) before the report can be published
You will not see the Gray report before the next election
This would be Cressida Dick who clapped for the nurses on Westminster Bridge during the ‘pandemic’ without a face mask, whilst her henchmen went round fining people for… er… not wearing face masks!
And who was apparently in charge when an entirely innocent man was shot dead in cold blood….
Never mind though, it was found to be a clear breach of H and S laws.
It gives me no end of smug satisfaction that Dick’s surname is an absolutely perfect descriptor. I rest my case.
This is what happens to NWO regional managers when they refuse to implement forced injections of experimental toxins and then go on to relax most of the ‘New Normal’ population ‘persuasion’ levers.
In Africa they are simply murdered and replaced with WEF puppets.
In the West they are deposed usually by blackmail from compromising phone or email taps or Epstein-like photo set ups.
Johnsons undoing – partygate.
Yep. A real war is going on. All while the sheeple pat themselves on the back about their superb analysis on Russia/Ukraine that they thought was their own, but actually got inserted into their brains verbatim by the MSM.
I accidentally flicked over to question time last night, just for long enough for some sheep to be telling us how Ukraine produces most of our gas, FFS. “I know it to be true, I just read it today”. This species is doomed.
Sebastian Kurz, chancellor of Austria from 2017 stepped down last summer with barely a mention in the British media. There were suggestions of corruption but little detail.
His replacement [who’s name evades me] was in power for only two weeks before resigning. In those two weeks he introduced medical apartheid [lockdowns solely for the unvaccinated- short lived] and vaccine mandates.
Perhaps Kurz was removed because he was unwilling to introduce these measures.
All very suspicious.
I’m feeling positive for the first time in a long time due to the Canadian Truckers, and the massive support they are garnering everywhere the convoy goes.
People offering support on bridges, flyovers and beside busy roads, at all hours of day and night in up to -30 degree temperatures while trudeau hides like the snivelling coward he is.
Truck Fudeau – is that allowed?
Peace
What bedswerving fopdoodle came up with that infantile “no hurtyfeels words”?
No content from me until I know which words will get me instabanned.
I think it’s just TY covering his ass and pandering to opposition.
That may well be, but it could have been worded better. Right now it reads like it was written by a 10-year old. I’m surprised it doesn’t say ‘Don’t use the F-word or the C-word or I shall tell mummy’.
Same story from Germany a couple days ago – up to 75% of covid-positive hospital admissions are for another medical reason here.
This actually a good thing.
As they have for almost 2 years.
Oh my: what an astounding revelation! Surely this cannot be correct???
A friend’s father went to a hospital exhibiting symptoms of a very bad reaction to a new diabetes drug he had been prescribed without follow up from his GP. They ‘tested’ him and declared he had “Covid” – he was held overnight for “tests” and his son had to fetch him in the morning to get him safely home before they started giving him medication and put him on a “pathway” .
On his escape he was told he would be ‘followed up” by being put on a “Virtual Covid Ward”(?) – indeed they bothered him by phone at home as he recovered from the reaction to the new diabetes drug simply by stopping taking it – all the symptoms of this reaction he had previously displayed at the hospital.
It appears that no-one was interested in his drug reaction – they wanted him as a Covid patient! . He has since completely recovered .
The Epidemic of Madness Engulfing the Globe
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/01/29/google-mass-formation-psychosis.aspx
Rates of anxiety and depression have increased dramatically, as well as cases of psychosis as more and more people experience delusional thinking and hallucinations. Similar to the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, society is once again losing touch with reality. Where will it all end? Google Doesn’t Want You to Research Mass Formation Psychosis
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
The big danger is that this fake normal stays
Join the friendly resistance before it’s too late
now is not the time to give up
Saturday 29th January 2pm
Wake up Wokingham Day
Meet outside Town Hall,
between Rose Inn & Costa
Wokingham RG40 1AP
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Having just skimmed the online Telegraph today still no mention of the huge Canadian convoy against vaccine mandates heading toward Ottawa and Trudeau. Can we have an article on this in Sceptics so I can send to friends who don’t believe it’s happening?
This also adds knowledge of the numbers of deaths claimed to be due primarily to covid and as indicated many time by others with other stronger data, but ignored by the MSM that those numbers are very likely to be overstated by at least a third.
Of course they are. How many people get admitted to hospital with a cold?