Castles In The Air
Anyway, as I was saying: news came yesterday of evidence of Covid in Milan in December 2019, while news of it was still only creeping out of Wuhan. In the UK it didn’t get a mention in New Scientist until early January, and that was in relation to Wuhan. So, while there is no evidence of the presence of the disease in the UK before February, it wouldn’t surprise me were it to have been here by New Year. Certainly there are anecdotal accounts of people with similar symptoms in the UK in December/January
Bor to be Wild (on the road to Sainsbury’s)
Obviously this is conjectural, but let’s assume it is true for the sake of a rough thought experiment.
We know that a significant proportion of those infected by the virus are contagious while also asymptomatic or presymptomatic. These people would not have been spotted at airports or other points of entry even had there been checks, and would have mingled in the community (as public health experts such as Dr Jason Leitch here in Scotland argued in March, as I recall). Therefore community spread could well have been well-established in the UK well before we saw what was happening in Wuhan and then in Italy. By the time UK authorities realised what was happening in March, it was, possibly, already far too late.
The disease is still not well understood, but the understanding in February/March was worse. In particular the focus then on sudden coughs and fever missed that there is a much larger range of possible symptoms. For some people it is not just a respiratory disease but something with more serious systemic effects. If the conjecture is valid, then, although we can criticise the UK government on basis of their response to the advice they were being given, we also see that, even had they responded perfectly (itself a problematic notion), it would still likely have been too late.
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Writing: I wrote 970 words, longhand, this afternoon, and typed them up this evening. That’s a decent session. It’s mostly dialogue, though, so I’ll have to come back and break it up a bit, which will, naturally enough, expand that word count. It all draws on the background work I’ve done during the last three days. Fingers crossed this is an indicator that I can get back into the groove.
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Music: Everything But The Girl play Paul Simon. Only Living Boy In New York was originally on Bridge Over Troubled Water, an album which is now more than half a century old. Imagine that. Someone my age in 1920 could not have slipped on a recording of a favourite artist made half a century previously in 1870, because audio recordings weren’t possible in 1870; Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. Technology, eh?
Anyway, Ben and Tracy stick pretty close to Simon and Garfunkle’s original, but smooth out some of Roy Halee’s more eccentric production, most obviously for the drums.
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