Desolate Shore

Jul 28, 2020 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water

I watched Panorama last night, a report by the excellent Carrie Gracie into how China handled the initial outbreak of what we now know as Covid-19. If you’re in the UK or have a VPN that will get you in, you’ll find it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000k4dq/panorama-chinas-coronavirus-coverup

I thought it did a decent job of looking at some of the issues and, notably, had some high-level interviewees from the Chinese government. I also thought it missed some interesting things in presenting its core narrative that the ‘late’ confirmation that the virus is human-transmissable in January was a causal factor in the situation we’re in now, particularly as that came after the mass travel of the Lunar New Year Festival. That may be so, but there remains the, apparently credible, identification of Covid-19 in sewage and waste water samples in northern Italy in December. It is also reported that genetic mapping indicates the introduction of the virus into Italy was not directly from China and wasn’t a one-time event. It remains the case that the consensus view is that the virus made the jump from animal to human sometime in October/November.

Given the proportion of people infected who are asymptomatic and thus not known to be infectious (including those who are pre-symptomatic), even January might have been too late to stop the spread, although it might , of course, have substantially reduced it and lessened the death toll. Much as I appreciated the Panorama investigation, I think there’s a lot of this story still to tell.

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No rain today, but blustery wind. I wrote some 1970 music posts and tried to wrestle ideas for a scene in the work-in-progress into shape. Getting there, but slowly.

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Music: famously, The Fast Show parodied the approach of British TV to jazz with Jazz Club in which an over-serious hip host introduced various avant garde musicians doing their thing. Tune? This is jazz, says Jackson Jeffrey Jackson before attempting to suck a melody through his trumpet. The parody worked because it hit the target with respect to both the avant garde element in free jazz and the TV tropes. I know because I remember the original programmes.

Crazee.

I have a vague memory of seeing Stan Tracey on one such programme in the seventies and thinking wtf? And not in a good way. Then one day, many years later, I heard some Stan Tracey and thought wtf? I need to get me some of that.

The Stan Tracey Quartet; Metro Allegretto