I haven’t counted up the number of posts I’ve made since I started this sequence in March, partly because I can’t be bothered but mostly because it doesn’t matter. I’ve been thinking about them today in the context of a series of messages in a WhatsApp group this morning by a friend who has also been keeping a diary, but not online and with only two or three entries a week. Keith talked about looking back at some time to see how interests (and obsessions) changed over the process.

I haven’t done that analysis here, and maybe never will, but I am conscious of changes.

One of the pressures I’ve felt is to somehow keep this ‘interesting’. There are obvious difficulties with this when life becomes hyper-local and the number of ‘interesting’ things that happen attenuates. One option is to try and do a Proust and write in detail about the progress of a raindrop down the window; another is to make a beeline for Andre Gide’s internalised monologues on the banality of life and the inevitability of death.

I’ve flirted with both, I think, while grumbling about traffic noise and aircraft vapour trails, and a post which, as my friend Stuart commented, used both ‘liminal’ and ‘interstitial’ in close proximity to each other.

What I now do is write what occurs to me and hope it has inherent interest, without worrying too much about whether it actually has. Sure, I try to make sure the spelling and punctuation are correct, and if I can think of a neat turn of phrase I’ll deploy it, but that’s about a bare minimum of craft rather than substantive content.

A question I haven’t answered for myself about blogging in general (and I’ve been blogging since September 2002), is who am I writing this for. When I first thought about creating a blog it was one of the first questions I asked myself; I’ll be sure to get back to you if I work out the answer.

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My breakfast perusal of Twitter led me to a thread by Professor Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois), who is director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, leading a group that, amongst other things, works on the reconstruction of infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics of human and wildlife pathogens. I’ve found him to be a calm voice of sanity through a lot of this.

This is the thread, which says a lot of what I think, but more succinctly.

The debate about how to respond to the #COVID19 pandemic is often framed as a scientific, or a scientific/economic problem. I do not believe it really is. Instead, it is primarily a moral and ethical conundrum. The main reason is that there is no solution, only tradeoffs.

 

There are many uncertainties left about #COVID19, but I believe we should have enough evidence to implement scientifically-informed pandemic mitigation strategies at this stage. The problem, though, is whether we, as a society, can agree on what to maximise/minimise.

 

Any rational, scientifically driven, strategy would require addressing some uncomfortable, possibly unanswerable questions, such as: What is the relative value of a child’s education, of the life an elderly person in a care home in Europe/the US, or of a child in Africa?

 

Opinions on the best course of action do not seem to depend on qualification. Those I consider as genuine experts in pandemic mitigation and global health seem equally divided in their views as the wider public. Opinions also do not fall along obvious political lines

 

Many countries do not seem to have a clear long-term strategy. For those that do (e.g. Sweden or Singapore), I believe their motivations and policies are generally equally moral and ethical. The difference is the weight they put on mutually exclusive objectives.

 

Each country faces a unique, idiosyncratic challenge and has to respond with the means at their disposal. As such, it may often be pointless to compare the ‘performance’ of their #COVID19 strategy at this stage of the pandemic.

 

Between-country comparisons of #COVID19 mitigation strategies may not even be particularly informative with the benefit of hindsight. Countries are interdependent, and every single epidemic is unique, with local and stochastic factors playing an important role.

 

There is no solution and those who claim otherwise are insufficiently informed. As such, it would be helpful if we could get over the endless sloganeering and engaged in an adult and honest discussion about what we value most and reached responsible decisions, accordingly.

(Stochastic: having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.)

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Music: One aspect of daily posts is having to decide what piece of music to put here. I have consciously tried to keep it light without going to far out there. it occured to me that I hadn’t, for example, posted any Captain Beefheart. Well then, post some of the Captain, I thought. But what? Do I go full-on Ice Cream For Crow or do I post something more conventionaly accessible?

I’ve gone with two of the latter, but reserve the right to get more experimental later.