Why is Everything so Expensive?

Recently I've been looking for something relatively simple: a folding canvas outdoor chair. 

Pre-pandemic, you could have picked one of these cheap chairs for less than a tenner. The going rate was about £8.

Now, you can double or treble that amount. 

But why? What is making such originally cheap goods so expensive? Is there some post-pandemic profiteering going on?

Well, sort of. The big Shipping companies saw an opportunity during the pandemic to dispose of their smaller container ships. Now, this was a logical step: the ships were laid up at anchor with crews on board, so they were being paid, but the ship wasn't earning money.

The companies then decide after a few months that this may be a good time to pay off the crews and scrap the smaller, less efficient ships. I say efficient, what I really mean is cheaper to run. Instead of a crew of 15 being in charge of 10,000 containers and earning the revenue from them, the companies could instead have a crew of 15 on a AAA container ship in charge of 50,000 containers. So the smaller container ships went off to the scrapyards of Pakistan. Where incidentally, Covid wasn't really a thing, certainly lockdowns weren't. So the ships were processed in short order.

Which is great, had the pandemic continued and the shipyards been able to produce enough AAA container ships to match the global demand.

Well, it didn't quite go to plan. The world opened up within a matter of weeks and the demand for imported goods spiked almost immediately. 

And now there weren't enough ships to move the containers. Yes there were the handful of AAA container ships available from before the pandemic, but the smaller ships were gone, scrapped, never to return. 

There simply wasn't enough capacity. So the law of supply and demand kicked in and shipping prices started to skyrocket as importers struggled to guarantee supply chains. The pre-pandemic shipping cost of moving a container from the Far East ballooned from £1500 pre-pandemic, to ten times that within weeks of the pandemic ending and the world opening up. And this was before the price of oil went up. This was just a week or two after the pandemic when oil was relatively cheap.

The going rate now is around £20,000 to £30,000 because the increased price of oil has been added into the mix. To ship a single container. Failure to pay usually ends up in severe delays as your container gets gazumped and bumped off the ship in favour of someone paying more. That's how the market works now. To guarantee supply, you have to pay dearly.

Which gets me back to the folding chair at the start of the article. How many can you get into a container? As a simple maths exercise say 10,000 chairs. 

Instantly the shipping cost per chair has gone from a negligible 15p to a pretty substantial £3. 

So along with the other increased costs like wages, local transport and energy, that £8 chair is now looking more like twice that. 

And that's the thing, these are not insubstantial increases. It's no wonder inflation is so high. The cost is in-built because that particular item is being shipped half way round the world. 

But that's the weakness in globalist theory. Yes, you maximise profits, but there is a risk. Sadly the global corporations mitigated the risk by controlling governments who handed out large sums in compensation for their losses.

During this pandemic the whole world shut down. Products made in Malaysia or Taiwan had to wait for their governments to open up and then take weeks or months to restart full production from scratch.

This should be a lesson to the globalists that their ideology is not robust. Relying on a handful of shipping companies to transport goods from places thousands of miles away is a risky practise. 

So is relying on your ideological enemy to provide the bulk of your energy needs. 

We have to get back to a more local production and supply chain. Maybe not duplicating production in every town and city, but at the very least each continent should have the facilities to produce everything that continent needs. Most continents have the majority of raw materials and workforce able to do this.

COVID-19 Panorama Programme and Community Integrated Care.

Last Thursday the Panorama Programme highlighted the care charity Community Integrated Care and how one of their home for dementia patients coped during the COVID-19 crisis. They lost quite a lot of their residents to the virus. 

Sadly Panorama did the usual lefty thing of Tory government bashing and tugging at heart strings. Plenty of emotional content and not much factual content. Let's have less of the "care workers crying in front of the camera" angle and more of the "fucked up confusion, changing the rules on a daily basis" angle instead.

The Panorama programme completely missed the reasons why care homes failed to prevent COVID-19 infections from getting inside.

In fact the programme blatantly showed on of the big issues during the crisis: whilst NHS hospital staff were doing full-on biological protection in what were effectively hazmat suits, care homes were left to deal with COVID-19 patients using just surgical masks, gloves and plastic aprons.

Where NHS staff were exiting COVID-19 wards and completely stripping off scrubs and PPE, the care home staff were wearing the same clothes walking from resident to resident.

It came as no surprise then that once testing had been established, the majority of care workers and residents in the home being filmed tested positive for COVID-19. The infection prevention was lacklustre at best. But homes can only follow official advice and use the equipment given to them. If they overstep their remit they can (and are) sanctioned. 

And this is where I am at odds with the Panorama programme: they didn't focus on the differences in advice and procedures between the NHS and care homes. Given there were dealing with effectively the same environment (working closely with a number of "patients", both infected and non-infected), why were the advice and infection control procedures so disparate?

The pictures on the news coming out of Covid wards at the time are chalk and cheese different between the advice given to care homes at the same time. 

The NHS had the resources available to protect staff (although there were issues even within the NHS) and patients. In the care sector people were just left to muddle through and deal with it as best they could.

The Panorama programme dealt with the subject of patients being sent to care homes from hospitals without covid testing and in some cases already infected patients being delivered to care homes which then went on to infect other staff and residents. Panorama dealt with the pressure that care homes were being put under to accept these patients, but nothing was said about practices, procedures and advice given to care homes. Yes, this was an issue, but only in limited cases.

In fact Community Integrated Care used common sense and instigated the full PPE policy (albeit only masks, gloves and aprons) and locked down care homes way before they were given official advice, which protected the majority of their homes from infection. The majority of their homes being infected from residents returned back to them infected from hospital visits.

The second thing the Panorama programme failed to investigate was the almost daily changes in official advice coming from official sources. I remember early in the pandemic, there was no advice for a number of weeks. Those homes that took it upon themselves to isolate and protect staff and residents fared best. Official advice at the beginning was woeful.

It was only when the horror stories came out of Italy of care home residents being left to die in abandoned homes that the government and their agents started to get their shit together and start offering advice. In one week the advice changed three times, such was the chaos around care. There was one change at least every week. And I've already blogged about the difference in advice given to different care sectors. Even though they may be doing the exact same job or type of care, residential care homes regulated by the CQC got more robust advice then other care sectors. The only difference I could see was that CQC regulated homes account for the stats about care homes that were being shown on the daily briefings. Unregulated care homes count as stats in the general population.

Other types of care such as domiciliary care or supported living were not given the same level of advice or support. My wife manages a number of homes that provide different forms of care. She was working to one set of guidelines for her registered home and a completely different set of guidelines for her other care homes. Despite them doing essentially the same job. That's how fucked up the advice was and still is.

And that's just advice. The debacle around getting hold of PPE is another saga entirely. Private care homes left out in the lurch, care homes in general left out of government initiatives and even when government -sponsored free PPE was available, the emails looked like a scam from some completely non-healthcare-related company.

The government deny care was an afterthought, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

But in my book, by concentrating on emotions Panorama spectacularly failed to score any point against the government. 

How's about playing back Chris Whitty's first few visits to the daily Covid-19 briefings when he went on about herd immunity when it wasn't a given there was any immunity against covid? How's about contacting care providers and asking for the emails that changed on almost a daily basis? How's about checking the difference between registered care homes and other forms of care?

And still the bollocks continue to be dropped: currently the plan is to test every care home worker for COVID on a weekly basis. Residents get tested every 28 days. 

Except currently not one testing kit has been delivered, so homes cannot meet the weekly target. Where's Panorama on that spectacular clanger?

It just shows that the BBC is run by children who fixate on one point and spectacularly miss attention to other details. They could have made one hell of a damning documentary if they had a clue about the subject they were filming.

Novel Corona Virus (COVID-19) Update

So Novel Corona Virus (2019) has an official title now: COVID-19. Not as snappy as NCoV but hey, officialdom isn't renown for it's snappiness...

So, an update: The Southampton school was deep-disinfected because some kids had a cold when they came back from Singapore. Fair play, better safe then sorry.

Mr Super-spreader has been given the all-clear and sent home. He's no longer infectious. Hopefully.

There's a prisoner in Bullingdon jail that is suspected of having the virus after being shipped over from Thailand. We'll see how that pans out.

A bunch of people (apparently foreign tourists) in London are in isolation at St. Thomas' after having flu-like symptoms after coming back from the far East.

So, thankfully it appears the UK is on top of the situation.

Thankfully we closed down direct flights from China some days ago. I was surprised to see a video that insinuated that the USA hadn't closed down air links to China. A bad move, considering anyone can walk through the border without symptoms but still be carrying the virus.

Even indirect flights might be a risk as it's a way of subverting the bio-security afforded by the closure of direct links.

I've actually got a car part coming from Hong Kong. Hopefully it'll be in the post long enough so the virus won't be a risk factor. ;-) Maybe I'll give it a wipe with a disinfectant wipe, just in case...

But hopefully as we reach the limits of the quarantine/incubation period, the UK will emerge COVID-19 clear.

Then we just nuke China... sorry, I mean hopefully the Chinese can get on top of the virus and get back to normality.

The Gamechanger: Novel Corona Virus.

The New infectious disease, the Novel Corona Virus that originated in the Wuhan region of China, is a real gamechanger amongst infectious diseases.

The more we hear about it, the more it seems the "precautions" advised by the World Health Organisation and the various foreign governments are following the curve, rather than ahead of it.

Standard procedures for this sort of thing used in the past for the SARS and MARS outbreaks don't work with NCoV.

Both SARS and MARS weren't infectious until symptoms emerged. That's why an effective method of spotting infected cases at airports and the like was to use temperature sensors.

The first scary thing with NCoV is that those sort of checks don't work with NCoV. Patients are without symptoms (asymptomatic) and still infectious. So a carrier can walk around without a temperature, or a cough or any other symptoms and still spread the virus.

That means the virus is hard to contain. If it's spread without symptoms, ANYONE could be a carrier no matter how healthy they look or feel. The only way to contain it is to contain and isolate the area of the outbreak.

For cases that arrive in new countries, the only effective way to contain the virus is to close down the area around the cases and let the virus run it's course. The current practice of taking patients to hospitals outside the infected area is bad. Believe me, it's very bad. You just end up creating new hotspots.

Travel into and out of infected areas should be stopped.

In the UK we've already seen how a person can pick up the virus in an area away from the initial outbreak (in this case Singapore), then flew to France (possibly infecting a new bunch of people on that flight), he then stopped off in France infecting a whole ski-chalet's worth of people, one of whom flew back to Spain (again possibly infecting a flight's worth of people). The Brit then climbed aboard an EasyJet flight back to the UK, most likely infecting another bunch of people because by now we know he was infectious from the cases in France.

The Brit then infected another person in the UK. There's now a link with a Doctor's surgery in Brighton and a school in Southampton. The details are sketchy at the moment, but if this is true, then the virus is already out in the wild in the UK. We may never isolate the virus or stop it from spreading. Not without drastic measures.

But even if this person infected 10, 20, 30 or even a hundred people on the flights he took between countries and then infected a bunch more wherever he landed, this UK case proves the infectious nature of the virus. The WHO infection rating of 2-3 is way off the mark. How many other people will these new infections go on to infect?

The second scary thing about NCoV is that if you are infected and survive, unlike the flu, you don't get immunity. China has already reported instances of re-infection. Whether this is just people with colds wrongly diagnosed as NCoV sufferers going on to contract NCo after being dragged onto plague wards with NCoV sufferers, or whether it truly is re-infectious we have yet to really confirm. But governments should be treating it like it is. The best defence is not to get infected, so isolation of infected areas needs to happen and happen quick.

The thing is, if the virus is re-infectious and kills off a small percentage of it's victims. You can be in the first wave and survive, a small percentage dies. In the second wave of re-infections, another small percentage dies off. But if you don't get immunity from previous infection, that cycle continues until there is no-one to infect. EVERYONE DIES FROM NCoV EVENTUALLY.

The third scary thing about NCoV is (and it is only supposition at the moment), but if satellite pictures coming out of Wuhan are correct, there is a chance that even dead bodies are infectious. It seems that China may now be burning dead bodies  on a large scale. This suggest that even dead bodies are not safe to handle and the only way to "sterilise" them is to burn them.

That suggests the virus can live without the host being alive for some time. A very scary thought.

Not only for the management of the bodies of victims, but also for the spread of the virus. If it can live on without a live host, then it can live on door handles and other public surfaces for some time and be passed onto people without direct contact.

The Final scary thing is the incubation period seems to be very long. Initially it was thought to be 12-14 days before patients exhibited symptoms. But reports suggest that patients can actually go as long as 24 days without exhibiting symptoms but still be infectious. So in China, patient that had been released from quarantine after not exhibiting symptoms, went on to not only become symptomatic, but also infect any close contacts at the same time.

The more information we get about NCoV the more scary it gets. The more it seems a very efficient virus. Spreading easily, hardy enough to infect without direct contact and able to re-infect. Fatal in a small number of cases, but with the ability to re-infect ad-infinitum and chip away at the numbers of victims until there are no hosts left.

The amazing thing is I see no action from governments to get a handle on the problem. Right now, the situation is fluid and the more we hear about NCoV, the more it seems the "standard" precautions are inadequate.

If I was an isolated country with no cases, somewhere like Iceland, I'd close the borders now. No-one in or out. No flights, no boats, nothing. If necessary for up to 6 months. Let the rest of the world find out how infectious the disease is and how deadly it is.

For the rest of us, well only time will tell. Hopefully on one of the waves of infection the virus will mutate into a harmless version, or possibly it mutates into a version that allows our immune system to recognise the virus and create some immunity.

Without it and without some pretty serious quarantine measures, we are pretty much toast.

We certainly need to get some truthful and open information from the Chinese authorities about numbers of infections, mortality rates, infection rating, re-infections rates, incubation period, longevity out of the body and other information about the virus, otherwise how could we hope to ever contain it. W eneed to be ahead of the information curve, not behind it.

A final note is about the conspiracy theories about NCoV, especially the rumours about it being a Bioweapon accidentally released. It has all the hallmarks of one: being hard to spot, hard to contain, highly infectious, hardy and finally fatal. But a natural-occurring virus transferring between species also has the same traits.

Normally a virus doesn't kill it's host and probably in the original carrier (Supposedly Bats) and probably in the host organism it doesn't kill them all off. But when transferring to humans, there is no such guarantee. The virus could wipe out this new host quite easily, unless it has the chance to mutate into a less deadly version, or something happens to trigger our immune system to fight it off.

It's not necessarily the trait of a bioweapon, just the risk you take when you transfer a disease from one host to another. Bad animal husbandry is a very effective way to initiate this transfer between species. Just remember that the next time you eat one of your eggs from a battery hen...

UPDATE

Doing a mental exercise here: just think if the Government gave out advice to anyone in contact with an NCoV carrier to self-quarantine. Who would pay their wages while they were waiting the two weeks or a month to see if they had contracted the virus? How would the government stop or encourage people to stay indoors?

Given the severity of the virus and the infectious nature, surely another step for the government would be to underwrite any loss in pay and/or benefits for those that had to self-quarantine?

Otherwise people will just go to work as normal.