Novel Corona Virus 2019: The Lack of Positive Action May Condemn us All.

Okay, I accept that NCOVID-19 is a new "novel" virus in the Human herd. Given that it's a new virus that hasn't been in humans before and the fact that we know absolutely nothing about how it works in the human population I find that the World Health Organisation and Governmental responses around the World to be woefully inadequate.

This is a new virus and the full effects are not know. What we are learning about the virus we are learning while it infects people around the world. This is not a good place to be observing the effects of the virus, mainly from the point we do not know if we can control it, what the long-term effects are and on top of that the more people it infects, the more chance it has to mutate and become more deadly. It could also become less deadly, but we always assume and plan for the worst case scenario: if it has a chance of getting more deadly, then plan and act for that.

So, first of all, what DO we know about NCOVID-19?

1. It is highly infectious. Unlike other serious viruses that are transmitted by contact and therefore limited in their ability to spread, NCOVID-19 is transmitted through the air by droplets. So by sneezing and coughing, the same as a cold or flu. It can also be transmitted by surface contact, so if you touch a surface touched, sneezed on or coughed on by an NCOVID-19 carrier.

2. Like a cold, it is re-infectious. If you get it once, you do not build up an immunity. Instead you can catch it again. And again. A lady in Japan that was infected and then tested as negative then ended up with a second infection. It's not understood how she was re-infected or if the tests were false negatives, but that case alone presents serious questions about the virus.

If the lady was in quarantine, how was she re-infected?
If she went home was she re-infected from a contaminated surface?
If so, how long does the virus last on a surface?
If she tested negative, was the test adequate or accurate?
Does the virus stay dormant in the body and allow false negative tests?
If it does stay dormant, for how long?

3. It tends to have a quite flat mortality rate. It will kill anyone at any age. The only predispositions to the effective mortality is an underlying medical condition. Heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, that sort of thing. The diabetes is a surprise given that it's not a disease of the heart and lungs. The mechanism for that might take a while to understand.

And that's about it.

What we don't know about the disease is a lot bigger.

1. What is the true incubation period? Experts are sticking to 14 days, but there is anecdotal evidence that incubation can stretch to 24 days. If that's the case then current quarantine periods are inadequate. Especially if the virus can go dormant and re-emerge.

2. How easily can it be transmitted? The government is saying "wash your hands" which is fine for contact-spread viruses, but not an airborne virus.

3. If washing hands is recommended, how long does the virus survive outside the body? Experts are making guesses, but no one has come out with a definitive figure. I assume if China are burning bodies rather than burying them, the virus stays infectious for a while. If the UK government is saying wash your hands it would appear at face value the virus can last a while outside a host.

4. What affects are there from being infected? Rumours are that patients end up with cardio-vascular or pulmonary issues which then increase the mortality of the second infection. Details are very scant at best, which seems to point to a pretty bad  outcome.

5. How does a person test positive, then negative, then positive again? Does the virus lie dormant? If it does, what triggers re-emergence? Can it lay dormant for a while without symptoms and emerge weeks later?

If I was the government, I'd have put those exposed to NCOVID-19 in quarantine and kept them there until we had more information about the virus. Separated into small groups the chance of cross-infection would be minimised, but really they need to be kept away from the population at large until we are sure it's safe.

The government need to be more forthright and pro-active on this. They need to be supporting sufferers financially.

The current policy seems to be akin to crossing ones fingers and hoping for the best. It is not a pro-active policy aimed at reducing the risk to the population at large. When dealing with something that is so infectious and so new, the "suck-it-and-see" policy just won't wash. This virus is less than three months old but it has already infected hundreds of thousands and killed many thousands. This is not a trivial thing.

Watching the spread of the disease, learning about it while it infects thousands of people across the globe is certainly not the way to do things like this.

Viruses have the ability to spontaneously mutate. They pick up attributes from other viruses in the hosts. The more people get infected with NCOVID-19 the more chance there is of a mutation picked up by the virus that makes it more deadly, harder to stop or impossible to vaccinate against.

What starts out as a mainly benign virus can be something else entirely by the time it's spread around the world. There is absolutely no guarantee that something as new as this will stay the same once it's infected the whole of humanity.

I'm watching the progress of the virus intently.

The government's response is to tell people to wash their hands and wait to see how deadly the thing becomes. After all they have bunkers to retreat to (as long as they don't take an unsuspectingly infected individual along with them).

Well, humanity will be okay if we all die off. Once there are no more hosts to infect and they and the virus die out, the descendants of the population of North Sentinel Island will have a whole planet to inherit.

It's happened before; humanity has weathered catastrophies before. Scientists are now coming to agree that there was a great catastrophe 11-12,000 years ago that wiped out a significant portion of the population. Male DNA has a big reduction in diversity around that time a significant proportion of the male population died off. The females, safe in their caves were able to survive with less trauma to the ancestral record.

The what, why and where of the catastrophic reduction in world population is still being hotly debated. The theories that there was at least one advanced civilisation around at that time are currently fringe. But so were the theories about the catastrophe that wiped out a huge chunk of the world population. before we could read the DNA data in our bodies.

As a race, humanity will survive, it always has. Whether you or I survive is something entirely different.

Electric Vehicles: Pricing the Poor out of Personal Transport.

First, let me state where I'm coming from om this blog. I've driven cars since 1991. Since that time I've never paid more that £2500 for a car. I've always bought used and the prices have ranged from £175 for a Little Red Fiat Uno back in the early naughties to £2500 for my current Lexus RX300 4x4 luxo-barge.

The wife recently made noises about wanting a car of her own, and I started looking at cheap small cars for her. Given that tons and cities around the country are looking to ban diesel and eventually petrol carts, I started looking and elderly Hybrids like the 1st gen. Toyota Prius. It seems the Prius is holding it's value well, no doubt buoyed by scarcity and the demand in London for use within the ULEZ.

Elderly, high mileage Prius'are fetching well over a grand, even cars with worn out batteries, because even though it spends most of it's time on the petrol engine, it's still a hybrid right? So Hybrids were out. In the end with nothing environmentally acceptable, I went for a £300 quid Hyundai Getz. Not a bad little car as it turns out. Reminds me of the Uno, but even at 1.3L  a little more gutless that the 999cc Uno. I assume because of the safety gubbins installed in the car and the automatic gearbox sapping the power.

But the price of used Prius' got me thinking about the prices and availability of cheap electric cars when all the internal combustion cars die off.

As a start, lets look at my "Typical" shitbox car: over 100K miles, over 10 years old.

Now, transferring that to electric cars, first off the mileage isn't that much of an issue because I'm sure the powertrain will be capable of doing that sort of mileage.

The thing that would worry me is like the Prius, the battery. Unlike the Prius with it's petrol engine, an EV is totally reliant on the battery and batteries have a finite number of charge cycles and have a lifespan limited by previous usage.

There are plenty of Nissan leafs out there with knackered batteries already, because Nissan designed the battery without any temperature management. I'm not sure I want an EV with a sub-50 mile range.

So straight away there is a dillemma. I could buy an EV that no-one will touch with a sub-optimal battery, but that would cost more than a grand to replace. So straight away we're well over the grand or two that I'd pay for a IC-engined snotter.

I could go for a EV that has a lease battery. But then I'm paying endless payments to the manufacturer in order to guarantee range. Unlike a comparable ICE car.

It strikes me that anyone with my car buying power is going to struggle to get into EVs. Either buying a car that needs a 5 grand battery, or hopefully a recon battery for half that. Maybe the aftermarket will eventually cut in with cheap Chinese batteries :-)

Or I buy a car with a lease battery and pay endless payments and hope the manufacturer continues to support that model of EV 15, 20 or 25 years into the future. With their previous track record, I have the feeling that EVs are going to expire not due to the car wearing out, but the reluctance of manufacturers to keep supplying batteries.

I think the era of cheap personal transport is coming to an end. It's a shame that progress yet again excludes the poor.

Yes they can get buses and trains, but in the past 50 years we've had the option to use them or the car. In future I think car ownership for the poor won't be an option.

And that, to me is not progress.

Why do You Work? The Crisis in Capitalism.

On a regular basis, I ask myself "Why do I work?" I ask it often, because it forces me to evaluate on a regular basis whether doing the job I'm doing is working for me as well as my employer.

After all, just working to pay the bills is a pretty soul-destroying pastime. Remember the old adage "All work and no play..."

So it is with any job: what you earn has to give you something more than just paying the bills. Subsistence wages are not giving you a life.

I've re-evaluated my employment on a regular basis and have done many different jobs. The main one that took be from earning 70K a year down to 20K was the 9/11 attacks. Back then I evaluated whether flying hither and thither, sat queuing up in airports and spending weeks away from my family was actually working for me. In the end I concluded it wasn't.

This is the crisis in Capitalism at the moment. Capitalism has become corrupted: it now stands for maximum profits and minimal costs.

Capitalism works best when it produces a sense of optimism, a sense of aspiration. Workers do a job that gives you enough free time and enough wages to allow use of that free time. So you can forget work for a couple of days. These days most companies engender that sense in their customers to increase sales, but really it's the workforce that also needs that sense of optimism. Instead we get zero hours contracts, 7-day working weeks and the rush to minimum wages, or wages so low that the taxpayer needs to top them up (the abhorrence that is in-work benefits). We are slipping back to Victorianesque working conditions and sweat-shop labour.

Capitalism works worst when it screws everyone. It screws the customer and it screws the worker. At that point Capitalism doesn't even provide a benefit to the shareholders, because pretty soon the company ceases to exist.

Back in History abuse of workers by factory owners started the Trades Union movement. But today the Union leaders are dining at the same posh restaurants as the factory owners. They have become corrupted. Just like the leaders of the Labour party and their cronyism and fawning over wealthy donors.

We need a change. We need to start to engender a sense that the workers of the UK deserve better. Corporations need to start paying a decent wage and that sense of optimism that brings about prosperity and productivity needs to return to our working lives.

Why do you work? Do you do it to just pay bills, or do you strive towards a goal?

I ask because without that little extra to provide enjoyment, work becomes soulless and productivity suffers. We all lose a little bit of ourselves.

Just as our forefathers, we need freedom and fresh air, just occasionally in order to suffer the depredations of the working week.