Cassandra on The Future?

This week on Facebook: My original posts on State Surveillance (2016) and that on Cash is subversive (2012) can still be read, however I recommend that you read the Snooper’s Charter (which became law in 2016) and the reference at¹.  You might also read Big Brother Loves You (which was posted in 2012) and the reference at². However, these are assumed liberties in which government policy (globally) to the Covid-19 pandemic has made the economic and environmental future even more uncertain.

Covid-19 Global Lockdown

This week on FaceBook: My wife and I are under lockdown¹, I am not suffering from the blues as in (1) but my wife lives in fear of a taser attack by the police. My sons keep telephoning us to see if we are alright during this lockdown and I guess we should be grateful for that. My younger son persuaded me phone up the NHS as I think that I have the mild form of Covid-19. The NHS help line, as far as I can make out, is overwhelmed by people who think that they might have the coronavirus. My son telephoned to check up on me, telling me that people lied about their symptoms, resulting in them being taken to hospital by ambulance and to be tested for a Covid-19 that they didn’t have.

Would a lockdown have been effective during the black death, it would probably have not been so, however we will never know as people were unaware of the causes of the black death. People were equally unaware when the Derbyshire village of Eyam went into lockdown during the 17th century, it is claimed that doing so saved many lives outside of the village, at great cost to those remaining. Covid-19 may require a political response, but the enemy is a pandemic with flu-like symptoms carried by a virus as at Eyam.

Today the story is different, which lead me to two articles that I read recently, the first was The microbes, the animals and us and the second Microbes in Motion: Touring World History, both viewpoints leading to problems that a vaccine cannot cure. Nevertheless, as is remarked on an Australian site, while Covid-19 calls for solidarity it also begets deeper conflicts and while history may repeat itself, globally the development of a vaccine to save us takes precedence over any other conflict:

 But more importantly, the basic distributive conflicts that characterise politics will rise to the surface. Unless a vaccine saves us, quickly. Let us hope so. The politics of the pandemic