Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Make America Sick Again

    I fear that this extraordinary photo will become a tragedy in hindsight. It’s of protesters in Michigan, many of them armed, demanding the government lifts lockdown because “we’re tired of not being able to buy the things that we need, go to the hairdressers.” Some protesters’ cars blocked the entrances to a hospital, preventing ambulances from getting through.

    This potentially lethal idiocy is being inflamed by – of course – Fox News. Earlier this week, Fox’s Bill Bennet told Americans once again that the coronavirus isn’t a pandemic and that social distancing isn’t necessary. Protesters’ claims that the virus was less dangerous than the flu are just echoing what Fox has been telling them, and their president, for the last five weeks.

  • The virus isn’t a leveller. It’s an amplifier

    The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have appeared in a video about mental health during the coronavirus crisis. “We’re in this together,” they say.

    I’ve deliberately chosen an extreme example of the sentiment, but it’s everywhere in mainstream and social media right now. Coronavirus is the great leveller, we’re told. We’re in this together.

    It isn’t, and we aren’t. Your experience of the crisis and your ability to survive it depend to a great extent on how privileged you already are.

    You might not be spending lockdown in Anmer Hall, the Cambridges’ ten-bedroom holiday home (pictured below). But you’re probably in a better place than many.

    Let’s say you’re a homeowner with a job you can do from home and a nice big garden. Your experience of this crisis will be vastly different than if you were stuck in a cramped flat, or if you still had to take the tube to work every day, or if you were in an institution or a care home.

    Even something as simple as where you live matters. Afua Hirsch in The Guardian:

    How do you self-isolate when you live in cramped or shared accommodation? How do you reduce shopping trips to once a week when you have little or no storage space? And if you do want to go to the park or do an extra shop, you now risk not only infection, but coming into contact with the police, some of whom are zealously taking advantage of their new social control powers.

    This goes far beyond mere comfort. The poorer you are, the more danger you’re in. And because people from ethnic minorities are more likely to be poor, they’re more likely to become ill.

    Hirsch:

    Ethnic minority people are becoming victims of this frightening illness at an alarming rate. A study of more than 2,000 patients critically ill with the virus in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has found that 35% are black, Asian or other ethnic minority. This is more than double the representation in the wider population.

    …To see the scary reality of racial inequality taken to extreme proportions during this pandemic, look to the United States. The tragic consequences have reached all parts of the nation. In Michigan, 15% of the population but 40% of the deaths are black. Chicago has a 30% African American population, and a 70% African American death rate. The picture from Louisiana is very similar: a 32% black population, with a 70% death rate.

    This isn’t about biology: white people don’t have special DNA that protects them from COVID-19. It’s about inequality.

    Rebecca Solnit, also in The Guardian:

    …health disparities due to racism increased the chances of becoming severely ill or dying. From New Orleans to Chicago, black people were at disproportionate risk of death. Higher levels of diabetes and hypertension can be linked to the stress of racism; asthma and respiratory problems are tied to the polluted air of many urban and industrial areas; and lack of long-term access to good medical care and food sources (due to poverty and discrimination) play their part.

    Coronavirus isn’t the great leveller some people believe it to be. It’s an amplifier. The more vulnerable you were, the more vulnerable you are.

  • Getting through today is enough of an achievement

    Laura Waddell has written a typically incisive and witty column about the mindset that sees police officers hassling people for sitting down and social media influencers shaming people for not doing 13 million sit-ups and writing a novel every day.

    Going into lockdown, and especially for the furloughed, many of us thought we would use the time productively. To work on a novel. To learn a language. A daily yoga practise. Crafting. But many have found it harder than they expected, distracted and made despondent by the bad news flowing each day. Are we putting pressure on ourselves to do these things because we want to, or because under a Capitalist society, endless productivity is demanded of us? In finishing that book with haste, are we responding to an artistic drive, or a marketing schedule? It is easy to internalise the pace of work, reenacting it even in downtime, particularly in those with insecure, freelance jobs, always hustling for the next gig.

  • The next two years

    Ed Yong is one of our best science writers, and this piece for The Atlantic is a clear-eyed look on where we all go from here. Whenever the lockdown is lifted – and lifting it too soon will have lethal consequences – we will not just go back to business as usual.

    The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”

  • Amazon: bastards in “bastards” shocker

    Something that you might not be aware of is how much newspaper, magazine and website publishers rely on affiliate marketing: if they link to a shop selling product X and you buy product X via that link, they get a small fee. Those revenues are particularly important during this coronavirus lockdown: the other big revenue drivers, print advertising and branded events, are effectively dead right now.

    So naturally Amazon has decided to kick the publishing industry while it’s down. Starting next week, it’s slashing the rates it pays its affiliates, in some cases by more than half.

    It’s terrible news for the industry, of course, but it’s also an indication of a wider problem: as print sales have continued their inevitable decline, publishers have repeatedly put their business eggs into single baskets – only to discover that by doing so they’re vulnerable to the whims of companies that see them as expendable. The giant tech brands have demonstrated again and again how ruthless they are. That’s how they became giant tech brands.

    There are lots of examples. Many businesses find that when Google changes its search engine rankings, their traffic disappears overnight. YouTubers find that rule changes or arbitrary decisions leave them unable to monetise their channels any more. The most awful example is Facebook, which lobbied media firms to “pivot to video” to reach huge audiences; its figures were falsified – in some case viewing figures were inflated by as much as 900%. Media firms fired their journalists to embrace the new world of video; when it turned out that the new world was fraudulent and the promised money wasn’t there, they fired their video people too.

    Whether you’re a publisher or an Amazon marketplace seller, a musician on Spotify, an artist on Etsy or a small business selling on social media, you’re ultimately trying to pretend that a furious, hungry tiger is a sweet little pussy cat. It’s not a question of if it’ll turn on you. It’s a question of when.

  • Shifting the narrative

    The Conservatives are working on their exit strategy. Not how we’ll exit the lockdown; how they’ll shift the blame for their failures onto others, such as the NHS. For example:

    Care homes are not run by the NHS.

    Care homes used to be run by councils, but years of funding cuts have seen that provision almost disappear. Today, care homes are primarily for-profit private businesses.

    84% of English care home beds are owned and operated by private companies, 13% are run by voluntary organisations and 3% are run by councils. As the authors of a recent report into the sector put it:

    The state has abdicated its responsibility for providing care over recent decades. The private sector may have filled this gap but it consistently puts profits before people.

    …The fact that private equity-backed firms have taken over a significant share of the UK’s care provision, fuelled by debt and driven by the prospect of rising property prices and ever-lower care costs, puts our vital social care system at ever-increasing risk.

    One of my best friends is a care home worker. Like many in the sector they are on a zero hours contract and paid a pittance by a private and very profitable company; they have not been given PPE because the company doesn’t want to pay for PPE. Care homes can do, or in this case not do, whatever they want. Which is why so many people are dying in them.

    The government doesn’t want to be on the hook for those deaths, or for the growing death toll among front-line NHS staff. Hence the emerging narrative that it’s all the NHS’s fault. But it isn’t. The lack of PPE for front-line workers and other key equipment is the result of government decisions and indecision going back to January.

    The dread hand of news management has already kicked in: the allegation is now that key workers aren’t getting PPE because the lumbering, inefficient NHS isn’t allocating resources properly, not that the resources weren’t there in the first place. There are a lot of carefully worded claims doing the rounds, so for example the government is keen to talk about the overall number of items of PPE that have been distributed rather than the details of which items have gone where and in what quantities: there’s a big difference between a gown (which is inappropriate for aerosol-generating procedures) and an FFP2 surgical mask. If there were enough PPE, everyone in the country with a 3D printer wouldn’t be making making visors for NHS staff and nurses wouldn’t be making their own PPE from bin bags.

    Still, we can count on our fearless, non-partisan press ensuring they don’t get away with it. Can’t we?

    Image by Liz Gerard on Twitter. It shows the Sun’s reporting of the COVID-19 death toll last week.

  • Lethal stupidity on a truly horrific scale

    The Sun’s front page after nearly 1,000 people died in a single day.

    The official UK coronavirus death toll will crack 10,000 today. The real death toll, which unlike the official figures includes those who died in care homes, those who died at home and those who had not already been tested positive for COVID-19, is much higher.

    The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine has published a good explanation of why the official figures are inaccurate, complete with spreadsheets so you can see for yourself. The figures we’re given in the daily briefings do not tell us how many people died on a particular day. They tell us how many deaths in hospitals were reported that day. There is often a delay between the death occurring and the death being reported.

    Here’s an example. The figure for 8 April was 828 deaths, but none of the 828 deaths happened on the 8th of April. They happened on the 4th of March, and the 5th of March, and the 31st of March, and the 4th of April, up to the 7th of April. Some of the people who died on the 8th will be reported in the figures for the 9th, and the 10th, and so on.

    What that means is that there’s a big lag between people dying and their deaths being counted, and that lag can be dramatic: the officially announced death toll for 31 March was 679, but NHS England’s statistics now say it was 1,710. The difference isn’t usually that dramatic, but it does mean that the figures are at best a guide to what’s been happening rather than an accurate picture.

    [Update: that means you should prepare for very bad news in the early part of next week: there will be a lag due to the Easter holiday, so we’re likely to see a spike in numbers when those reports come in.]

    However you count it, we’re now on track to have the highest death toll of any country in Western Europe, despite having had more time to prepare than the rest of Western Europe.

    If you can bear to read it, there’s a timeline of the lethal arrogance that’s already killed thousands of people here.

    Nesrine Malik in The Guardian:

    It is a jarring experience to wake up to a British death toll that is almost a thousand a day, and not see that number on every front page, being put to every politician in every single interview, with a demand for an explanation. It is as if those who should be asking these questions, from the media to opposition politicians, have been subjected to a mass memory-erasing exercise. Every report showing the scale of the crisis should be framed in the language of accountability and anchored in the premise of preventability. With all the benefits of hindsight, the government dragged its feet, wasted precious time and infused the issue with a sense of British exceptionalism: drastic measures need not be taken because in the UK things will somehow be different.

    … It’s hard, as we lock down, to nurture an outrage that is based on decisions in the past when the loss of life is happening today – more so when the government has stealthily removed itself from the picture and shifted the responsibility entirely on to the public…

    …Relocate the pain and recall that this need not have happened. Ten thousand people, in UK hospitals alone, have now died.

  • One in ten

    At the time of writing:

    101,000 – total global deaths from Covid-19

    8,958 – total UK deaths from the same virus, excluding hundreds more in care homes

    The UK has nearly one in ten of the global deaths from this virus despite being one of the most recent countries to get it.

    Today’s daily death toll, 980, means for two days running the UK has had more daily deaths than the worst days in Italy or France.

    That’s despite having the benefit of time to see how the virus has spread in other countries, time to order protective equipment and ventilators, time to plan an effective response. Time other countries didn’t have.

    Things could have been even worse. If the football authorities hadn’t become fed up with government inaction and decided to cancel multiple big games in March, the numbers  would be even higher.

    This is a political failure on a truly horrific scale.

    It’s time for the press to do its job and hold the government to account.

  • Beware bored police officers

    Here’s Cambridge Police on Twitter this morning.

    Let’s play a little game. It’s called “show us which specific part of the emergency coronavirus legislation details which supermarket aisles are essential and which ones are non-essential”.

    There isn’t one, of course. Shops are allowed to sell anything they have in stock, and you are allowed to buy it.

    And it’s not just the Cambridge plod. Yesterday we had suggestions that police would check the contents of people’s shopping carts to make sure they weren’t buying anything frivolous. Last week, police were deciding that cigarettes and alcohol weren’t permitted.

    So far at least this is a fairly innocuous example of something much more serious: whenever new powers are made available to people, some of those people will deliberately or accidentally overestimate the powers they have.

    Whenever new powers are being considered, even in an emergency, one question should always be paramount: what could the worst person in the world do with those powers? Because once the powers have been made available, you’ll find out.

  • To protect the NHS, stay home (at elections)

    This is doing the rounds on social media right now.

    It’s funny, but like the best political jokes it has sharp teeth. How many of the people standing outside clapping for the NHS on a Thursday evening voted for a party that’s stripped the NHS bare, refused to pay staff properly, refused to consider its workers key staff when deciding who can live in the UK, refused to stockpile adequate protective equipment, refused to take part in a ventilator purchase scheme for ideological reasons and conducted ongoing privatisation by stealth?

    How many of the people demanding footballers pay some extra cash are making similar demands of the UK’s super-rich?

    How many of the newspapers calling NHS nurses and doctors angels and promoting NHS fundraisers are owned by billionaires and published by companies carefully structured to avoid paying tax?

    NHS underfunding is not an act of God. It’s an act of politicians. And no amount of charity campaigning will fill the gap between what the NHS needs and what the government has been willing to give it – especially once the coronavirus crisis is over and the government can get back to business as usual.

    The NHS is desperately underfunded, its staff underpaid and its recruitment hampered by our immigration and Brexit policies. That didn’t start with this coronavirus, and if we don’t demand real change those problems will continue long after COVID-19 is beaten. And when the next pandemic strikes, we’ll be just as unprepared.