This is a Global Pandemic Let’s Treat it as Such
Adam Hanieh on the COVID-19 pandemic
27 March 2020 VERSO BLOG  

In the face of the COVID-19 tsunami, our lives are changing in ways that were inconceivable just a few short weeks ago. Not since the 2008-2009 economic collapse has the world collectively shared an experience of this kind: a single, rapidly-mutating, global crisis, structuring the rhythm of our daily lives within a complex calculus of risk and competing probabilities.


In response, numerous social movements have put forward demands that take seriously the potentially disastrous consequences of the virus, while also tackling the incapacity of capitalist governments to adequately address the crisis itself. These demands include questions of worker safety, the necessity of neighbourhood level organising, income and social security, the rights of those on zero-hour contracts or in precarious employment, and the need to protect renters and those living in poverty. In this sense, the COVID-19 crisis has sharply underscored the irrational nature of health care systems structured around corporate profit – the almost universal cutbacks to public hospital staffing and infrastructure (including critical care beds and ventilators), the lack of public health provision and prohibitive cost of access to medical services in many countries, and the ways in which the property rights of pharmaceutical companies serve to restrict widespread access to potential therapeutic treatments and the development of vaccines.



However, the global dimensions of COVID-19 have figured less prominently in much of the left discussion. Mike Davis has rightly observed that “the danger to the global poor has been almost totally ignored by journalists and Western governments” and left debates have been similarly circumscribed, with attention largely focused on the severe health care crises unfolding in Europe and the US. Even inside Europe there is extreme unevenness in the capacity of states to deal with this crisis – as the juxtaposition of Germany and Greece illustrates – but a much greater disaster is about to envelop the rest of the world. In response, our perspective on this pandemic must become truly global, based on an understanding of how the public health aspects of this virus intersect with larger questions of political economy (including the likelihood of a prolonged and severe global economic downturn). This is not the time to pull up the (national) hatches and speak simply of the fight against the virus inside our own borders.

Public Health in the South

As with all so-called ‘humanitarian’ crises, it is essential to remember that the social conditions found across most of the countries of the South are the direct product of how these states are inserted into the hierarchies of the world market. Historically, this included a long encounter with Western colonialism, which has continued, into contemporary times, with the subordination of poorer countries to the interests of the world’s wealthiest states and largest transnational corporations. Since the mid-1980s, repeated bouts of structural adjustment – often accompanied by Western military action, debilitating sanctions regimes, or support for authoritarian rulers – have systematically destroyed the social and economic capacities of poorer states, leaving them ill-equipped to deal with major crises such as COVID-19.

Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral epidemiology and a lack of biological resistance to a novel pathogen. The ways that most people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia will experience the coming pandemic is a direct consequence of a global economy systemically structured around the exploitation of the resources and peoples of the South. In this sense, the pandemic is very much a social and human-made disaster – not simply a calamity arising from natural or biological causes.

One clear example of how this disaster is human-made is the poor state of public health systems across most countries in the South, which tend to be underfunded and lacking in adequate medicines, equipment, and staff. This is particularly significant for understanding the threat presented by COVID-19 due to the rapid and very large surge in serious and critical cases that typically require hospital admission as a result of the virus (currently estimated at around 15%-20% of confirmed cases). This fact is now widely discussed in the context of Europe and the US, and lies behind the strategy of ‘flattening the curve’ in order to alleviate the pressure on hospital critical care capacity.

Yet, while we rightly point to the lack of ICU beds, ventilators, and trained medical staff across many Western states, we must recognise that the situation in most of the rest of the world is immeasurably worse. Malawi, for example, has about 25 ICU beds for a population of 17 million people. There are less than 2.8 critical care beds/100,000 people on average across South Asia, with Bangladesh possessing around 1100 such beds for a population of over 157 million (0.7 critical care beds/100,000 people). In comparison, the shocking pictures coming out of Italy are occurring in an advanced health care system with an average 12.5 ICU beds/100,000 (and the ability to bring more online). The situation is so serious that many poorer countries do not even have information on ICU availability, with one 2015 academic paper estimating that “more than 50% of [low income] countries lack any published data on ICU capacity.” Without such information it is difficult to imagine how these countries could possibly plan to meet the inevitable demand for critical care arising from COVID-19.

Of course, the question of ICU and hospital capacity is one part of a much larger set of issues including a widespread lack of basic resources (e.g. clean water, food, and electricity), adequate access to primary medical care, and the presence of other comorbidities (such as high rates of HIV and tuberculosis). Taken as a whole, all of these factors will undoubtedly mean a vastly higher prevalence of critically ill patients (and hence overall fatalities) across poorer countries as a result of COVID-19.

Labour and Housing are Public Health Issues

Debates around how best to respond to COVID-19 in Europe and the US have illustrated the mutually-reinforcing relationship between effective public health measures and conditions of labour, precarity, and poverty. Calls for people to self-isolate when sick – or the enforcement of longer periods of mandatory lockdowns – are economically impossible for the many people who cannot easily shift their work online or those in the service sector who work in zero-hour contracts or other kinds of temporary employment. Recognising the fundamental consequences of these work patterns for public health, many European governments have announced sweeping promises around compensation for those made unemployed or forced to stay at home during this crisis.

It remains to be seen how effective these schemes will be and to what degree they will actually meet the needs of the very large numbers of people who will lose their jobs as a result of the crisis. Nonetheless, we must recognise that such schemes will simply not exist for most of the world’s population. In countries where the majority of the labour force is engaged in informal work or depends upon unpredictable daily wages – much of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia – there is no feasible way that people can choose to stay home or self-isolate. This must be viewed alongside the fact that there will almost certainly be very large increases in the ‘working poor’ as a direct result of the crisis. Indeed, the ILO has estimated for its worst-case scenario (24.7 million job losses globally) that the number of people in low and low-middle income countries earning less than $US 3.20/day at PPP will grow by nearly 20 million people.

Once again, these figures are important not solely because of day-to-day economic survival. Without the mitigation effects offered through quarantine and isolation, the actual progress of the disease in the rest of the world will certainly be much more devastating than the harrowing scenes witnessed to date in China, Europe, and the US.

Moreover, workers involved in informal and precarious labour often live in slums and overcrowded housing – ideal conditions for the explosive spread of the virus. As an interviewee with the Washington Post recently noted in relation to Brazil: “More than 1.4 million people — nearly a quarter of Rio’s population — live in one of the city’s favelas. Many can’t afford to miss a single day of work, let alone weeks. People will continue leaving their houses .... The storm’s about to hit.”

Similarly disastrous scenarios face the many millions of people currently displaced through war and conflict. The Middle East, for example, is the site of the largest forced displacement since the Second World War, with massive numbers of refugees and internally-displaced people as a result of the on-going wars in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. Most of these people live in refugee camps or overcrowded urban spaces, and often lack the rudimentary rights to health care typically associated with citizenship. The widespread prevalence of malnutrition and other diseases (such as the reappearance of cholera in Yemen) make these displaced communities particularly susceptible to the virus itself.

One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70% of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. The first two cases of COVID-19 were identified in Gaza on 20 March (a lack of testing equipment, however, has meant that only 92 people out of the 2-million strong population have been tested for the virus). Reeling from 13-years of Israeli siege and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, living conditions in the Strip are marked by extreme poverty, poor sanitation, and a chronic lack of drugs and medical equipment (there are, for example, only 62 ventilators in Gaza, and just 15 of these are currently available for use). Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine – foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere.

Intersecting Crises

The imminent public health crisis facing poorer countries as a consequence of COVID-19 will be further deepened by an associated global economic downturn that is almost certain to exceed the scale of 2008. It is too early to predict the depth of this slump, but many leading financial institutions are expecting this to be the worst recession in living memory. One of the reasons for this is the near simultaneous shutdown of manufacturing, transport, and service sectors across the US, Europe, and China – an event without historical precedent since the Second World War. With one-fifth of the world’s population currently under some form of lockdown, supply chains and global trade have collapsed and stock market prices have plunged – with most major exchanges losing between 30-40% of their value between 17 February and 17 March.

Yet, as Eric Touissant has emphasised, the economic collapse we are now fast approaching was not caused by COVID-19 – rather, the virus presented “the spark or trigger” of a deeper crisis that has been in the making for several years. Closely connected to this are the measures put in place by governments and central banks since 2008, most notably the policies of quantitative easing and repeated interest-rate cuts. These policies aimed at propping up share prices through massively increasing the supply of ultra-cheap money to financial markets. They meant a very significant growth in all forms of debt – corporate, government, and household. In the U.S, for example, the nonfinancial corporate debt of large companies reached $10 trillion dollars in mid-2019 (around 48% of GDP), a significant rise from its previous peak in 2008 (when it stood at about 44%). Typically, this debt was not used for productive investment, but rather for financial activities (such as funding dividends, share buybacks, and merger and acquisitions). We thus have the well-observed phenomena of booming stock markets on one hand, and stagnating investment and declining profit levels on the other.

Significant to the coming crisis, however, is the fact that the growth in corporate debt has been largely concentrated in below investment grade bonds (so-called junk bonds), or bonds that are rated BBB, just one grade above junk status. Indeed, according to Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, BBB debt made up a remarkable 50% of the global bond market in 2019, compared to only 17% in 2001. What this means is that the synchronised collapse of worldwide production, demand, and financial asset prices presents a massive problem for corporations needing to refinance their debt. As economic activity grinds to a halt in key sectors, companies whose debt is due to be rolled over now face a credit market that has essentially shuttered – no one is willing to lend in these conditions and many overleveraged companies (especially those involved in sectors such as airlines, retail, energy, tourism, automobiles, and leisure) could be earning almost no revenue over the coming period. The prospect of a wave of high profile corporate bankruptcies, defaults, and credit downgrades is therefore extremely likely. This is not just a US problem – financial analysts have recently warned of a ‘cash crunch’ and a ‘wave of bankruptcies’ across the Asia Pacific region, where corporate debt levels have doubled to $32 trillion over the last decade.

All of this poses a very grave danger to the rest of the world, where a variety of transmission routes will metastasise the downturn across poorer countries and populations. As with 2008, these include a likely plunge in exports, a sharp pull back in foreign direct investment flows and tourism revenues, and a drop in worker remittances. The latter factor is often forgotten in the discussion of the current crisis, but it is essential to remember that one of the key features of neoliberal globalisation has been the integration of large parts of the world’s population into global capitalism through remittance flows from family members working overseas. In 1999, only eleven countries worldwide had remittances greater than 10 per cent of GDP; by 2016, this figure had risen to thirty countries. In 2016, just over 30 per cent of all 179 countries for which data was available recorded remittance levels greater than 5 per cent of GDP – a proportion that has doubled since 2000. Astonishingly, around one billion people – one out of seven people globally – are directly involved in remittance flows as either senders or recipients. The closing down of borders because of COVID-19 – coupled with the halt to economic activities in key sectors where migrants tend to predominate – means we could be facing a precipitous drop in worker remittances globally. This is an outcome that would have very severe ramifications for countries in the South.

Another key mechanism by which the rapidly evolving economic crisis may hit countries in the South is the large build up of debt held by poorer countries in recent years. This includes both the least developed countries in the world as well as so-called ‘emerging markets’. In late 2019, the Institute for International Finance estimated that emerging market debt stood at $72 trillion, a figure that had doubled since 2010. Much of this debt is denominated in US dollars, which exposes its holders to fluctuations in the value of the US currency. In recent weeks the US dollar has strengthened significantly as investors sought a safe-haven in response to the crisis; as a result, other national currencies have fallen, and the burden of interest and principal repayments on $US-denominated debt has been increasing. Already in 2018, 46 countries were spending more on public debt service than on their health care systems as a share of GDP. Today, we are entering an alarming situation where many poorer countries will face increasingly burdensome debt repayments while simultaneously attempting to manage an unprecedented public health crisis – all in the context of a very deep global recession.

And let us not harbour any illusions that these intersecting crises might bring an end to structural adjustment or the emergence of some kind of ‘global social democracy’. As we have repeatedly seen over the last decade, capital frequently seizes moments of crisis as a moment of opportunity – a chance to implement radical change that was previously blocked or appeared impossible. Indeed, World Bank President David Malpass implied as much when he noted at the (virtual) G20 meeting of Finance Ministers a few days ago: “Countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery … For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.”

It is essential to bring all these international dimensions to the centre of the left debate around COVID-19, linking the fight against the virus to questions such as the abolition of ‘Third World’ debt, an end to IMF/World Bank neoliberal structural adjustment packages, reparations for colonialism, a halt to the global arms trade, an end to sanctions regimes, and so forth. All of these campaigns are, in effect, global public health issues – they bear directly on the ability of poorer countries to mitigate the effects of the virus and the associated economic downturn. It is not enough to speak of solidarity and mutual self-help in our own neighbourhoods, communities, and within our national borders – without raising the much greater threat that this virus presents to the rest of the world. Of course high levels of poverty, precarious conditions of labour and housing, and a lack of adequate health infrastructure also threaten the ability of populations across Europe and the US to mitigate this infection. But grassroots campaigns in the South are building coalitions that tackle these issues in interesting and internationalist ways. Without a global orientation, we risk reinforcing the ways that the virus has seamlessly fed into the discursive political rhetoric of nativist and xenophobic movements – a politics deeply seeped in authoritarianism, an obsession with border controls, and a ‘my-country first’ national patriotism.

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Covid-19

The ozone layer is healing and redirecting wind flows around the globe
ENVIRONMENT 

25 March 2020 NEW SCIENTIST By Layal Liverpool   

The ozone layer over Antarctica is on the mend, and that has knock-on effects for circulating air currents Science Photo Library / Alamy
The hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica is continuing to recover and it is leading to changes in atmospheric circulation – the flow of air over Earth’s surface that causes winds.

Using data from satellite observations and climate simulations, Antara Banerjee at the University of Colorado Boulder and her colleagues modelled changing wind patterns related to the layer’s recovery. Its healing is largely thanks to the Montreal Protocol agreed internationally in 1987, which banned the production of ozone-depleting substances.

Before 2000, a belt of air currents called the mid-latitude jet stream in the southern hemisphere had been gradually shifting towards the South Pole. Another tropical jet stream called the Hadley cell, responsible for trade winds, tropical rain-belts, hurricanes and subtropical deserts, had been getting wider.

Banerjee and her team found that both of these trends stopped and began to reverse slightly in 2000. This change couldn’t be explained by random fluctuations in climate, and Banerjee says they are a direct effect of the recovering ozone layer.

Alterations in the path of a jet stream may influence weather through shifts in atmospheric temperature and rainfall, which could lead to changes in ocean temperature and salt concentration.

Read more: Ozone hole recovery will probably be delayed by banned gas from China

In terms of ozone layer recovery, “we’ve turned the corner”, says Martyn Chipperfield at the University of Leeds in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study. He says we had already seen signs that the ozone layer is recovering and that this study represents the next step, which is seeing the effect of that recovery on the climate.

Chipperfield says it is important to know which aspects of climate change have been caused by carbon dioxide emissions, which are continuing to rise, versus ozone depletion, which is now stopping and reversing.

Despite the ban on ozone-depleting substances, these chemicals have very long lifetimes in the atmosphere, so full ozone recovery isn’t expected to take place for several decades.

The ozone layer will also recover at different speeds in different parts of the atmosphere, says Banerjee. For instance, the ozone layer is expected to recover to 1980s levels by the 2030s for the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes and by the 2050s for the southern mid-latitudes, she says, while the Antarctic ozone hole will probably recover a bit later in the 2060s.

Climate change will also have an effect on the ozone layer. “A thinning of the ozone layer over the tropics is predicted,” says Chipperfield. “We still have to tackle climate change.”

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2120-4

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238542-the-ozone-layer-is-healing-and-redirecting-wind-flows-around-the-globe/#ixzz6IBQ2u6Ld

Greta: We must fight the climate crisis and pandemic simultaneously
NEW SCIENTIST HEALTH 30 March 2020 By Adam Vaughan
Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg says we must prevent inaction on climate issues while fighting the coronavirus pandemic Monasse Thierry/ANDBZ/ABACA/PA Images

The world needs to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and climate change simultaneously, and guard against people who try to use the current crisis to delay action on cutting carbon emissions, Greta Thunberg has urged.

Listen to the full interview with Greta Thunberg on our new podcast, the Big Interview

The Swedish climate activist, who revealed last week that she and her father are likely to have had covid-19, said the response to the outbreak revealed societal shortcomings, as well as our ability to change in the face of a crisis, but had also proved that we are able to act fast.

“If one virus can wipe out the entire economy in a matter of weeks and shut down societies, then that is a proof that our societies are not very resilient. It also shows that once we are in an emergency, we can act and we can change our behaviour quickly,” she said in a conversation on New Scientist‘s Big Interview podcast.

Greta Thunberg: We must fight the climate crisis and pandemic simultaneously

Some politicians have called for climate action to be put on hold while governments grapple with the coronavirus, with the Czech Republic’s prime minister Andrej Babiš saying the European Union should “forget about the Green Deal now”.

Read more: Can a Green New Deal boost the US economy and save the planet?

Thunberg said: “People will try to use this emergency as an excuse not to act on the climate crisis, and that we have to be very careful for.” She said she understood the emergency the world was facing now, but it wasn’t an excuse to shelve action on emissions.

“People don’t want to hear about the climate crisis [now]. I completely understand that, but we have to make sure that it’s not forgotten. We need to treat both of these crises at the same time, because the climate crisis will not go away,” she said.

The campaigner and the Fridays for Future movement, which she kick-started with her first school strike in 2018, have made their weekly protests virtual during the pandemic.

Students have been good at staying off the streets, said Thunberg, and although young people tend to have milder symptoms of the disease, “we still stand in solidarity with those in risk groups and I think that is a very beautiful thing.”

Thunberg has had mild symptoms of covid-19, with some tiredness and a cough, but said that the more intense ones that her father experienced fit with the symptoms of the illness exactly. Neither have been tested, as Sweden is only testing the most severe cases.\

Greta Thunberg appears to have been infected by the coronavirus

2019 was incredible for Thunberg: she was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, travelled to North America and back by boat and addressed world leaders at the United Nations in New York.

The 17-year old said she always found herself going back to the science of climate change in her speeches because it wasn’t something that could be contested. “It’s not something you can have different opinions in, it’s just pure science. In that sense, it’s very much black and white.”

Read more: Our fight against climate change could help us rein in coronavirus too

She has focused on the “carbon budgets” put forward by the UN climate science panel in 2018, which attempt to estimate the carbon emissions that can be released into the atmosphere without breaching global warming thresholds, such as 1.5°C and 2°C rises in temperature. She said these budgets are insufficient because they don’t account for tipping points, such as the collapse of ice sheets in West Antarctica, but are still the “most reliable roadmaps” humanity has.

Thunberg said she has taken heart from small successes, including the rejection of expanding an airport in Bristol, UK, and rewilding projects. But she noted that the bigger picture of steadily rising global emissions was negative: “Yes, we need to see the victories, but we can’t only focus on the victories because we close our eyes to the actual crisis.”

Criticism from politicians, including Donald Trump, was a “milestone”, she said. “We need to see that as a victory, when they criticise us like that. But also it’s just so hilarious when grown-ups like that feel so threatened by children.”

Thunberg said she was frustrated that media coverage focused on her rather than the many other young climate activists around the world, but she understood it. Her rise as a public figure has been “very hard” for her parents, she said, because they saw both the positive and negative sides of it. One of their key influences on her was “to always think of others and to be a humanitarian”, she said.

On her life after education, Thunberg hopes the world will have taken serious action on carbon emissions so she can pursue a job other than as a climate activist. “All I know is that I want to do something and I want to be somewhere where I can make the most difference, try to make the world a better place, but I don’t know where that will be,” she said.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238831-greta-we-must-fight-the-climate-crisis-and-pandemic-simultaneously/#ixzz6IBZOJDDc

Our low-paid workers are our lifeline
Angela McRobbie 25 March 2020 VERSO BLOG

On Wednesday 18th March, Angela McRobbie was admitted to hospital with what turned out to be COVID-19. Here she discusses her experiences of the virus, and pays tribute to those low paid workers who are at the forefront of efforts to tackle the pandemic.


It is now day 2 of my being discharged from the Whittington Hospital in North London, with a positive test for COVID-19 coming through on Saturday afternoon. The only reason I’m writing this is to re-iterate how, as a society, we now have to swivel 360 degrees to properly value those dedicated workers whose compassion has humbled me in ways I can hardly convey.

The first workforce I came into contact with doing long hours, poorly paid, possibly at risk over recent weeks and acting with such professionalism were the cabin crew on the any Easyjet flights I’ve taken between Gatwick and Berlin Tegel. I’ve recently been finalising a research project running between London, Berlin and Milan, but more importantly I’ve been helping care for a friend who has been going through first chemo, then immunotherapy. Once en route I exchanged glances with the crew when a seemingly agitated woman boarded wearing a large mask and then entirely covering her face by pulling down her woolie hat. I was bang next to her, as was the passenger on the other side, for the 90 minutes looking through the window throughout. Perhaps this was the moment I got infected. A week later, and this time on another flight back to London, I began to feel queasy on board. I was relieved not to have thrown up and managed to get home to North London. This was Thursday 12th March and from that point on I became weaker and weaker by the hour. But with no cough and no temperature, I did not really make the leap to thinking it to be C-19. I collapsed on the bathroom floor 3 times, I slept with a kind of hallucinogenic intensity and I ate almost nothing. By Wednesday 18th my daughter called an ambulance, and when the brave paramedics arrived they could see how ill I was. I so much hope they have remained healthy, as they were unmasked.

They took me to the Whittington Hospital, just 5 minutes from where I live. There was a frenzy of activity in A & E, and I was first given a lung x-ray and told immediately by a doctor that there were signs of infection. I was also given oxygen, which I needed over the course of 4 days. My blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen levels were checked every two hours throughout the night, also by amazing health staff working 12 hour shifts. I was put on two antibiotics and Tamiflu, just in case they worked. Oddly, after 12 hours, I felt they were working – though this could have been merely my relief that I was in such good hands. I once again collapsed on the bathroom floor and the ward sister so helpfully called my daughter. At least I could eat a little. I was in a ward with terribly ill and mostly patients older than me (I’m 68). Through the fog of my own illness I could see how the doctors and nurses were treating quite confused patients with such compassion, spending up to 30 minutes at a time with them, masked but really risking their lives. I had also become quite deaf during this process and at a certain point I just smiled and nodded. I told the doctor of my travels and that mercifully we were on strike at my university so this had kept me out of personal contact, often one to one, with up to 300 students over the space of 4 days.

By late Friday I felt a wave of calm that perhaps I was going to survive this. By Saturday a positive result emerged. Again, a wonderful young doctor broke the news but by then I was eating and no longer needed oxygen, and he said I may be allowed home Sunday. They decided to keep me on the antibiotics. He explained that so little is known and that hospital policy was following the guidance from their own microbiologists. My daughter had been allowed short visits and told me staff were worried about running out of masks, the next day she came to collect me bringing with her a box of a 100 that she had pre-ordered a week or so before.

Several staff including one of the cleaners smiled and wished me the best when I was leaving the ward, this was so generous since I was leaving all of them to a future unknown. Since being home I am only able to walk like someone in their 90s. I hold onto doors and walls for support. Any degree of strength seems very slow to re-enter my system but there are some good signs. I feel as though it’s going to take weeks, but that’s fine. I am lucky to live alone and I have the sun streaming through my windows. I feel full of political fervour to see our dedicated health and care workforce, clinical and non-clinical looked after. Why cannot the military medical corps be pulled in across the country? And cannot this happen now? Essential travel must be made safe and easy for core workers, Sadiq Khan and other mayors have it in their hands to find ways of making this happen. I also hope Easyjet is thinking of how it can not only pay its workforce more generously but look after them with the care they deserve. Coincidentally in a forthcoming short book, that I have just finished writing, I rage about how our low pay economy ‘incarcerates’ sectors of the population with long hours, and near to xero hours conditions meaning that there is little if any chance for further job training, for day release or for upping qualifications. This is a national pattern for workers, from north to south we only, who until the last week we have given barely have more than a second thought to. These are women and men in the checkouts who I often talk to and they tell me they only have higher hopes for their children doing well at school and university. They feel themselves to be trapped in a future of low paid jobs. But this can change now. If social scientists have any role to play (and in the last 2 weeks I have doubted my own professional value indeed in comparison to virologists epidemiologists not to say health staff) then we can clamour loudly for a new world after the virus which permits the service sector to be able to see true improvement in wages, conditions and also opportunity to gain more qualifications.



Angela McRobbie is a sociologist at Goldsmiths University of London.

The COVID-19 pandemic will change everything - for better or worse

Christine Berry VERSO BOOKS
24 March 2020

Many on the left have argued that the current crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to the conditions for a new socialism to emerge from the ashes. But, as Christine Berry argues, crises aren't only opportunities for the left, and the conditions that are emerging could well play into the hands of a renewed far-right.

In the past week, it has become horribly clear that we are living through something cataclysmic. The human cost of the covid-19 pandemic will be immense. Despite stark and horrific inequalities in people’s ability to protect themselves and their loved ones, it will upend the lives even of those whose privilege usually shields them from the worst impacts of crises. And the extraordinary steps that governments are already taking in response will redraw the political map. The situation is so radically uncertain and fast-moving that we cannot predict the shape of the economies and societies that will emerge from this crisis, but they certainly will not be the same ones that have just blindly stumbled into it.

Amidst widespread fear and anxiety, there are those on the left who hope that from the ashes of this crisis the foundations of a better society will rise. There have been several different versions of this argument circulating. The first is that the crisis is brutally exposing the shortcomings of our broken economic model. Sick people are being forced to continue going to work in defiance of public health advice, because the alternative is destitution. Workers in the hospitality sector were laid off literally overnight after the government advised people not to go to bars and restaurants. The devastating effects of austerity on our NHS are being laid bare. The prospect of schools closing has thrown into sharp relief the swathes of our economy that would cease to function without childcare – and with it, the unpaid, undervalued and essential work done by carers in the home. In short, it’s now painfully clear that the structure of our economy fails abysmally to support human health and wellbeing. It’s also clear that our society is only as strong as its weakest link. Contrary to the austerity-era rhetoric pitting strivers against skivers, if we don’t guarantee a secure livelihood for everyone – including those unable to work – we all suffer. When the dust settles and we compare the path of the epidemic in, say, the UK and Scandinavia, it will become apparent that these failings have claimed many lives.

The crisis is also being seen as bringing out the best of humanity, normalising a new spirit of collective care. Mutual aid networks are springing up across the country. Communities are organising to provide each other with support during isolation – from providing food to running errands to helping with childcare and dog-walking, or simply keeping in touch on the phone or online. The government’s hesitancy to introduce social distancing measures seemed to be partly based on evidence about the health and morbidity effects of loneliness – but they appear not to have reckoned with the way society would respond. It’s entirely possible that some will end up feeling less lonely than before the crisis hit, as their neighbours and communities rally round to support them. The UK has seen nothing like this in recent memory, but countries like Greece and Spain have: in the aftermath of the financial crisis, an extensive ‘solidarity economy’ sprang up to step into the gap left by broken markets and a retreating state. I’m reminded of a quote from a Greek organiser with Solidarity4All: “We are at the end, but from this end we try to help each other.”

This matters not only because of the new values of solidarity it could nurture and the connections it could create, but because it is expanding and highlighting non-market means of provisioning. People are starting social media groups to swap things they need in response to shortages. Companies like Brewdog and Leith Gin are repurposing their operations to make hand sanitiser and distributing it for free. If the crisis begins to seriously disrupt markets for essential goods and services, these solidarity networks could become an essential lifeline. Markets are being curtailed by less heartwarming human responses, too, as supermarkets introduce rationing in response to shelves being emptied by stockpilers. The idea that the market is the only, or even the best, way to meet our basic needs seems unlikely to survive this crisis unscathed.

Not only are non-market means of social provision coming from the bottom-up, the crisis is also normalising state intervention in the economy on an almost unprecedented scale. Already the US government is proposing an $800bn stimulus package. The UK government has announced £330bn in loan guarantees and has guaranteed 80% of the wages of employees “furloughed” due to the crisis, saying it will do “whatever it takes” to limit the fallout. The economy is being put on a war footing, with manufacturers urged to switch to making ventilators. Spain has nationalised all private hospitals. Before the crisis ends, we are likely to see hundreds of billions of pounds pumped into the economy so that households and businesses can stay afloat. Just a few weeks ago, state interventions such as the Green New Deal and universal healthcare were deemed unaffordable, “pie in the sky” ideas. If we can do these things in response to a pandemic, the argument goes, we can do them in response to the climate emergency.

But it is here that such ideas start to unravel somewhat, and reassuring visions of a post-crisis socialist utopia begin to give way to reality. It’s true that this crisis will change what is politically possible: the idea that Labour’s 2019 spending plans were unrealistic or reckless, or that government shouldn’t try to mould markets to meet social goals, will seem hard to sustain after this. It’s true that in 1945, the experience of WW2 meant that state planning was widespread, and that this helped lay the foundations for a post-war settlement based on extensive public ownership and control. It’s possible that the financial crisis was our Wall Street Crash, that this is our world war, and that we will emerge into the sunlit uplands of a new and better political settlement.

And yet. Despite all of this, there is something disconcerting in the idea that emergency state intervention will, in and of itself, pave the way to a socialist future. For one thing, there’s a definite sense of déjà vu here. Many of the same arguments were being made during the 2008 financial crisis. Unbridled capitalism’s flaws had brought the system crashing down. The government had stepped in, blowing out of the water the pretence of firms taking their own risks in competitive, dynamic markets. Many thought that this, too, would lead to a new system in which markets would be more constrained and government would play a bigger role. But things didn’t work out that way. Instead, we saw the crisis leveraged to advance an agenda of the radical retreat of the state – partly on the basis that we had ‘maxed out our credit card’ responding to the crisis and had no money left for other priorities. (Already, Conservatives are trying to sustain this narrative, arguing that “the whole point of fiscal conservatism in normal times is to be able to act decisively if there is a genuine economic emergency”.)

The bank bail-outs were state intervention, sure: but they were an intervention that underwrote the losses of finance capital, for which ordinary people paid the price for a decade or more. It’s mildly astonishing to me that, twelve years later, we are hearing the same arguments being made again, as if the state stepping in to manage a crisis is necessarily going to push politics to the left. The question then is not simply whether states are intervening to manage the crisis, but how. Who wins and who loses from these interventions? Who is being asked to take the pain, and who is being protected? What shape of economy will we be left with when all this is over? It’s too early to answer these questions with any certainty, but early signs are not encouraging. The measures announced so far have scrupulously protected the interests of capital whilst failing to do nearly enough to protect workers.

Boris Johnson initially set the tone by ‘advising’ people not to go out rather than ordering venues to close, meaning they could not claim on their insurance – though he was eventually forced to move to a complete shutdown after many businesses predictably stayed open. The rescue package announced the following day mostly amounted to enabling people to take on more debts that will need to be paid back: £330bn guaranteed loans for businesses, and mortgage ‘holidays’ for home-owners (during which their loans will continue to accrue interest). Many people’s lost income will not be recouped once the crisis is over, yet landlords will be allowed to recoup any missed or suspended rent payments in full. The government moved belatedly to protect jobs and incomes by offering wage support, but its package remains full of holes. At time of writing, it was coming under increasing pressure to extend help to the self-employed, currently excluded from the measures and still forced to choose between health and hardship. There has been nothing for the millions of parents who suddenly find themselves without childcare and struggling to continue working. Even where salaried employees are concerned, the measures failed to adequately protect workers, with business receipt of wage support not being made conditional on avoiding lay-offs. The costs of the crisis, then, are still being borne largely by workers and small businesses – albeit subsidised by the state, and thus by future citizens – it’s just that some of those costs are being deferred. As yet, no sacrifices have been demanded of banks, landlords or profitable corporations.

In the British context, where people and businesses are already dangerously over-indebted, this reliance on expanding private debt during a downturn is risky. It also means that we could emerge from this crisis with an economy even more skewed in favour of capital against labour. Commentators and government figures are beginning to suggest that planned increases in the minimum wage may need to be deferred, and unspecified ‘regulations’ eased, to support businesses to recover. The result could be that many people are left with their household finances in tatters and increased debt burdens to cover, while workers’ rights could just as easily be watered down as strengthened. From an economic point of view, it is obvious that the UK’s broken labour markets have made us less resilient to this crisis. But from a political point of view, it is as yet far from clear that this will translate into positive change.

In any case, I worry that the idea of state intervention as an unqualified good reflects a dangerously outdated view of what constitutes progressive change, one stuck in the era of austerity, when the left/right debate was about whether the government should spend money or not. Recent years have seen an emerging economic agenda on the left that has recognised that this is not really where the action is (albeit higher levels of state spending are essential). It has also recognised that states can be tools of oppression as well as liberation, and that we must democratise and decentralise power – both economic and political – if we want to build a just and well-functioning socialist economy. WW2 paved the way for the post-war settlement because both were based on bureaucratic state control – but this is precisely the characteristic of the ‘spirit of ‘45’ that Corbynism has criticised. Why then the sudden enthusiasm for it?

In any case, austerity politics is no longer the main enemy. Rishi Sunak’s budget may now be an economic irrelevance, but it served a useful purpose in illuminating the new politics of ‘Johnsonism’. The left debate on this had tended to assume either that Johnson was ‘moving left’ and Labour had ‘won the argument’, or that it was all rhetoric and he was simply going to continue with austerity. The budget showed that neither of these was really true. Of course, Johnson was going to spend money to keep his new voters on-side, but that didn’t imply some Damascene conversion to progressive values. Austerity would continue for the most marginalised, particularly those on benefits, there was no intention of taking on concentrations of extractive economic power – the banks, the landlords, the utility firms – and this new economic interventionism was still coupled to a racist-nationalist agenda including draconian restrictions on immigration.

Before we can seek to rise to the present moment, the left needs to realise, and very quickly, that it is no longer competing with small-state neoliberalism. Across the world, it is competing with a new breed of right-wing nationalism – sometimes coupled with neoliberalism, to be sure, but sometimes quite happy to countenance state intervention if it helps cement their electoral coalitions. If this crisis may be creating some of the conditions for socialism, it is also accelerating many of the conditions for fascism. It shouldn’t need spelling out, but fascism does tend to involve quite an economically interventionist state. And if it is normalising state intervention, the crisis is also normalising draconian border controls and restrictions on daily life. It is normalising emergency legislation banning everything from mass gatherings to teachers going on strike. It is normalising the belief that government knows best and everyone else should just fall in line. While a global pandemic clearly demands a global response, with Donald Trump in the White House it is instead lending itself to xenophobia and small-minded nationalism. Instead of just focusing on the scale of Johnson and Sunak’s interventionism, we should be looking at Trump talking about the “Chinese virus”, pressing the pandemic into service to shore up support for his border wall, or trying to negotiate exclusive American access to vaccines. We should be looking at the refugees and migrants abandoned by the authorities or trapped in camps in France, Italy and Greece. We should be looking at the rise in racism towards Chinese people and attempts to scapegoat migrants for the pandemic.

More fundamentally, we should be looking at the emotions the crisis is activating. As various people pointed out just a fortnight ago (even if that now feels like a lifetime), when Toby Young was blathering on about ‘defeating fascism by debating it in the public sphere’, fascism is not rational – it is emotional. It plays on emotions like fear, hate and anger, as well as less obviously negative emotions like national pride. Socialism does not thrive on these emotions: it thrives on hope and, dare I say it, love. After Sunak’s budget, Grace Blakeley observed that progressives tend to over-estimate the radicalising impacts of a crisis and under-estimate the radicalising impacts of having one’s demands met. Recent events give that insight new relevance.

It would be a dangerous mistake to assume that this represents a straightforward ‘opportunity’ for positive structural change. It could just as easily activate a limbic response that inclines people to protect those closest to them and shut out everyone else. Even seemingly positive displays of community solidarity could play into this if they remain confined within national borders or couched in parochial rhetoric about the ‘blitz spirit’. After all, a sense of belonging to one’s community is also a feature of fascism.

There is obviously political work to be done during this crisis. We must not shun the idea of pushing the situation into a better direction – indeed, it’s essential that we try. But if we want to make this more likely, it’s crucial that we don’t get carried away with the idea of crises as merely moments of opportunity. Fundamentally, we must remember that we are not in charge of the course of events. The far-right are. And it’s crucial that we focus on what distinguishes our politics from theirs, rather than spend too long celebrating our newfound common ground: that we fight the next political argument and not the last one. In this context, we must constantly keep coming back to the question of who is winning and who is losing; who is being protected and who is being blamed. In short, how will this reshape power relations, and whose side are we on? How can we counter the actual enemy we face – an unholy alliance of racist authoritarian nationalism and disaster capitalism – rather than the imagined enemy of last-decade austerity neoliberalism? Fetishising state intervention, at a time when right-wing authoritarian governments are presiding over emergency measures – however necessary they may be for public health – may look with hindsight like a catastrophic historical mistake.


Christine Berry is an author, researcher and freelance journalist based in Manchester. She is co-author with Joe Guinan of People Get Ready: Preparing for a Corbyn Government. Christine is a Trustee of Rethinking Economics, a Fellow of the Next System Project, a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab and Contributing Editor of Renewal journal. Previously she was Director of Policy and Government at the New Economics Foundation.

You could be spreading the coronavirus without realising you’ve got it

NEW SCIENTIST 

HEALTH 24 March 2020
By Graham Lawton

A lack of social distancing on London’s Primrose Hill on 22 March
RMV/Shutterstock

BRONX NY NURSES AND HOSPITAL STAFF HAVE A SAFE SOCIAL 
PROTEST OVER LACK OF SAFETY PPE. NY DAILY NEWS MARCH 25/2020

With more than 380,000 confirmed cases worldwide, one thing is clear about the new coronavirus: it is very good at infecting people. Now studies are starting to reveal just how infectious it is – and when a person with covid-19 is most likely to spread the virus.

While we know some people are more vulnerable to the virus than others, it is capable of putting a healthy adult of any age into a critical condition and in need of intensive care. However, the virus can also be asymptomatic, causing no noticeable illness in some people. Such cases were first recognised in China in January (Science China Life Sciences, doi.org/dqbn), but it wasn’t known how common they were.

Research published last week by Jeffrey Shaman of Columbia University in New York and his colleagues analysed the course of the epidemic in 375 Chinese cities between 10 January, when the epidemic took off, and 23 January, when containment measures such as travel restrictions were imposed.

Read more: How to fight infection by turning back your immune system’s clock

The study concluded that 86 per cent of cases were “undocumented” – that is, asymptomatic or had only very mild symptoms (Science, doi.org/ggn6c2). The researchers also analysed case data from foreign nationals who were evacuated from the city of Wuhan, where the first cases were seen, and found a similar proportion of asymptomatic or very mild cases.

Such undocumented cases are still contagious and the study found them to be the source of most of the virus’s spread in China before the restrictions came in. Even though these people were only 55 per cent as contagious as people with symptoms, the study found that they were the source of 79 per cent of further infections, due to there being more of them, and the higher likelihood that they were out and about.

“If somebody’s experiencing mild symptoms, and I think most of us can relate to this, we’re still going to go about our day,” says Shaman. “These people are the major driver of it and they’re the ones who facilitated the spread.”

Read more: We’re beginning to understand the biology of the covid-19 virus

A project in Italy has also found many symptomless cases. When everybody was tested in a town called Vò, one of the hardest-hit in the country, 60 per cent of people who tested positive were found to have no symptoms.

That is lower than the number found in China but is in the same ballpark, says Shaman. “It might be one in 10 in some societies versus one in five in others, but generally you’re looking at about an order of magnitude more cases than have been confirmed,” he says.

For most people who do fall ill, symptoms are usually mild and develop slowly, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While many have heard that a cough, fever, shortness of breath and fatigue can be signs of covid-19, the condition’s symptoms can also include a runny or stuffy nose, sore throat, headache, muscle pain, diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting.

Of those who get ill, 19 per cent enter a severe or critical condition, usually with pneumonia. The mortality rate varies depending on a number of factors, such as a population’s average age, the state of a country’s healthcare system and the extent to which mild cases are identified and counted. A study last week estimated that 1.4 per cent of symptomatic cases in Wuhan died (Nature Medicine, doi.org/dqbq).

It is rarer for children to develop serious disease, but it is a myth that young, healthy adults don’t. “There are some young people who have ended up in intensive care,” said the UK government’s chief medical adviser, Chris Whitty, at a briefing on 19 March.

Once someone is infected, the incubation period is usually between two and 14 days, with half of cases showing symptoms before the sixth day (Annals of Internal Medicine, doi.org/dph3). However, this was calculated by studying 181 confirmed cases, meaning it is unlikely to have taken very mild and asymptomatic cases into account.

Read more: How soon will we have a coronavirus vaccine? The race against covid-19

Even people who develop symptoms are at risk of unwittingly spreading the virus. A study in China suggests that infectiousness starts about 2.5 days before the onset of symptoms, and peaks 15 hours before (medRxiv, doi.org/dqbr).

We know that coughs and sneezes spread the virus, so how is it possible for asymptomatic people to spread the infection?

People with mild or no symptoms can have a very high viral load in their upper respiratory tracts, meaning they can shed the virus through spitting, touching their mouths or noses and then a surface, or possibly talking. Even people who don’t feel ill occasionally cough or sneeze.

Once symptoms develop, a person’s viral load declines steadily, and they become increasingly less infectious. However, people appear to keep shedding the virus for around two weeks after they recover from covid-19, both in their saliva and stools (medRxiv, doi.org/dqbs). This means that even once a person’s symptoms have cleared, it may still be possible to infect other people.

Airborne droplets are likely to be the main infection route, but contaminated surfaces could play a role too. Health advice typically says the virus can persist for about 2 hours on surfaces, says William Keevil at the University of Southampton, UK.

But a study published last week suggests that this is a serious underestimate, with viable virus surviving on cardboard for 14 hours and plastic and stainless steel for up to three days (New England Journal of Medicine, doi.org/ggn88w). It can also hang around in the air for at least 3 hours.

Read more: Can you catch the coronavirus twice? We don’t know yet

“Survival of coronaviruses for days on touch surfaces is a hygiene risk,” says Keevil. “It is difficult to avoid touching [contaminated objects or surfaces] such as door handles and push plates, bed and stair rails, public touch screens etc.”

There is also some evidence of transmission from faeces to the mouth, says Elizabeth Halloran at the University of Washington, which reinforces the importance of handwashing.

Keevil recommends regular, rigorous handwashing or using an alcohol hand gel, and avoiding touching the eyes, nose and mouth. “The latter being extremely difficult because humans are tactile and touch their faces many times an hour,” he says.

What all this makes clear is that advising only people with a cough or fever and their families to self-isolate won’t prevent the coronavirus from spreading, thanks to its fiendish ability to cause very mild symptoms in people, and to peak in infectiousness before people even realise they are sick.

More on these topics:
coronavirus
covid-19

Magazine issue 3275 , published 28 March 2020
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238473-you-could-be-spreading-the-coronavirus-without-realising-youve-got-it/#ixzz6IBMeUjy7

Can you catch the coronavirus twice? We don’t know yet

We don’t have enough evidence yet to know if recovering from covid-19 induces immunity, or whether any immunity would give long-lasting protection against the coronavirus

NEW SCIENTIST HEALTH 25 March 2020 By Graham Lawton

SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (yellow), as seen using an electron microscope
CDC/Science Photo Library

SEE NOT INVISIBLE AT ALL, DESPITE TRUMPS CLAIMS OTHERWISE
 ("INVISIBLE" SCOURGE, ENEMY, ETC.)

SAY you have caught covid-19 and recovered – are you now immune for life, or could you catch it again? We just don’t know yet.

In February, reports emerged of a woman in Japan who had been given the all-clear after having covid-19 but then tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus a second time. There have also been reports of a man in Japan testing positive after being given the all-clear, and anecdotal cases of second positives have emerged from China, too.

This has raised fears that people may not develop immunity to the virus. This would mean that, until we have an effective vaccine, we could all experience repeated rounds of infection.


But the science is still uncertain. “There is some anecdotal evidence of reinfections, but we really don’t know,” says Ira Longini at the University of Florida. It may be that the tests used were unreliable, which is a problem with tests for other respiratory viruses, says Jeffrey Shaman at Columbia University in New York.

Podcast: When will we get a safe covid-19 vaccine? An expert explains

Early signs from small animal experiments are reassuring. A team from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing exposed four rhesus macaques to the virus. A week later, all four were ill with covid-19-like symptoms and had high virus loads. Two weeks later, the macaques had recovered and were confirmed to have antibodies to the virus in their bloodstream.

“You can be infected with other coronaviruses over and over. We don’t know if that’s true for this virus”

The researchers then tried to reinfect two of them but failed, which suggests the animals were immune (bioRxiv, doi.org/ggn8r8). “That finding is very encouraging, as it suggests that it is possible to induce protective immunity against the virus,” says Alfredo Garzino-Demo at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean long-term immunity. There are other coronaviruses circulating among humans and although they induce immunity, this doesn’t last. “Some other viruses in the coronavirus family, such as those that cause common colds, tend to induce immunity that is relatively short-lived, at around three months,” says Peter Openshaw at Imperial College London.

“Because [the virus] is so new, we do not yet know how long any protection generated through infection will last. We urgently need more research looking at the immune responses of people who have recovered from infection to be sure,” says Openshaw.

Other immunologists agree. “Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is not yet well understood and we do not know how protective the antibody response will be in the long-term,” says Erica Bickerton at the Pirbright Institute in the UK.

Read more: How to fight infection

“For ordinary coronavirus infections, you do not get lasting immunity,” says Longini. “You can be infected over and over, and we really don’t know for this novel coronavirus if that’s also true.”

Other infectious disease specialists are more optimistic. “The evidence is increasingly convincing that infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to an antibody response that is protective. Most likely this protection is for life,” says Martin Hibberd at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “Although we need more evidence to be sure of this, people who have recovered are unlikely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 again.”


Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532754-600-can-you-catch-the-coronavirus-twice-we-dont-know-yet/#ixzz6IBLTjeVg

Did bubonic plague really cause the Black Death?

Everyone thinks the Black Death was caused by bubonic plague. But they could be wrong – and we need to find the real culprit before it strikes again

By Debora Mackenzie 24 November 2001

THE DISEASE that spread like wildfire through Europe between 1347 and 1351 is still the most violent epidemic in recorded history. It killed at least a third of the population, more than 25 million people. Victims first suffered pain, fever and boils, then swollen lymph nodes and blotches on the skin. After that they vomited blood and died within three days. The survivors called it the Great Pestilence. Victorian scientists dubbed it the Black Death.

As far as most people are concerned, the Black Death was bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, a flea-borne bacterial disease of rodents that jumped to humans. But two epidemiologists from Liverpool University say we’ve got it all wrong. In Biology of Plagues, a book released earlier this year, they effectively demolish the bubonic plague theory. “If you look at how the Black Death spread,” says Susan Scott, one of the authors, “one of the least likely diseases to have caused it is bubonic plague.” If Scott and co-author Christopher Duncan are right, the world would do well to listen.

Whatever pathogen caused the Black Death appears to have ravaged Europe several times during the past two millennia, and it could resurface again. If we knew what it really was, we could prepare for it. “It’s always important to re-evaluate these questions so we are not taken by surprise,” says Steve Morse, an expert on emerging viral diseases at Columbia University in New York. Yet few experts in infectious diseases have even read the book, let alone taken its ideas seriously. New Scientist has, and it looks to us as though Scott and Duncan are on to something.

The idea that the Black Death was bubonic plague dates back to the late 19th century, when Alexandre Yersin, a French bacteriologist, unravelled the complex biology of bubonic plague. He noted that the disease shared a key feature with the Black Death: the bubo, a dark, painful, swollen lymph gland usually in the armpit or groin. Even though buboes also occur in other diseases, he decided the two were the same, even naming the bacterium pestis after the Great Pestilence.

But the theory is riddled with glaring flaws, say Scott and Duncan. First of all, bubonic plague is intimately associated with rodents and the fleas they carry. But the Black Death’s pattern of spread doesn’t fit a rat and flea-borne disease. It raced across the Alps and through northern Europe at temperatures too cold for fleas to hatch, and swept from Marseilles to Paris at four kilometres a day – -far faster than a rat could travel. Moreover, the rats necessary to spread the disease simply were not there. The only rat in Europe in the Middle Ages was the black rat, Rattus rattus, which stays close to human habitation. Yet the Black Death jumped across great tracts of open country-up to 300 kilometres between towns in France-in only a few days with no intermediate outbreaks. “Iceland had no rats at all,” notes Duncan, “but the Black Death was reported there too.”

In contrast, bubonic plague spreads, as rats do, slowly and sporadically. In 1907, the British Plague Commission in India reported an outbreak that took six months to move 300 feet. After bubonic plague arrived in South Africa in 1899, it moved inland at just 20 kilometres a year, even with steam trains to help.

The disease that caused the Black Death stayed in Europe until 1666. During its 300-year reign, Scott and Duncan have found records of outbreaks that occurred somewhere in France virtually every year. Every few years, these outbreaks spawned epidemics that ravaged the rest of Europe. For Yersinia to do this, it would have to become established in a population of rodents that are resistant to the disease. It couldn’t have been rats, because the plague bacterium kills them-along with all other European rodents. As a result, Europe, along with Australia and Antarctica, remain the only regions of the world where bubonic plague has never settled. So, once again, the Black Death behaved in a way plague simply cannot.

Nor is bubonic plague contagious enough to have been the Black Death. The Black Death killed at least a third of the population wherever it hit, sometimes more. But when bubonic plague hit India in the 19th century, fewer than 2 per cent of the people in affected towns died. And when plague invaded southern Africa, South America and the south-western US, it didn’t trigger a massive epidemic.

The most obvious problem with the plague theory is that, unlike bubonic plague, the Black Death obviously spread directly from person to person. People in the thick of the epidemic recognised this, and Scott and Duncan proved they were right by tracing the anatomy of outbreaks, person by person, using English burial records from the 16th century. These records, which detail all deaths from the pestilence by order of Elizabeth I, clearly show the disease spreading from one person to their neighbours and relatives, separated by an incubation period of 20 to 30 days.

The details tally perfectly with a disease that kills about 37 days after infection. For the first 10 to 12 days, you weren’t infectious. Then for 20 to 22 days, you were. You only knew you were infected when you fell ill, for the final five days or less-but by then you had been infecting people unknowingly for weeks. Europeans at the time clearly knew the disease had a long, infectious incubation period, because they rapidly imposed measures to isolate potential carriers. For example, they stopped anyone arriving on a ship from disembarking for 40 days, or quarantina in Italian – -the origin of the word quarantine.
Telltale timing

Epidemiologists know that diseases with a long incubation time create outbreaks that last months. From 14th-century ecclesiastical records, Scott and Duncan estimate that outbreaks of the Black Death in a given town or diocese typically lasted 8 or 9 months. That, plus the delay between waves of cases, is the fingerprint of the disease across Europe over seasons and centuries, they say. The pair found exactly the same pattern in 17th-century outbreaks in Florence, Milan and a dozen towns across England, including London, Colchester, Newcastle, Manchester and Eyam in Derbyshire. In 1665, the inhabitants of Eyam selflessly confined themselves to the village. A third of them died, but they kept the disease from reaching other towns. This would not have worked if the carriers were rats.

Despite the force of their argument, Scott and Duncan have yet to convince their colleagues. None of the experts that New Scientist spoke to had read their book, and a summary of its ideas provoked reactions that range from polite interest to outright dismissal. Some of Scott’s colleagues, for example, have scoffed that “everyone knows the Black Death was bubonic plague”.

“I doubt you can say plague was not involved in the Black Death, though there may have been other diseases too,” says Elisabeth Carniel, a bubonic plague expert at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “But I haven’t had time to read the book.” Carniel suggests that fleas could have spread the Black Death directly between people. Human fleas can keep it in their guts for a few weeks, leading to a delay in spread. But this would be unlikely to have happened the same way every time.

Moreover, people with enough Yersinia in their blood for a flea to pick it up are already very sick. They would only be able to pass their infection on in this way for a very short time-and whoever the flea bit would also sicken within a week, the incubation time of Yersinia. This does not fit the pattern documented by Scott and Duncan. Neither would an extra-virulent Yersinia, which would still depend on rats.

There have been several other ingenious attempts to save the Yersinia theory as inconsistencies have emerged. Many fall back on pneumonic plague, a variant form of Yersinia infection. This can occur in the later stages of bubonic plague, when the bacteria sometimes proliferate in the lungs and can be coughed out, and inhaled by people nearby. Untreated pneumonic plague is invariably fatal and can spread directly from person to person.

But not far, and not for long-plague only becomes pneumonic when the patient is practically at death’s door. “It is simply impossible that people sick enough to have developed the pneumonic form of the disease could have travelled far,” says Scott. Yet the Black Death typically jumped between towns in the time a healthy human took to travel. Also, pneumonic plague kills quickly-within six days, usually less. With such a short infectious period, local outbreaks of pneumonic plague end much sooner than 8 or 9 months, notes Scott. Rats and fleas can restart them, but then the disease is back to spreading slowly and sporadically like flea-borne diseases. Moreover, pneumonic plague lacks the one thing that links Yersinia to the Black Death: buboes.

If the Black Death wasn’t bubonic plague, then what was it? Possibly-and ominously-it may have been a virus. The evidence comes from a mutant protein on the surface of certain white blood cells. The protein, CCR5, normally acts as a receptor for the immune signalling molecules called chemokines, which help control inflammation. The AIDS virus and the poxvirus that causes myxomatosis in rabbits also use CCR5 as a docking port to enter and kill immune cells.

In 1998, a team led by Stephen O’Brien of the US National Cancer Institute analysed a mutant form of CCR5 that gives some protection against HIV. From its pattern of occurrence in the population, they think it arose in north-eastern Europe some 2000 years ago-and around 700 years ago, something happened to boost its incidence from 1 in 40,000 Europeans to 1 in 5. “It had to have been a breathtaking selective pressure to jack it up that high,” says O’Brien. The only plausible explanation, he thinks, is that the mutation helped its carriers survive the Black Death. In fact, say Scott and Duncan, Europeans did seem to grow more resistant to the disease between the 14th and 17th centuries.

Yersinia, too, enters and kills immune cells when it causes disease. But when O’Brien’s team pitted Yersinia against blood cells from people with and without the mutation, they found no dramatic difference. “The results were equivocal,” says O’Brien. “We don’t know if the mutation protected or not.” Further experiments are under way. Similar mutations occur elsewhere in the world, but at nowhere near the high frequency of the European mutant. This suggests that pathogens such as smallpox exerted some selective force, but nothing like whatever happened in Europe, says O’Brien.

The association between CCR5 and viruses suggests that the Black Death was a virus too. Its sudden emergence, and equally sudden disappearance after the Great Plague of London in 1666, also argue for a viral cause. Like the deadly flu of 1918, viruses can sometimes mutate into killers, and then disappear.

But what sort of virus was the Black Death? Scott and Duncan suggest a haemorrhagic filovirus such as Ebola, since the one consistent symptom was bleeding. In fact they think “haemorrhagic plague” would be a good new name for the disease.

They are not the first to blame Ebola for an ancient plague. Scientists and classicists in San Diego reported in 1996 that the symptoms of the plague of Athens around 430 BC, described by Thucydides, are remarkably similar to Ebola, including a distinctive retching or hiccupping. Apart from that, many of the symptoms of that plague- – and one in Constantinople in AD 540 – -were similar to the Black Death.

Of course, the filoviruses we know about are relatively hard to catch, with an incubation period of a week or less, not three weeks or more. But there are other haemorrhagic viruses: Lassa fever in Africa is fairly contagious, and incubates for up to three weeks. Eurasian hantaviruses can incubate for up to 42 days, but are not usually directly contagious between people. Both can be as deadly as the Black Death.
Out of Africa

Perhaps we can narrow the search to Africa. Europeans first recorded the Black Death in Sicily in 1347. The Sicilians blamed it on Genoese galleys that arrived from Crimea just as the illness exploded. But the long incubation period means the infection must have arrived earlier. Scott suspects it initially came from Africa, just a short hop away from Sicily. That continent is historically the home of more human pathogens than any other, and the people who lived through the epidemics that wracked Athens and Constantinople said their disease came from there. The epidemic in Constantinople, for instance, seems to have come via trade routes from the Central African interior. “And I’m sure that disease was the same as the Black Death,” says O’Brien.

One way to solve the puzzle could be to look for the pathogen’s DNA in the plague pits of Europe. Didier Raoult and colleagues at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseilles examined three skeletons in a 14th-century mass grave in Montpellier last year (New Scientist, 11 November 2000, p 31). They searched the skeletons for fragments of DNA unique to several known pathogens-Yersinia, anthrax or typhus. They found one match: Yersinia. In their report they wrote: “We believe that we can end the controversy. Medieval Black Death was [bubonic] plague.”

Not so fast, says Scott. Southern France probably had bubonic plague at that time, even if it wasn’t the Black Death. Moreover, attempts by Alan Cooper, director of the Ancient Biomolecules Centre at Oxford University, and Raoult’s team to replicate the results have so far failed, says Cooper. Similar attempts to find Yersinia DNA at mass graves in London, Copenhagen and another burial in southern France have also failed.

It’s too early to conclude that the failure to find Yersinia DNA means the bacterium wasn’t there, though. The art of retrieving ancient DNA is still in its infancy, Cooper warns. Pathogen DNA – -especially that of fragile viruses – -is extremely difficult to reliably identify in remains that are centuries old. “The pathogen decays along with its victim,” he says. Scientists have had difficulty, for example, in retrieving the 1918 flu virus, even from bodies less than a century old and preserved by permafrost. And even if the technique for retrieving ancient DNA improves, you need to know what you’re searching for. There is no way now to search for an unknown haemorrhagic virus.

But the possibility that the Black Death could strike again should give scientists the incentive to keep trying. The similarity of the catastrophes in Athens, Constantinople and medieval Europe suggests that whatever the pathogen is, it comes out of hiding every few centuries. And the last outbreak was its fastest and most murderous. What would it do in the modern world? Maybe we should find it, before it finds us.

Further reading:Biology of plagues: Evidence from historical populationsby Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Cambridge University Press (2001)

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223184-000-did-bubonic-plague-really-cause-the-black-death/#ixzz6IBKqNk2x