Coronavirus

If the coronavirus were as deadly as the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of the population of Europe in the 1340s, there would be no doubt about the need for extreme measures. But this virus spares far more people than it kills, and is sometimes mild to the point of invisibility, even as it proves lethal to others. It’s almost as though nature had calibrated the virus exactly to the point where risk-avoiders saw the lockdown as vital for survival while risk-accepters saw it as so economically destructive as to be worse than the disease itself. America is polarized not just politically but in its attitude to risk.

Do you know what the real ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ is? No, not the fauxtraged shrieks of liberals at everything the president does. It’s the tendency Trump has to turn normally sensible conservative journalists into a sort of Praetorian Guard, drawing their swords to defend his every utterance, and endowing comments that would shame a blithering idiot with non-existent purpose and meaning. The esteemed US editor of The Spectator, Mr Gray, has his gladius out. He argues the president spitballing at a press conference that perhaps one could inject disinfectant to the lungs to kill coronavirus, or irradiate the body with (carcinogenic) UV light, was actually 16-dimensional chess and ‘a Trumpian masterpiece’.

Public opinion is rapidly turning against China as intelligence agencies have exposed the full extent of the communist state’s coverup of the novel coronavirus outbreak. US intelligence has determined that China has underreported total cases and deaths, and dragged its feet in telling the rest of the world about the seriousness of the virus. A Trump administration official told The Spectator earlier this month that the US response was delayed by at least a month due to China’s lack of transparency. Americans are angry at China’s deception: a majority of them polled at the end of March and in early April said they agree with President Trump referring to COVID-19 as the ‘Chinese virus’.

Can we still say that we live in a liberal age? We live, now, in the age of an epidemic. Calling for a political order that can effectively respond to such a disease is starting to sound a lot like calling for a post-liberal order. In the pages of the Atlantic, Adrian Vermeule has made something of the same point: the order that we have been living under is clearly unequipped to deal with crises of the nature of this epidemic. The common libertarian conservative position that any government action on this is a violation of the rights of the individual, shows the fundamental insanity of libertarianism. My father used to quote Voltaire to me: 'My right to punch you in the nose ends where your nose begins.

This is a piece about death. Obviously death is a serious topic, perhaps as serious as anything you could possibly write about, but in these truly weird times of a global pandemic and unprecedented threat to what most people would conceive as normality, let’s start with a joke. How do you make ordinary citizens accept an indefinite period of economic shutdown and deprivation of their most basic civil liberties? Two weeks at a time!There seems to be a bit of a trend regarding disclaimers among those who have an opinion in favor of a return to everyday life anytime soon so I’ll start with the usual caveats: I accept that coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 or whatever you prefer to call it, is a serious health threat.

The COVID-19 pandemic came along just as Cold War Two was getting under way between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — the superpowers of our time — with the European Union and a good many other US allies quietly hoping to be non-aligned. Far from propelling Beijing and Washington towards détente in the face of a common enemy, the new plague has only intensified the Cold War. For the first time, China’s campaign of disinformation has been on a Russian level, with wild anti-American conspiracy theories being disseminated by senior Foreign Ministry officials.