Influenza

Friday

Matt Purple

The Covid hysterics’ bleak midwinter

From our US edition

A great scourge has descended upon the land, leaving in its wake a path of misery and girlfriends shivering under blankets. Crops have been destroyed, and there are times when (after 5 p.m.) it can seem like we might never see the sun again. Yet the greatest terror ushered in by this darkness is its plague, a relentless onslaught of mild coughs and sniffly noses that seems to have left just about everyone feeling marginally annoyed. The ancients had a word for it, winter, and it's eliciting trembles of horror from the Cassandras over at the New York Times. New Yorkers, the Times recently croaked, "are living not just among the coronavirus and its seemingly endless variants, but a bunch of other viruses too." This "bunch" includes such baffling ailments as the common cold and the flu.

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Monday

Kat Rosenfield

The zero COVID delusion

From our US edition

During World War Two, ordinary citizens were encouraged to plant victory gardens, collect scrap metal and carpool to save fuel, always with the understanding that these measures would somehow contribute to victory. The propaganda of the time was heavy on the same ‘do your part’ messaging that we've seen during the COVID pandemic, giving meaning to people's sacrifices by characterizing their efforts as a patriotic duty and a moral imperative — and by strongly implying that those who balked at those sacrifices were on the side of the bad guy. One of the most famous posters from the era shows a snappily-dressed man behind the wheel of a car, with a ghostly, familiar figure sporting a toothbrush mustache in the passenger seat.

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Thursday

Fraser Nelson

What happens next? Gauging the fallout from the pandemic

What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there have been no decent books making sense of Covid-19. This is not just about a virus but a collision of politics, panic, digital media, human behaviour and incompetence. Niall Ferguson’s Doom looks at each of these aspects, putting them into historical perspective in a book of dazzling range and rigour. He offers several answers — and none of them is comforting. For most of human history, viruses were unexceptional — hard to research, because no one thought them remarkable. When plagues struck in the Middle Ages, we’d rush into quarantine, which acquired its name in 1383 when Marseilles asked sailors to self-isolate for 40 days.

Saturday

Alex Berenson

How to work out the real COVID death toll

From our US edition

Maybe the most important questions of all: how lethal is SARS-COV-2? Whom does it kill? Are the death counts accurate — and, if not, are they over- or understated? Estimates for the lethality of the coronavirus have varied widely since January. Early Chinese data suggested the virus might have an ‘infection fatality rate’ as high as 1.4-2 percent. A death rate in that range could mean the coronavirus might kill more than six million Americans, although even under the worst-case scenarios some people would not be exposed, and others might have natural immunity that would prevent them from being infected at all. As we have learned more about the virus, estimates of its lethality have fallen.

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