Five months (or years?) more of frustration

Today, with the news that Victoria’s new COVID-19 cases have increased by 75 compared to yesterday, the looming future for the state becomes mapped out so clearly.

Around five weeks ago, Victoria’s leaders were criticised for not opening up sooner, despite there still being an average of eight new cases in the state during the preceding week. Today, such criticism seems patently absurd with as many new COVID cases as at the March peak, and certain in ensuing days to be far more than the previous record of 111. Contrariwise, if Victoria had waited until four weeks after the last new COVID-19 case to remove restrictions in place in April and May, Melburnians would have seen life back to normal by this coming spring with zero risk of a new wave of infections. As it is, with only a portion of these restrictions removed, COVID-19 cases are again growing exponentially, and, as targeted lockdowns in major centres of COVID-19 growth have failed, Victoria stands faced with three unpleasant choices:

• a strict lockdown with all non-essential services closed until four weeks after the last new COVID-19 infection
• this will absolutely ensure that no COVID-19 whatsoever remains in the Victorian community
• to ensure the complete elimination of the virus this move would need to be accompanied by sustained high levels of testing until eight weeks (56 days) after the last new COVID-19 infection
• only this policy, although unpleasant in the short term, can ensure absolutely zero risk of another wave of infections and permit rapid, complete reopening once zero risk is attained
• short-term lockdowns and reopenings when cases have fallen merely to “manageable” levels
• this is the actual policy of the Andrews Government, but will result in severe long-term hardship for the majority of Victorians
• the certain result is a chaotic pattern – lasting many years – of lockdown after lockdown, partial reopening after partial reopening, with the virus entirely uncontrolled
• continuing reopening in face of exponential growth of COVID-19 that is certain to overwhelm the state’s medical services

Given observed rates of decay in new COVID-19 cases before the partial reopening at the end of May, it is probable that, had there been no partial reopening, it would have been around the end of August before the state reached four weeks after the last new COVID-19 case, although possible timeframes could have ranged from late July at the earliest up to late September or even later. Eight weeks after the last new COVID-19 case would have been the middle of October 2020, although a range from late August until the end of November would have been plausible.

Melbourne’s populace was frustrated with lockdowns before reopening began at the end of May, and would have found it difficult to tolerate a continued strict lockdown into August, September or even October 2020 (into whenever is four weeks after the last new infection). However, such a long lockdown, alongside constant testing and rigid quarantine, would have ensured a rapid return to normal conditions without any risk of reoccurring infections. This would have been a definite lesser evil and allowed rapid although seriously delayed return to normal life with zero risk of local COVID-19 infection. As it stands, Melbourne’s populace will almost certainly become more frustrated again with repeated lockdowns and reopenings into 2021, 2022 and further on, alongside continual spread of COVID-19.

What is already striking, and certain to be more so in the future, is that Victoria will beyond doubt remain locked down whilst all Australia’s other states and territories have eliminated COVID-19 spread, and almost certainly after basic social distancing requirements are eliminated there. Even if movement into border communities on the Victorian side of the Murray River is permitted, there will likely be no permission for movement into or out of Victoria beyond those limits once COVID-19 is eradicated from the remainder of Australia. Rather, we will simply see travelling links that exclude Melbourne and its surrounds established and maintained for many years. Long-term trends towards Melbourne’s relative growth will likely be reversed and growth transferred to other parts of Australia, although which other parts will benefit be is impossible to yet tell.

A looming disaster and a quarantine botch

Twenty days ago, there was a family celebration to celebrate Victoria’s first day with zero COVID-19 cases.

Unfortunately, the hope provided by two days early this month with no new COVID-19 case in Victoria has been crushed by rapid community spread of the virus at a time when the rest of Australia has not seen locally sourced transmission for a long time. Despite the rapid spread – which is practically certain to exceed Victoria’s peak of 111 reported cases per day late in March – the Andrews Government is preceding with the opening of major libraries and museums for the school holidays. These school holidays, which finish on Sunday 12 July, are critical for the finances of economically crippled cultural institutions such as the State Library and the Melbourne Museum. It is also true that some precautions are being taken to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19 inside these claustrophobic building environments.

If COVID-19 cases in Victoria grow at the rate they have over the past fortnight – from a daily average of three coronavirus cases in Victoria a fortnight ago to 23 today – they would rise to 176 cases per day over the coming fortnight to end on 10 July, and to 1,351 cases per day over the first fortnight of the scheduled school term, which ends on 24 July. Given that testing is steady at around 20,000 tests per day over the past three days, and tends to peak on Thursdays and Fridays when people are most often at facilities in major shopping centres, 1,351 cases per day would mean that 6.75 percent of Melburnians have COVID-19.

Such a situation would mean that Melbourne – though likely not rural Victoria where there is no community transmission – would return to the strict lockdown from between 17 March and the late May. Most likely the state government would be eager to maintain a much longer lockdown than the ten weeks seen last autumn, in order to ensure that COVID-19 really does get eliminated from the state. Security would require that the severest restrictions remain until four weeks after the last new COVID-19 infection, to ensure that the virus has completely gone. Such would mean that restrictions would be returned to the highest level – or higher than last autumn – and last until well after the ordinary September holidays, and most likely not being removed or even relaxed until November or even December. Whilst such a long lockdown might remove COVID-19 from Melbourne to a reasonable degree, it would be certainly horribly frustrating for a population already not wishing to see restrictions upon movement re-imposed.

For politicians who are awfully vacillating rather than acting decisively, a re-imposed lockdown is feared as costing votes, unlike in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfallen, where a lockdown has been re-imposed without opposition two days ago upon 400,000 people after an infection in a meatpacking facility. This is what Victoria needed to do in the Cities of Brimbank and Maribyrnong as soon as the Cedar Meats cluster was detected.

It is popularly thought that the reason why Victoria alone amongst Australian states is suffering community transmission of COVID-19 is luck. This is patently wrong. The reality is that there is no accident behind why Victoria is the only state with community COVID transmission:

1. The source of most of Victoria’s current community COVID-19 transmission is almost certainly from security guards in quarantine hotels, most critically the Rydges and the Stamford Plaza
2. Most people in quarantine are recent migrants who travelled abroad to visit near relatives on urgent family matters
3. Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and the Territories are home to a very small proportion of recent migrants, and essentially none live in rural areas
4. Most critically, in New South Wales army personnel and medical staff were used to strictly enforce quarantine. Contrariwise, in Victoria security guards with no medical knowledge were used to enforce quarantine

The result is that COVID spread from those in quarantine to immigrant communities chiefly in Melbourne’s western suburbs, but has remained inside quarantine in New South Wales and has essentially disappeared from rural areas and from other states. There is a severe lesson exactly analogous to the one I noted about the absence of quarantine for travellers from tropical Asia at the start of the pandemic here: that strict and properly-enforced quarantine is the best way to stop disease spreading. Both the Victorian Government and the World Health Organisation appear yet to learn this lesson.

Are these “History's Nine Most Insane Rulers”?

As a result of highly reasonable criticism of the PIGs’ views on race and on American politics – and their tendency to follow what the Republican Party does – I have not been so interested in them. During the COVID-19 crisis, I have turned quite a bit to their political opposite, the Trotskyists whom I read intensely during April, at times falling prey to the anger that is of course the aim of websites like the World Socialist Web Site.

As I searched my huge backlog of emails, I found that Regnery – the publisher of the PIGs whose founder Henry Regnery was a Nazi sympathiser – had published a book that responds to criticism of Donald Trump by arguing that there were many rulers much more insane than Trump has ever been. Titled History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers (with a number in the title rather than spelled out) it looks at the following historical figures (lifespan in brackets):

1. Emperor Caligula of Rome (A.D. 12 to A.D. 41)
2. Charles VI of France (1368 to 1422)
3. Ivan IV Vasilyevich of Russia (1530 to 1584)
4. Sultan Ibrahim I of Ottoman (1615 to 1648)
5. George III of England (1738 to 1820)
6. Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845 to 1886)
7. Idi Amin (1925 to 2003)
8. Saparmurat Niyazov (Saparmyrat Ataýewiç Nyýazow; 1940 to 2006)
9. Kim Jong-il (1942 to 2011)

The first thing a reader will not about these leaders is the absence of the most infamous tyrants of history like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot – not to mention others. There are no nonhereditary theocratic monarchs in the list, and most are hereditary monarchs from earlier civilisations. Of these, a couple are quite familiar (Ivan IV “The Terrible” and Ludwig II) but most are not. The details of two of the three post-monarchical leaders – Sapamurat Niyazov or “Türkmenbaşy” and Idi Amin – are well-known but in the limited audio I watched tonight on YouTube they stood out in a manner that more infamous dictators did not for their eccentric behaviour.

The video itself was of some interest for revealing surprising side-effects of these rulers’ insanity and mad behaviour.

“The Incompetent Security Game”

As a child, I read three of the eight Famous Five Adventure Games (see a discussion of another aspect here) – The Sinister Lake Game, The Whispering Island Game and The Secret Airfield Game. I was probably attracted by the numbers of the paragraphs in the games working out the games’ structure, which is quite logical but not explained anywhere on the web as far as I know.

Even back in my childhood, my brother always said the games were contrived – something I will admit without a grudge and which still gives me a bit of humour even in my forties. Since my unsuccessful librarianship course, I have collected the five remaining titles, although I have not been able to get the full cards for The Wreckers’ Tower Game or The Shuddering Mountain Game.

I always could recognise Blyton’s xenophobia in most of these books. Most although not all the villians are Italian (The Whispering Island Game) or Russian. No doubt this xenophobia reflects Blyton’s upper-middle-class hostility to the internationalism of Europe’s socialist working classes, and of course Russian international power and the spread of Stalinism was an especially salient issue in the 1950s.

Often, and still today, I have imagined whilst knowing it wrong that the Famous Five is fact rather than children’s fiction written by a middle-class woman undoubtedly hostile to the urban lower classes. However, despite having known the problems of the stories for a long time, today my brother offered a new twist on many jokes we tell about them. He argued that the story of Jeff being abducted by two men was entirely unrealistic because a secret military airfield would be much better guarded than the story in The Secret Airfield Game (and the related story in Five Go to Billycock Hill) implies. He also said that theft of a top secret military jet would have been investigated by military police much more quickly than implied in the stories, where there is no evidence of any investigation other than by the airfield’s ordinary guards. My brother made a really funny joke of calling the game “The Incompetent Security Game”, arguing that a secret military airfield would never be left unguarded even in the dark of night. Even with the limited technology of the 1950s, I agreed and agree enough to see that I had overlooked entirely unlikely elements in the plots of the Famous Five Adventure Games.

The name “The Incompetent Security Game” is really, really funny, unlike my brother’s “Child Labor Game” which implies that the Famous Five did not enjoy what they were doing. Its only problem is that it would imply that the mystery is to be solved in government negligence, which Blyton would not have wanted to convey. In fact, she likely wanted to convey the idea that ordinary people should take responsibility for crises as deep and as specialised as theft of critical military equipment or of minerals or old treasures.