LOCKDOWN UK CITIZEN NO. 63,567,109 writes:

Covid-19 is not alone.
This deadly virus emerged in 2012
from melting Arctic permafrost.

Update 7 April 2020

UK LOCKDOWN - FUEL SAVED		07/04/2020		NCH Oxford
01-Jan-20	FROM
07-Apr-20	TO
97	lockdown days
7	days per week
14	weeks
5	usual weekly commute
69	commute days lockdown
65	average journey time of 65 minutes each day
57%	commute by car
27,000,000	workers
33,600,000	drivers
7,900	average miles p.a. (assume energy for all travellers)
42	average mpg (assume energy for all travellers)
4.5	litres per UK gallon
365	driving days. Assume distance equally spread
22	miles per day
4.8	litres per day
161,607,306	all drivers litres per day
15,675,908,676	litres all drivers - all lockdown days
112	pence per litre - pump price
£        17,557,017,717	Cash saved by travellers		£          17.56	Billion
180	Exhaust multiple as fuel burns
2,821,663,561,644	Exhaust litres saved		28,217	Billion litres
£                           33.50	BRENT CRUDE per barrel			07/04/2020
159	litres per barrel
98,590,621	Barrels
£     3,302,785,790.18	Saved - imported?		£            3.30	Billion

Update 3 April 2020 
Trump keeps the gun-shops open. Americans will seek out and shoot the virus. Or, shoot the unemployed. Or, shoot all the 10M infected. Civil War will fix Covid-19. 

CNBC - April 2nd

Initial jobless claims surged to more 6.6 million last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That brings the two-week total to about 10 million due to the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown.

_________________________

The Guardian.

Americans have responded to the coronavirus epidemic with a record-breaking number of gun purchases, according to new government data on the number of background checks conducted in March.

More than 3.7m total firearm background checks were conducted through the FBI’s background check system in March, the highest number on record in more than 20 years. An estimated 2.4m of those background checks were conducted for gun sales, according to adjusted statistics from a leading firearms industry trade group. That’s an 80% increase compared with the same month last year, the trade group said.

________________________________

TESTING TIMES - update 2nd April 2020
Nothing new under the sun.

THE BLACK DEATH - 200 YEARS OF PLAGUE
The beak contained herb filters to protect medics.
2/3rds of the population died.

From the Spectator

Dr John Lee

How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear

There is room for different interpretations of the data

(READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE) From magazine issue: 28 March 2020

In announcing the most far-reaching restrictions on personal freedom in the history of our nation, (UNITED KINGDOM) Boris Johnson resolutely followed the scientific advice that he had been given. The advisers to the government seem calm and collected, with a solid consensus among them. In the face of a new viral threat, with numbers of cases surging daily, I’m not sure that any prime minister would have acted very differently.

But I’d like to raise some perspectives that have hardly been aired in the past weeks, and which point to an interpretation of the figures rather different from that which the government is acting on. I’m a recently-retired Professor of Pathology and NHS consultant pathologist, and have spent most of my adult life in healthcare and science – fields which, all too often, are characterised by doubt rather than certainty. There is room for different interpretations of the current data. If some of these other interpretations are correct, or at least nearer to the truth, then conclusions about the actions required will change correspondingly.

The simplest way to judge whether we have an exceptionally lethal disease is to look at the death rates. Are more people dying than we would expect to die anyway in a given week or month? Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to Covid-19 — so 0.8 per cent of that expected total. On a global basis, we’d expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of that total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu). Not figures that would, in and of themselves, cause drastic global reactions.

______________________________________________________________

1st April 2020

APRIL FOOLS

London’s “Nightingale” 4,000 bed new hospital in a Conference Centre by The Thames, is not ready. It’s reassuring that our traditional CAN’T- DO managers are still empowered to cull thousands of the sick and elderly by simply applying inertia. If we wait long enough, problems solve themselves.

Ditto, the massive funding package to rescue our small businesses. HM Gov have (tongue in cheek) announced immense grants/loans. The banks are blocking it by insisting on mortgaging the business owners’ homes. “You will not only lose your business and livelihood, you and your feckless family will also be homeless.” 

This morning the BBC say that 800,000 of our SMEs will rapidly go bust. SMEs employ 60% of our workforce. The medics and MPs need a lot more justification than Covid-19 for the redundant millions who will die in despair, due to the lock-down.

NOW is the time to develop a better national strategy. 1^st – ditch this dopey useless government and the NHS senior managers. It is significant that both Boris and his strange familiar, Dominic Cummings, have disappeared; hoping to re-enter, blameless, after the current cock-ups, conspiracies and gross-stupidities have run their course.

Noel Hodson, Business Expansion Expert,

_____________________________________________________________

27th March 2020 - 3 pm - London.

Subject: DAILY EXPRESS - DOMINIC CUMMINGS NOT TO TAKE OVER GOVERNMENT

Dominic Cummings 'does a runner' from No10 as Boris Johnson says he has coronavirus

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1261272/Dominic-Cummings-coronavirus-uk-boris-johnson-latest-video-covid-19-update-death-toll

DOMINIC CUMMINGS has "done a runner" from Downing Street after both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced they have tested positive for coronavirus.

By CLAIRE ANDERSON

PUBLISHED: 14:26, Fri, Mar 27, 2020 | UPDATED: 14:26, Fri, Mar 27, 2020

___________________________________________________________________

26th March 2020

“Do we need food?”

My body type - until I hit 60..
by Alberto Giacometti

Locked-down under Coronavirus-home-arrest, aged 77 and a quarter, I find that when I crouch down and bend to tie my shoelaces (I spurn Velcro fasteners and Trainers), I can no longer breathe easily. In-depth critical-analysis has tracked this disability, having dismissed dozens of blame-worthy external culprits, to the fact that I am simply too fat. 

Not noticeably overweight, viewed from the front or back, I don’t yet need two airline seats, but my profile reveals a distinct and persistent paunch. A layer of quite solid fat on my belly. It is this unsightly, useless, heavy, stubborn lump that as I bend double presses upwards into the territory of my lungs – and makes me breathless. I have never before been fat. For much of my younger life I was distinctly a Giacometti figure; unfailingly gaunt rather than tubby. This has changed. 

Further analysis, recently informed by our listing and stock-piling 2020 Coronavirus food supplies, demonstrates that what is causing these unwanted deposits of strangely firm blubber, is food! My dear wife speculates that it might come from an excess of alcohol in my now regular glasses of evening wine; and urges urgent, Puritan and total temperance. However, three of my brothers considerably shortened their lives with vast excesses of alcohol – which had the reverse effect; they each wasted away with each drink, losing body-mass month by month, until they were thin enough to pass through The Eye of a Needle, and Meet our Maker in the realm of the Heavenly Jerusalem. No; the paunch is definitely caused by excess, unabsorbed foodstuffs.

Which leads me to the Big-Question: Do we, hi-tech 21^st century mankind and womankind, person-kind, politically-correct “guys” need food?

We spend vast amounts of energy, money, anticipation, preparation, pleasure and risk ill-health consuming food. All of us, or our agents, grow, breed, shepherd, harvest, cull, seek, kill and cook food. Half of the food never makes it from farm to plate. It is prodigiously wasted. The half that we do eat is disassembled and dissolved in our hundred metres of guts; inner-tubes that extract trace chemicals to refresh our cells and power our needs and desires. 

Ninety-percent of what we consume is excreted as waste – that revolts us and has to be washed away in sewers. The sewers, blocked with fatbergs, need constant cleaning and maintenance – that takes human energy – that requires food – that creates waste – and requires endless amounts of work to repetitively replace. We are slaves to the thrice daily process of creation, consumption, extraction and excretion of – food! Pause the process and our active battery-life is at best 20 days, before we start eating each-other. But we rarely pause. Then, as the body balancing mechanisms start to malfunction, as we age, we, many of us, get fat.

Including children, there are seven-billion folk, averaging 10 stones, 140 pounds, wobbling around on the Earth’s surface – 70 billion stones of humanity – three-and-a-half billion tons of flesh. If we all congregated on say, the Isle of Wight, or Manhattan, would our combined mass give the Earth a wobble, create an imbalance that could distort the planet’s orbit round the Sun – and plunge us into that fiery orb? It doesn’t bear thinking about. It is too awful.

We spend, arguably we waste, a lot of our short lives, our three-score-years-and-ten on this business of feeding. Farming, shopping, mealtimes, abluting, cleaning up, gyms, jogging, visiting the dentist, going to the doctor. Do we really need it?

Let’s get down to basics. We now have the capability of creating and mass-producing a single daily pill that would feed us all the nutrients we require. A pill that we would absorb and burn-off entirely as energy, without waste. No more toilet-breaks. Think of the impact on GDP (gross-domestic-product). In fact, we probably don’t even need a pill. Science can calculate the precise amount, the quantum, and form of electromagnetic energy needed to replenish the chemicals of our cells. We could plug into the central electricity generating board supply while we sleep – and recharge our cellular-batteries.

The daily Pill or E-Charge would do away the need for teeth, most internal plumbing, bowels, spare-tyres, paunches, subcutaneous-fat, and a whole mess of troublesome inter-testine organs. I mean, who needs them? Where airlines now squeeze three overweight paying passengers in a cramped row – they could cram in six guys. Think of the profits.

We don’t need to wait for Darwinian Evolution to adapt our bodies to the new regime; the super-rich can immediately have super-rich-person-surgery to remove all the stuff we no longer need or want. The middle-class and struggling-poor will have to wait – and weight – for nature to confer on them fashionable Giacometti figures.

“You can never be too rich or too thin.” Said Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, wife of Edward the Eighth. And it didn’t do her, or her career, any harm.    

Duchess & Duke of Windsor.
"You can never be too rich or too thin."