A Journal of the Plague Year

Shopping day today. The meat counter looked deceptively full. It wasn’t. A portion was fresh pasta instead, as before, now without the excuse of a special on it. A portion, when I looked closer, was vegetarian meat substitutes—brands and items the store never carried before.

Yeast reappeared, after long absence, but an unfamiliar brand.

Social distancing was impossible; no one else was doing it, and many objected if you tried. It does appear unfriendly if you hold back until they finish, or refuse to pass. Unpleasant experience.

I also felt that everyone’s mood was darker. Last week, and weeks before, there was a spirit of “we’re all in this together.” Now people everywhere are getting cranky. Probably including me. It’s past having any novelty value, and we are losing hope it will all end well if we just do as we are told by the authorities.

You can almost see the social fibres snapping.

The store seemed a bit busier than last week, but still no lineup and no wait to get in.

Dr. John Campbell, one of my YouTube authorities, reported a study in the New England Journal of Medicine which, he said, showed that hydroxychloroquine unfortunately did not work. But I, and many other listeners, immediately saw problems with the study. It was used without zinc, and in emergency departments on those with severe symptoms. It was almost as though they crafted the study to return negative results.

Dr. Campbell backed down from his definitive statement the next day.

I’d say hydroxychloroquine is still alive. It looks sinister that remdesivir has been approved already, despite only marginal results in an unfinished study, while we hear almost nothing officially about hydroxychloroquine, and what we hear seems engineered to be negative. Hydroxychloraquine is cheap and readily available. Remdesivir is a gigantic profit opportunity for Gilead Pharmaceuticals. It is almost enough to make you doubt the system.

As Milton Friedman pointed out, the problem with government regulations is that, in order to set and enforce regulations, government is obliged to rely on the expertise of those actually in the industry. So what do they do? Ensure the regulations reduce competition and work to their benefit instead of that of the consumer.

There are rumblings of other possible treatments. Campbell and Scott Adams are now both suggesting that Vitamin D deficiency may be an important factor in how badly one is affected by the virus. The statistical correlations look impressive. Again, it is striking that we hear nothing about vitamin D from any government source: there’s no money in it for the pharmaceuticals.

Adams has been saying there is no way we can have enough tests available in the next few months to move to a strategy of test, trace, and isolate—the obvious alternative to lockdown. But yesterday, Trump announced that the US had enough testing capacity now to do so. And the British government has begun the program on the Isle of Wight, with plans to make it universal in a week or two if all works as hoped.

It seems to me we can get things back up and moving with such a strategy, combined with UV light for sterilization in public places, infrared cameras to check for fevers at entrances to public buildings, face masks, checking everyone for vitamin D deficiency, and isolation of seniors and those with other risk factors. Even without effective treatments.