RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/a-world-turned-upside-down/

Commenting on the course of history, former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is famously quoted as saying, “Events, dear boy, events.” The historian, H.A.L. Fisher, described history as “one damn thing after another”.

The historical record is replete with the unexpected. You might call them black swan events, as has Quadrant contributor Mark Powell. It might be argued that, but for the sudden impact of the coronavirus, the future be completely different. Yet, as in relation to past events, a retrospective on 2020 might conclude that the Western world in particular was on the cusp of a seismic economic, social and cultural shift, and the Wuhan virus provided the catalyst.

Superficially, totalitarian and authoritarian states — China, in particular, the ultimate source and cause of this pandemic — will seek to pretend that they have the pandemic under control and proclaim business as usual. After all, the Beijing regime’s legitimacy rests in part on its ability to hide the human cost of its ideologically driven denial of the coronavirus during those first critical weeks.

Up until now, we have witnessed the curious paradox of a totalitarian state being able to take advantage of an economically borderless world. The self-proclaimed economic purists were so sold on the notion of free trade that they failed to notice the fraud at its core. Donald Trump intuitively recognized what the established paradigm utterly failed to see. At the very least, China may no longer be able to take advantage of a borderless world. Perhaps China, feeling itself increasingly cornered, will become more overtly aggressive. The world, and in particular, our region may become more unstable. Defence preparedness will assume a renewed urgency.

Among all nations, nation-state borders have become the crucial line of defence against COVID-19.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15870/coronavirus-elderly-abandoned

In addition to the ethical questions raised by the rationing of healthcare according to age, the denial of medical attention to the elderly, many of whom have paid into the social welfare system all their lives, also casts a spotlight on the shortcomings of socialized medicine in Southern Europe, where austerity measures imposed by the European Central Bank have resulted in massive budget cuts for public healthcare.

In documents leaked to several Spanish media, the Catalan Emergency Medical Service (Servicio de Emergencias Médicas) instructed doctors, nurses and ambulance personnel to inform the families of older patients suffering from coronavirus that “death at home is the best option.” … The protocol also advised medical personnel to avoid referring to the lack of hospital beds in Catalonia.

“My father started working at the age of 14 until he was 65. He never asked for anything. On March 18, he needed a respirator to avoid dying and was denied…. This is the Spain we have. My father’s generation built this country, its reservoirs, roads, agriculture, working 14 hours a day, coming out of a postwar period. And they are being left to die.” — Óscar Haro, YouTube video, March 20, 2020.

In November 2019, two months before the coronavirus first appeared in Spain, the Spanish government revealed that nearly 700,000 patients were on a waiting list for surgeries. Nationwide, patients had to wait on average 115 days to receive surgery; in Catalonia, patients had to wait nearly six months; in Madrid patients had to wait for six weeks.

The severity of the coronavirus crisis in Italy and Spain, where elderly patients are being allowed to die for the benefit of the young, is due in large measure to the austerity measures associated with their membership in the eurozone. The large numbers of dead, especially among the elderly, appears to be the price that Italians and Spaniards are paying to be part of a monetary union which they never should have joined.

With well over a half-million confirmed cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Europe, a growing number of regional medical authorities have begun issuing guidelines and protocols that call for hospitals to prioritize younger patients over those who are older.

In Italy and Spain, the two countries most affected by the coronavirus pandemic in Europe, doctors in overwhelmed intensive care units have for weeks been making life or death decisions about who receives emergency treatment. The new protocols, however, amount to government directives that instruct medical personnel effectively to abandon elderly patients to their fate.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/opinions/uks-concern-for-boris-johnson-overrides-politics/index.html

Something extraordinary is happening in the middle of this extraordinary crisis. While the physical health of the world is in peril, a new kind of health is emerging in which the emotional connections between people start to strengthen along new, fresh lines. I call this social hfealth.

This can be seen most clearly in the world of politics where old borders and enmities are dissolving. For evidence of this, look no further than my home country, Britain, and the response to the hospitalization due to complications from coronavirus of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

I have known Boris for 30 years, from when he was editor of The Spectator, the famous conservative magazine. I was briefly in charge of high-value donor fundraising for the Labour Party and am the daughter of a man so left wing that Bernie Sanders flew over to the UK to give the “Eric Hobsbawm” lecture at the famous Hay Festival.
Boris doesn’t do boundaries. If he likes you, he likes you. If you are not of his political persuasion, no matter. This underscores both his popularity with the public — he won a landslide in the general election in December — and the response to his medical predicament.

When “Boris” (we refer to our leader by his first name, unlike Americans, who seem to refer to theirs by his surname) was taken into St. Thomas’ Hospital opposite the Houses of Parliament last Sunday evening and then moved on Monday night into intensive care, you could almost hear the collective gasp of grief and concern.

In the Daily Telegraph, house Bible of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party and where he was a popular columnist for many years, you would expect the kind of sentiment expressed by Allison Pearson who wrote: “the health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic, and by extension, the health of the nation itself. All 66 million of us are metaphorically pacing the hospital corridor, desperate for news.”