Covid Inquiry – lockdowns and saving lives.

December 7, 2023 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

When China introduced their strict lock-down I remember saying ‘That could never happen here’. And when people on social media were saying ‘we’ve got to lock-down immediately’ I didn’t think it should – imprisoning the elderly in their homes for 3 months for no offense!

When my father died of prostate cancer after several years of suffering and treatment, I was relieved. I was desperately sad and sat alone and cried to mourn the loss, but he was never going to be young and healthy again and his suffering was over.

Before my mother died I used to cry coming home from visiting her at the pointlessness of her days, she had no joy anymore and would sit on her bed looking out the window. She would often say that she was ready to die, but her body kept holding on. When she fell with a broken hip and was taken to hospital she signed a DNR. She didn’t want to eat and only did when pressed by the kindly nurses. When she died it was a relief but again desperately sad – but she was never going to be young and healthy again, and she had fulfilled her purpose.

The Covid inquiry is asking how many more lives could have been ‘saved’ by earlier lock-downs. Would my mother or father’s lives have been ‘saved’ by extending them further?

In “Screwtape Letters” – letters from one demon to another CS Lewis writes “They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we (the demons) have taught them to do so.” In his non-fictional writing Lewis points out that we have lost sight of the ‘true reality’ of God and the spiritual life. In our earthly, material world everyone dies; it is just a question of when.

In reality, it is not the length of our days but what we have striven to become on earth that matters – our character, or values, our loves. Of course the death of a loved one is sad, but let’s have less of this ‘saving lives’ when we simply mean ‘extending lives’ and let’s focus more on reality.

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““Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies–these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.”” ― C.S. Lewis

Why we still need the pandemic.

January 15, 2021 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

As I listened to the news this morning, I began to realise that we are not yet ready for this pandemic to end. We still haven’t learned what we need to learn.

We still haven’t learned that one person is just as valuable and important as another.

We haven’t learned that money and economic systems must be our servant and not our master.

Can you believe that as a nation we are debating whether it is necessary to ensure that children should be fed? Of course it is! We would not contemplate not feeding our own children, so the question betrays that we think ‘our’ children are more valuable than ‘their’ children.

We are debating whether, if we do have to help, is it better to give food vouchers or food parcels to the poor. Why would we not simply give the money? Because ‘they’ are not to be trusted to spend it wisely, whilst ‘we’ have so much money that we can spend it frivolously and still have full bellies.

Within this nation, within this world, we don’t value one person as much as another . The pandemic is forcing us to see this and learn our lesson – but we are not there yet.

Money is a man-made invention; a tool that should allow everyone to contribute what they are able to society and to receive what they need from society. Yet an alien would see that although there is food in supermarkets, there are people who have no food but are not allowed to eat it. The alien would see that whilst some people are contributing according to their abilities, others are not permitted to – those same people who are not allowed to eat. The alien would see that – for instance – there are those who have no homes but that those with building skills are building bigger houses for those who already have them.

The alien would ask why. Why is this person allowed to eat, but that one is not? Why are people building this person a bigger house when that person has nowhere to live? The alien would conclude that ‘this’ person must be different from ‘that’ person; a superior being, more valuable and important.

Our actions show that we do not believe that one person is just as valuable and important as another.

We might say ‘everyone matters’ and ‘everyone is equally important’. And if we really mean it, then we have become subservient to an economic system that does not allow us to express that belief. We have sacrificed our beliefs in fundamental morality and truth to an artificially generated concept – money – that is supposed to be our servant but that has become our master.

We have become slaves to an economic situation where two equally important human beings receive grossly unequal shares of the fruits of the labour of society, and where two equally important human beings are given vastly different opportunities to use their skills and abilities to contribute to society.

The Nazis outwardly claimed superiority over other races – but don’t our actions show that we hold those beliefs in our hearts?

That is one lesson of this pandemic. Have we learned it yet? If we have learned it, are we not ashamed? If so, we can repent and amend our thinking and our actions.

And have we learned yet from that pandemic that we have become slaves to our economic system? That we have sacrificed our morality, our humanity to a man-made mechanism? When we have learnt that lesson we need to decide what we are going to do about it: Individually, and as a nation.

So perhaps we are not yet ready for this pandemic to end. Perhaps we still haven’t learned what we need to learn. But I hope it won’t take us too long!

With such a low Covid death rate, why do we have to accept a “draconian” lock-down?

January 12, 2021 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

I have been challenged to give an opinion on the lock-down, based on a claim that “99.7% of people recover” (source unknown). A referenced and logically argued study suggests that in fact the death rate is much higher.

But let’s assume for a moment that the death rate is only 3 in every thousand (0.3%).

Evidence shows that “a 20-year age-gap increased the risk by around 10-fold. So, compared to a 20-year-old, an 80-year-old had 10 * 10 * 10 ~ 1000 times the risk of dying.” And the same document references that 90% of deaths have pre-exisiting conditions, and the chance of a healthy 30 year old woman dying if infected is only one in 30,000. In other words, the risk is highest for older people, and those with pre-existing conditions. Roughly two thirds of deaths are in those over 75.

So, if we were to simply allow the virus to ‘let rip’, and the death rate were only the 0.3% quoted we would see deaths in the over 75s equivalent to two in every thousand of the population.

Deaths from the disease are highly selective. Accepting this situation would be equivalent to sacrificing our over 75’s population. To put the ‘two in every thousand of the population’ into context, roughly two in every thousand of the world’s population are Jews – so this would be equivalent to eliminating all the Jews. Do I need to go on?

Data shows that hospital treatment has improved, with the chance of surviving if hospitalised with Covid increasing from 70% to nearly 90%. Without hospital treatment the death toll would increase between three and ten times. This is why there is so much focus on ‘protecting the NHS’.

If we were to let the virus ‘let rip’ then our hospitals would indeed be overwhelmed and the death rate would conservatively increase by a factor of 3. Using the death rate from my challenger of 0.3% today, that would increase it to about one in every hundred of the population.

Again this would be targeted at the older generation, and equivalent in numbers to eliminating the world’s population of Jews three times over. Or globally that would be equivalent to wiping out the whole population of the United Kingdom.

We have a clear choice.

Either we accept personal restrictions in order to save a category of our population. Or we ‘sacrifice’ that population for the sake of our ‘personal freedom’.

This is something that I completely oppose. And many of our fathers and grandfathers fought and died in the Second World War to destroy a regime which had that approach; I deliberately used the example of the number of Jews to reinforce the point.

I for one am willing to accept some personal sacrifice in order to protect the vulnerable, and those who dedicate their lives to care for those who are vulnerable, and I call on everyone to do the same.

POSTSCRIPT

To be clear – there have been appalling decisions, profiteering and cronyism by those in power. But we must not let such behaviour prevent us from doing what is right. We have to make up for the shortcomings of leadership, but perhaps we might remember this when we next get the chance to choose who will lead our country.