This edition is given over entirely to cycling author Peter Whitfield.
“The Industry of Fear” questions the media hysteria to the Coronavirus and seeks to find a “sense of proportion” to this global health crisis.
THE INDUSTRY OF FEAR
Peter
Whitfield, March 2020
The Problem
All is not what it seems, and you should not believe everything you read in the newspapers. I am writing this in the city of Genoa, as much of the world is gripped by a public panic unlike anything I can remember, caused by a new form of influenza virus. This is the story which now entirely dominates the world news. The streets here are far quieter than I have ever seen them, because so many normal social functions are suspended, and people are being asked to isolate themselves indoors, and not to venture out. I don’t understand what is happening around me, and I am writing now to call for a sense of proportion in this crisis. I am not a doctor and not an epidemiologist; I simply want to look at a few facts, and place them in the context of some broader ideas. As I write, this city is, like much of Italy, in a state of near-paralysis.
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| Empty streets in cities across Europe |
I am not qualified to enter into an
analysis of the disease statistics or to interpret them. This virus is clearly
able to spread very quickly through some communities, but apparently less
rapidly in others. The most striking thing about the disease it that it affects
almost exclusively old people, aged at least sixty, more often seventy, with
many victims in their eighties and older; the average age of those who have
died here is reportedly 81. Most these people have been suffering from what we
now call pre-existing conditions, that is, they were seriously ill, with
conditions that could be life-threatening. Relatively healthy people under the
age of sixty seem either not to contract the virus, or if they do, they
experience moderate symptoms similar to other flu types, from which they
recover normally. The reality is that 95% of people have little or nothing to fear
from this infection.
The first important question to ask
is: How does this outbreak compare to our previous experience of flu, and to
mortality patterns generally ? The population of Italy is 60 million, and total
mortality is around 600,000. Half of the total deaths occur, not surprisingly,
in the age-group 65-90, with heart disease, cancer and dementia among the
leading causes. Publicly available statistics tell us that in Italy over the
last five years, flu deaths have been running at 17,000 per year, say in round
terms, 1400 per month. Total global deaths from influenza currently stand at
640,000 per year. We might also reflect that in Italy, smoking-related deaths
are given as 70,000 per year, alcohol-related deaths as 20,000, and road
traffic deaths as slightly below 5,000. Thus smoking, drinking and car-crashes
cause a total of 95,000 deaths annually in Italy, deaths which we can surely
classify as unnecessary or preventable. The average age of the Italian
population is rising steadily. What conclusions do these statistics point to?
First, that if the Coronavirus is
here for some time, and if it continues to cause around 10,000 or 12,000 deaths
per year, the total death toll would rise by that amount. Yet the extra deaths
would still be lower than the “normal” flu deaths with which we have been
living for many years. Second, that these extra deaths would occur almost
entirely in the age-group 65-90. Third, that these extra deaths would still be
far lower than those other unnecessary or preventable deaths mentioned above. The conclusion is that there are
certain types of death which we are prepared to tolerate, because we have
become accustomed to them, and we are not prepared to take the steps necessary
to eliminate them. To put it bluntly, we simply don’t care about them, they are
simply part of the price we pay for a free-choice society. But there are other
newer types of death which shock us and which we cannot tolerate. Except that
this one is not a really new type of death, it is a form of influenza, which is
already killing 17,000 Italians each year; so there is something irrational or
inexplicable here about the way we perceive things.
The truth is that within the pattern of
human dying, in Italy and world-wide, there is no very great abnormality in the
current flu outbreak. Looking further afield, I give the example of malaria, an
illness whose origin and treatment are very well understood, but which still
kills around 500,000 people a year, the great majority of them in sub-Saharan
Africa. If this new flu virus had brought extra deaths into Africa, would we
have declared war on it, or would we have let it quietly run its course? In the
field of preventable deaths, the numbers of gun-related deaths in the USA is
30,000 per year, mostly murders, but many suicides. No American government has
ever shown any desire to reduce this figure by controlling the availability of
guns, yet now, when American deaths from this virus number a few hundred, they
are frantically seeking every means possible to combat it.
Mankind Within Nature
Our
attitude to death is clearly strange and irrational; perhaps our feelings about
death have become socially conditioned. We accept certain types of death as
routine, while others we target as unacceptable. Medical science has made such
advances in the past fifty or sixty years, through drugs and surgery, that it
can promise us a life longer by far than we could have expected in any past
age. A longer life expectancy has become the Holy Grail of medicine, to the
extent that there almost exists a sense that no one should ever die, that
biological life can and should be prolonged to the ultimate point. We seem to
have lost the sense that death is a part of nature, a part of life, in a word,
that we must all die, some later and some sooner. Death is apparently seen as
an affront to medical science and to human power. Yet this increased medical
power has not led to a lessening of the fear of death, quite the reverse, it
has intensified that fear, and created a demand to be cured of each and every
ailment. This medical power has become part of man’s self-glorification, his
sense of having risen above nature, of having left natural laws behind. When a
new, previously unknown virus such as this one appears, able to kill a considerable
number of people in the developed world, we are shocked and, we lose all sense
of proportion, and are reduced to panic. We are outraged that the humblest
life-forms in nature – insignificant, unintelligent, microscopic organisms –
can threaten our life, and so we declare war on them. The language used to
describe this present outbreak has been almost apocalyptic, which only shows
what short memories we have, seeing that the plagues of earlier centuries
killed humankind in their millions, but that, totally without the aid of
science, the population has always recovered. It may sound heartless to discuss
death in this cold clinical way, but we have to acknowledge that death is a
clinical function, a fundamental part of living nature. This has to be said, even
though to say it lays one open to the charge of being inhumane.
I find it especially striking that
this virus outbreak and the extraordinary reaction to it should happen now, at
this point in human history. I had imagined that in the last twenty or thirty
years, the environmental crisis had worked a radical change in our ideas about
man, nature and the planet. I thought that we were beginning to re-capture a
sense that man could not separate himself from nature, or else disaster would
overtake him. For two hundred years mankind has been using science and
technology to distance himself from nature, without regard to the costs of his
actions; now it seems we understand those costs only too well. We understand
that mankind’s success as a species threatens the whole of nature, ultimately
even his own existence. And medical science is implicated in that threat,
because beneath the environmental crisis lies the powerful driving force of
population growth.
In the environmental debate, one of
the hardest things to talk about is population. It has been estimated that in
the year 1800 the earth’s population was not more than one billion. It took
until 1930 to reach two billion. By the year 2000 it was six billion. It is now
approaching eight billion, and seems set to reach ten billion by 2050. Medical
progress limiting the causes of death has been the key factor in this
population growth. And here, in these figures alone, we see the fundamental
force that is driving the environmental crisis: billions of human lives all
demanding work, food, energy, housing, transport, tools for living, education,
medical care and social care. And yet still medical science is moving forward
with research on a hundred different fronts to combat still more causes of
death. Why do we not see that death is the simple natural counterbalance to
population growth? Why should the human population continue to grow? Why, when
this virus appears and threatens to claim some tens of thousands of human
lives, should a cry of panic arise from the medical and political
establishments, saying that we must at all costs conquer this virus and save
those lives?
Why, rationally, do we need eight
billion people rather than seven billion, or six billion or five billion? If we
continue to multiply, it seems that the earth will slowly but inevitably die.
Perhaps a partial human extinction of humanity may be the only answer, but how
can that come about? How do we reduce that population? Who shall say who should
die and who can live? How can we claim that there must be a future for
limitless numbers of humankind, if that future is biologically untenable? How
can we doubt that nature is using these humble organisms to swing the balance
of power against mankind?
True and False Perspectives
Questions
like these are uncomfortable and disturbing, but if we have learned anything
from the environment debate in the last twenty years, they have to be asked. If
we admit that human impact on the planet is disastrous, then we have to look at
ways to reduce it, and population reduction is an obvious way of achieving
this. Yet the behaviour of political leaders and still more the news media has
been to precipitate a global panic at the idea that some thousands of people,
culled from eight billion, may die, in addition to the millions who die
annually from a myriad of natural causes. And we should add that in spite of
all these normal deaths, the world’s population is still remorselessly
increasing by some eighty million per year. Leaders at all levels should be
re-assuring people that the majority of the population has nothing to fear from
this disease, while warning that some deaths are inevitable. In the news
reports the virus has become a frenzied obsession, full of predictions of
disaster for mankind. We no longer hear anything about the environmental issues
about which the press has been screaming for years, nor about great political
challenges such as Brexit. The only subject of interest now is this new threat
to the lives of a small fraction of the human race – nothing else matters.
There has been a failure of leadership, of rationality, so that the crisis we
now find ourselves in is not the disease itself but the panic which has been
allowed to develop, which is out of all proportion to the actual threat to
life.
The media have for years been selling
news by promoting fear as hard as they can and in all its forms. Fear of war
and terrorism, fear of climate change, fear of natural disasters, fear of
disease, fear of financial collapse, fear of political and social change – all
these things have made today’s press into a contemporary dance of death. The
hysteria of the media naturally has an effect on political leaders, and in a
situation like the present one they too are swept along into over-reaction.
They lose sight of reality and a spiral of fear is generated that might be
appropriate for some virulent plague which was capable of killing millions.
This problem is presented as if it were the rout of civilisation, the massacre
of mankind. This virus has revealed the tremendous levels of insecurity that
lie beneath the surface of modern life, and the vulnerability of our social
networks. Countless millions of people around the world have been terrified,
social life has been disrupted, and reason has been lost sight of through the
poor leadership that has been shown in this episode. It is as though our lives
are no longer our own, they are mere incidents over which governments and
scientists have jurisdiction. The politicians have played the fear game,
responding to the media hysteria, promising extreme measures to defeat this
disease, irrespective of the social costs. The level of fear that this illness
has provoked seems to me to point to a deep unease felt by so many people about
our modern way of life, the sense that the human world is unstable, out of
control, and its individual members alienated and vulnerable. This is why the
industry of fear is flourishing.
