709-218-7927 The Landfall Garden House 60 Canon Bayley Road Bonavista, Newfoundland CANADA A0C 1B0 |
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Saturday, April 11, 2020
My Prediction
I write this on Friday, April 03, 2020 in the morning after several weeks thought.
Some three weeks ago I claimed that the politicians had dug themselves into a hole by shutting down every business (in Bonavista and elsewhere) except the supermarkets and the liquor stores. Very few politicians are well-educated, but I suspect eighty-percent of them will prick up their ears when they hear “food riots”, and twenty percent of them may have read history and know about medieval England, Corn laws, Irish famines, Russian Revolutions (various), the Franco-Prussian war and so on.
Food riots happen when people are deprived of food (what is that well-known 5-point hierarchy? “Shelter, Food, Self-Esteem etc”) Humans can survive without food for weeks, I believe, but humans without access to food that is a few yards away take matters into their own hands.
The liquor store in this town is in the Foodland Supermarket building. Shut down the supermarket and you close off the supply of liquor, and I have had confirmed my belief that there are more hunting men with shotguns in Bonavista than there are RCMP officers.
So, politicians are now trapped. They have shut down the library, the cafes, the department store. The computer/phone store; the flower-shop. Shaun Chaulk’s body shop where he spray-paints cars is now closed to the public, so Robert has been laid off. Mail deliveries are erratic. I have filled in my Copious Free™ by re-reading Nevil Shute’s “On The Beach” (a very bad choice at this time) and eating too much cake and too many cookies.
So.
World-wide shutdowns and an “economic downturn” caused NOT by the Covid virus but by a bunch of uninformed ill-educated politicians who have jumped on the bandwagon with its banner announcing “We are going to help fight this”, and encouraged by the news media that appears to have hijacked Google News.
Like all viruses this one will die down once it has run its course. All viruses die away once they have run their course. They may not go away, they sit there drumming their exceedingly tiny fingers (a virus is much smaller than a cell) until they can find a fresh crop of vehicles that are not immune.
Oh yes, my prediction.
As the virus dies down, the press will interview the pollies who will bray that “Thanks to our Herculean efforts and/or Draconian measures, our special laws shutting down businesses and prohibiting assemblies of more than [insert your favourite number here] people, we have beaten this deadly virus!”.
These statements will be issued somewhere between one and three months from now. That is, on or after Sunday, May 03, 2020 and on or before Monday, August 03, 2020. I lean towards May rather than August.
That is, once the pollies have made their point with their ill-thought out schemes, it will be time to get back to work.
If you want to bet money on this I’d advise you, as always, not to bet money. But watch for the upcoming release of data with the first whiff of re-assurance that “the tide is beginning to ebb, we’re not there yet, but things might have the possibility of suggesting that it might not be too early to think that we might be beating this virus”.
The announcement will come within a week of that.
In the meantime, if you have internet access, look up the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-19 and the bad year around 1968 and so on.
Also, set yourself a challenge of finding out if this virus’s death figures are in any way different in profile from any other. Aides of the pollies are discovering this data now and beginning to suggest to their bosses that maybe, just maybe, this really is a virus like many (but not all) viruses, and has been blown out of proportion by egotistical politicians and panic-festering news media.
I turn 74 this year. My estimate is a new virus every month. That suggests that this body has beaten off somewhere near 888 virus attacks since the day I popped out of the womb. ( January 14th 2021 "The new Covid variant, B117, is rapidly spreading around the UK" in the first two minutes mentions a mutation rate of perhaps two per month, which would boost my tally to 1776, a strange co-incidence) What is your score?
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709-218-7927 The Landfall Garden House 60 Canon Bayley Road Bonavista, Newfoundland CANADA A0C 1B0 |
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