It’s going to get worse … before it gets more worse

It occurred to me yesterday that you can get up to some pretty weird things trying to occupy yourself during these lock-down days. It’s all relative, of course. Here in The Rust’s editorial command centre on the second level deck of the publisher’s superyacht moored two miles off the coast of Tenerife, I’m told we have enough provisions to last us another ten weeks, but you never know.

In modern times the old adage that “there are lies, damned lies and statistics” (its origin variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli or Mark Twain) has never been more relevant.

The UK Coronavirus death toll may have just passed the 1,000 mark – and from yesterday’s Government daily news conference we learned that the latest scientific predictions now tell us that if we get away with a grand total less than 20,000 by the time all this is over we’ll have had “a good war” (if that’s how we’re describing our current struggle).

There’s been plenty of ongoing scientific, medial and political “incoming” criticism of the Government’s apparently haphazard, constantly shifting, ”shooting from the hip” and (at various times) contradictory directives and advice.

I’m no supporter or apologist for the Tory Government – as I wouldn’t be of whatever Government was in power – but it occurred to me that, just possibly, Number 10 were aware of these predictions right from the off, but they also reckoned that if they were to tell us the truth from the outset, they’d get howls of protest from all sides and possibly even civil unrest etc. at the thought that we’d all have to end up living how we are now, hopefully temporarily.

So they deliberately began with a “softly, softly” approach and then – probably on some discrete timetable devised in advance – have been gradually ‘tightening the screw” ever since and, as they have, allowing in their progress for all that has featured in the media – viz. the £1 billion panic-buying spree the population went on at the beginning and then the push-back protests and “shaming” of those people who took part in it; the “twelve feet apart” advice (and then the arguments to and fro as to who was, and who wasn’t, adhering to it) …

You know what I’m suggesting – that, despite all the teasing and joshing of the Boris phenomenon, full of its enthusiastic but chaotic pronouncements, the Government has actually got this thing totally under control and is playing everything “by a, or the, book” that it had planned for every eventuality ages ago – should this sort of thing ever happen.

Unlikely, I know, but I’m still just putting it out there.

Here are a few statistics, some that I picked up from the latest edition of Private Eye:

In 2018-2019  there were just under 542,000 deaths registered in England and Wales – 50,000 more than expected due to the cold weather, prolonged austerity and seasonal respiratory viruses.

Roughly 40% of the world’s population don’t have home access to soap and/or water and as a result they’re used to death: more than 4,000 people a day die from TB and 1,200 from malaria.

The Prime Minister created a bit of a stir when he made his public pronouncement “Many of you will lose loved ones before their time”. We already knew, because we’d been told, that those over 80 are in the highest risk category – but in reality, that should hardly be news because in Britain the average overall life expectancy is 80.96 years!

One of my daily accompaniments as we ride out the current crisis in the near-African sunshine is listening to BBC radio broadcast on the internet – I’m glad to record that our satellite-delivered broadband out here has a regular, sound connection.

Yesterday I enjoyed a mid-afternoon programme I listened to for the very first time – Radio Five Live’s Common Sense Coronavirus Programme, operating via a phone-in format and hosted by Conor Murray, supported by an excellent resident medical expert “Doctor Chris”.

Amidst all the listener contributions – a raft of stirring examples of public-spirited behaviour; the stupidity, illogicality or incompetence of the authorities; the ignorance and pig-headedness of our moronic citizens who are not taking any of this crisis seriously (or seriously enough); and the so-sad stories of elderly, disabled or bedridden unfortunates who have been left on the verge of penury and medical danger – Doctor Chris came out with one or two apparent facts that struck hard and right through the heart of at least your author’s comfortable complacency, if not everybody else’s.

I leave Rusters today with just a couple of them to digest.

The biggest issue facing the human world is that there are just too many of us. There are currently approximately 7.9 billon people in the world, already many more than the Earth can sustainably support.

I didn’t know that.

Then he came up with a real zinger. Did we know, he asked, that on average the world’s population doubles every 75 years?

In other words – I soon worked out on my calculator – by 2095 the human population, if we last that long – will be nearing 16 billion.

In a context of the fact that three of my relatively close family are scheduled to bring offspring into the world within the next six months – no doubt already wallowing in the hopes and aspirations of every parents ever since history began as regards educational attainment, happy family life and generally a better future for their descendants.

But there isn’t going to be a better future for our descendants is there?

The human race is a virus upon the Earth and the one that’s probably going to have the biggest existential impact upon it … er … since that big asteroid landed in the sea off Mexico and killed off all the dinosaurs …