Urban Art Association

A long but very pertinent read from Anthony Costello:

Despite what Matt Hancock says, the UK government's policy is still herd immunity.

Tests alone are no good. We urgently need a community surveillance programme to stop the spread of Covid-19.

When the lockdown is lifted, will the virus return? Of course it will. Matt Hancock has said we will do 100,000 tests each day by the end of April, but Britain still doesn’t have a way to control the virus that goes beyond lockdown. Without a proper programme of community surveillance and contact tracing, we won’t stop the spread of coronavirus. As patients pour into hospitals again, a series of national lockdowns will follow. It’s a pattern that could go on for yearus – until we have a vaccine.






The problem with Hancock’s plan is that testing alone won’t break the chain of community transmission.
To stop the spread of a virus, tests must be linked to community surveillance and contact tracing. This ensures that people who have the virus, and people they have come into contact with, can be identified quickly and quarantined at home to prevent the virus spreading. The government’s tests will measure how many people have had the virus, and will show whether health workers are immune – but without community surveillance, tests alone won’t prevent its spread.

On 12 March, the chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, and chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, announced that the UK had moved from containing the virus to delaying its spread. Their plan was to flatten the curve of the epidemic that would sweep through our population. They reassured us that herd immunity would kick in once 60% of the population had been infected. Social distancing and washing our hands would ease the pressure on health services, they said. Crucially, community testing and contract tracing would stop immediately. At that point, we were still four weeks behind Italy. The media felt safe, reassured by two eminent physicians.

The trouble is, those scientists were wrong. The maths wasn’t difficult: working off their figures, about 40 million people in the UK would be infected by coronavirus, and between 200,000 and 400,000 would eventually die. When the government’s mathematicians modelled figures from Italy and showed that 30% of people admitted to hospital ended up in intensive care, they warned the government that the NHS would be overwhelmed. The government backtracked within three days, and shifted to suppressing rather than mitigating the virus.
In reality, little changed. The government’s beliefs were founded on the assumption that coronavirus behaves like flu. It doesn’t. Its mortality rate is higher, there is little evidence that it is seasonal, and it poses a far greater threat to the NHS. Without a programme of community surveillance and contact tracing, the virus will continue to spread. Britain will be subject to routine flare-ups and repeated lockdowns.

I spoke to a senior international epidemic expert, who wished to remain anonymous. They described the UK’s response as too weak. “Finding these viruses is like guerrilla warfare. If you don’t know where the virus is hiding you cannot control it. We must use a bundle of measures to chase it. We must organise teams of friendly community workers to find people with symptoms, test for the virus, isolate and treat them, and trace their contacts. Workers must check on them in their homes every one or two days,” they said.

I asked them whether social distancing alone could beat the virus. “It won’t work,” they told me. “You can stop contact tracing in the hotspots, but when you lift the lockdown, everywhere at the same time, you’ll face a problem: the virus will come back. New hotspots will form.
“Without a community programme for case detection and contact tracing, you won’t find the virus until it’s too late.”
In China, Xi Jinping initially prevaricated, suppressing the findings of a fact-finding mission on 4 January that investigated the outbreak in Wuhan. But by 26 January, China had placed more than 50 million people under quarantine; 40 provinces reported a total of 2,744 cases and 80 deaths. The Chinese communist party mobilised thousands of community workers to scale up a national testing effort, while mapping infections using case definitions based on symptoms.

Almost 40,000 health workers were flown in from across China to help with this huge community surveillance effort. The government enforced regional lockdowns, closed down shops, bars, universities and schools, and policed the supermarkets and pharmacies. They developed apps to monitor peoples’ symptoms and their compliance with quarantine, and set up 24-hour TV channels in every province to update people on data, progress and prevention. With this comprehensive response, China managed to suppress the transmission of the virus in less than two months.

By contrast, the UK was slow to act, and timid when it did. The government mistakenly based its coronavirus response on social distancing alone. The UK’s Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (Sage) didn’t even ask their mathematical advisers to model a community testing programme. Neil Ferguson reportedly said community testing and contact tracing wasn’t included as a possible strategy in the original modelling because not enough tests were available. But we had eight weeks’ notice.

We still don’t have a coordinated mobilisation of general practices and public health outbreak management teams. None are linked with digital apps or laboratory testing. In one of the best research cultures in the world, we failed to create the community surveillance and testing effort needed to stop the spread of the virus.

The government and its advisers are now committed to their strategy of delaying the spread of coronavirus, which they hope will eventually lead to herd immunity. Our present predicament is a symptom of past decisions: the decision not to roll out testing sooner put the government on the back foot, scrambling to catch up with the virus.

But it isn’t too late. To prevent the spread of coronavirus, we need a change of direction. Local authorities must take control of their public-health outbreak management teams. We need a centralised app and database to allow citizens to report their symptoms, such as the NHSX app that researchers have been working on since January.

GP networks, working with teams of trained volunteers and retired health workers equipped with personal protective equipment, could visit everyone reporting suspicious symptoms at home every one to two days. If there is testing, all the better. But symptom-based reporting will do. With a proper community protection scheme in place, local authorities could shield their population from the threat of the virus, which has taken hold in hotspots like London and the cities of the Midlands and north west.
The lockdown will flatten the curve, but we have a month or more before it lifts. This gives us time. To prevent the virus spreading to less affected areas, we have a choice: a dramatic change of direction, or praying that vaccinologists can work miracles.

• Anthony Costello is professor of global health at UCL, and former director of maternal and child health at the World Health Organisation.

Salute the heroes of the American Pandumbic!

Salute the heroes of the American Pandumbic!

f**kingstupid c**t

I very much hope you meant to add an ‘s’ to your last word.

Someone sent me this via facebook.
I have looked for the article it came from but can't find the english translation.
But this is a good, interesting and pretty positive read.


Matthias Horx: "This is a historic moment"

"Nothing will be as before": futurologist Mattias Horx provides food for thought with his text about the time after this crisis.

I am often asked when Corona "will be over" and everything returns to normal. My answer: never. There are historical moments when the future changes direction. We call them bifurcations. Or deep crises. Such times are now.

The world as we know is dissolving. But behind it comes a new world, the formation of which we can at least imagine. For this I would like to offer you an exercise with which we have had good experiences in vision processes at companies. We call it the RE-Gnose. In contrast to the Prognose, we do not look "into the future" with this technique. But from the future BACK to today. Sounds crazy? Let's try it:

1. The re-gnosis: Our world in autumn 2020

Let's imagine a situation in autumn, let's say in September 2020. We're sitting in a street cafe in a big city. It is warm and people are moving on the street again. Do they move differently? Is everything the same as before? Does the wine, the cocktail, the coffee taste like it used to?
Like before Corona?
Or even better?
Looking back, what will we be surprised about?

We will be surprised that the social constrains that we had to put ourselves through rarely lead to actual isolation. On the contrary. After the initial shock, many of us were even relieved that the many runs, talks and communications on multichannels suddenly came to a stop. Waiver does not necessarily mean loss, but it can actually open up new possibilities. Some have already experienced this, for example by trying interval fasting - and then suddenly the food tasted better. Paradoxically, the physical distance that the virus forced onto us created new closeness. We contacted with old friends more often, strengthened ties that had become loose. Families, neighbors, friends got closer and sometimes even solved hidden conflicts.

The social courtesy and mutual respect that we previously increasingly missed, made a comeback.

Now, in autumn 2020, there is a completely different mood at football games than in spring when there was a lot of mass rage. We wonder why this is so.

We are to be amazed by how quickly cultural techniques of the digital world have proven themselves in practice. Teleconferencing and videoconferencing, which most colleagues had always resisted (while the business-flying was preferred), turned out to be quite practical and productive. Teachers learned a lot about internet teaching. Home-office became a natural course for many - along with the improvisation and time juggling that goes with it.

At the same time, apparently outdated cultural techniques experienced a renaissance. Suddenly when you called you got not only the answering machine, but real people. The virus spawned a new culture of long phone calls without a second screen. The "messages" themselves suddenly took on a new meaning. You really communicated again. No one was allowed to wriggle anymore. Nobody was held out anymore. This created a new culture of accessibility. Of commitment.

People who never before came to rest because of the hectic pace, including young people, started going for long walks (a word that was previously unfamiliar to many). Reading books suddenly became a cult.

Reality shows suddenly seemed awkward. The whole trivia trash, the infinite soul garbage that flowed through all channels. No, it didn't completely disappear. But it was rapidly losing value.
Can anyone remember the political correctness dispute? The infinite number of cultural wars about ... what was it all about?

Crises work primarily by dissolving old phenomena, making them superfluous ...
Cynicism, this casual way of keeping the world off by devaluation, was suddenly abundant.
The excessive fear-hysteria in the media was limited after a short first outbreak.

We will be surprised that already by summertime the medications needed to increase survival rate were found. This lowered the death rate and Corona became a virus that we just have to deal with - much like the flu and many other diseases. Medical progress helped. But we also learned that the decisive factor was not so much the technology, but the change in social behavior. The decisive factor was that people could remain solidary and constructive despite radical restrictions. Human-social intelligence has helped. The much-praised artificial intelligence however, which was known to be able to solve everything, has only had a limited impact on the Corona Crises.

This has shifted the relationship between technology and culture. Before the crisis, technology seemed to be the panacea, the bearer of all utopias. No one - or only a few hard-headed people - still believe in great digital redemption today. The big technology hype is over. We are again turning our attention to the humane questions: What is man? What are we for each other?

We are astonished to see how much humor and humanity actually emerged in the days of the virus.

We will be amazed at how far the economy could shrink without something like "collapse" actually happening, which was invoked before every little tax increase and every government intervention. Although there was a "black April", a deep economic downturn and a 50% stock market fall, even though many companies went bankrupt, shrank or mutated into something completely different, zero never came. As if economy were a breathing being that can also doze or sleep and even dream.

Today in the fall, there is a global economy again. But global just-in-time production, with huge branched value chains, in which millions of individual parts are carted across the planet, has survived. It is currently being dismantled and reconfigured. Interim storage facilities, depots and reserves are growing again everywhere in the productions and service facilities. Local productions are booming, networks are being localized, and crafts are experiencing a renaissance. The global system is drifting towards globalization: localization of the global.

We will be surprised that even the loss of assets due to the stock market crash does not hurt as much as it seemed in the beginning. In the new world, wealth suddenly no longer plays the decisive role. Good neighbors and a blossoming vegetable garden are more important.

Could it be that the virus has changed our course in the direction that it wanted to be changed anyway?

2. Re-gnose: coping with the present through a leap into the future

Why does this kind of “from the front backwards” scenario seems so irritatingly different from a classic forecast? It is because of the specific properties of our future sense. When we look "into the future", we mostly only see the dangers and problems "coming up", which pile up to insurmountable barriers. Like a locomotive out of the tunnel that runs over us. This fear barrier separates us from the future. That's why horror futures are always the easiest to depict.

On the other hand, re-gnoses form a loop of knowledge, in which we include ourselves, our inner change, in the future calculation. We connect internally with the future, and this creates a bridge between today and tomorrow. A "Future Awareness" arises.

If you do it right, something like Future Intelligence is created. We are able to anticipate not only the external "events", but also the internal adaptations with which we interact with a changed world.

It is therefore very different from a forecast that always has something dead, sterile in its apodictic character. We leave the stiffness of fear and return to the vitality that truly belongs to every future.

We all know that feeling of successfully overcoming fear. When we go to the dentist for treatment, we are worried long in advance. We lose control on the dentist's chair and it hurts before the procedure even started. In anticipating this feeling, we build up fears that can completely overwhelm us. However, once we have survived the procedure, there is a feeling of coping: the world looks young and fresh again and we are suddenly full of drive. Neurobiologically, the fear hormone Adrenaline is replaced by Dopamine, a type of endogenous drug for the future. While Adrenaline leads us to flee or fight (which is not really productive in the dentist's chair, nor in the fight against Corona), Dopamine opens our brain synapses: we are excited about what is to come, curious, foresighted. When we have a healthy Dopamine level, we make plans, we have visions that lead us to a forward-looking attitude.

Surprisingly, many experience exactly this in the Corona crisis. A massive loss of control suddenly turns into a veritable intoxication of the positive. After a period of bewilderment and fear, an inner strength arises. The world "ends", but if we are to still be there, a kind of new-being arises from inside. In the middle of civilization's shutdown, we walk through forests or parks, or across almost empty spaces. But this is not an apocalypse, but a new beginning.

This is how it manifests: Change begins as a changed pattern of expectations, perceptions and world connections. Sometimes it is precisely the break with the routines, the familiar, that releases our sense of the future again. The idea and certainty that everything could be completely different - even for the better.

We may even be surprised that Trump will be voted out of office in November. [...] The Corona crisis made it clear that those who want to incite people against each other have no real contribution to questions about the future. When things get serious, the destructive that lives in populism becomes clear.

Politics in its original sense as the formation of social responsibilities got within this crisis a new credibility, a new legitimacy. Precisely because it had to act "authoritarian", politics created trust in society. Science also experienced an astonishing renaissance in the probation crisis. Virologists and epidemiologists became media stars, but also "futuristic" philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, who were previously on the sidelines of the polarized debates, regained their voice and weight.

Fake news, however, rapidly lost market value. Conspiracy theories also suddenly looked like rotten goods, even though they were desperately offered.

3. A virus as an accelerator of evolution

Deep crises also point to another basic principle of change: the trend-countertrend synthesis.

The new world after Corona - or better with Corona - arises from the disruption of the megatrend of connectivity. Politically and economically this phenomenon is also called "globalization". The interruption of connectivity - through border closings, separations, foreclosures, quarantines - does not lead to the abolition of connections. But to reorganize the connectomes that hold our world together and carry it into the future. There is a developmental phase in the socio-economic systems.

The world to come will appreciate distance again - and this will make for more qualitative closeness. Autonomy and dependency, opening and closing are to be rebalanced. This can make the world more complex, but also more stable. This transformation is mostly a blind evolutionary process - because one fails, a new more adequate one prevails. This makes you dizzy at first, but then it shows its inner meaning: sustainability is what connects the paradoxes on a new level.

This process of complexation - not to be confused with complication - can also be consciously designed by people. Those who can, who speak the language of the coming complexity, will be the leaders of tomorrow. The hope-bearers. The future Gretas.

"Through Corona we will adapt our entire attitude towards life - in the sense of our existence as living beings in the midst of other forms of life." Slavo Zizek at the peak of the corona crisis in mid-March

Every deep crisis has a story, a narrative that resonates far into the future. One of the strongest visions left by the corona virus are the Italians making music on the balconies. The second vision is sent to us by satellite images that suddenly show the industrial areas of China and Italy free of smog. In 2020, human CO2 emissions will drop for the first time in history. That fact will do something to us.
If the virus can do that - can we possibly do it too? Maybe the virus was just a messenger from the future. His drastic message is: Human civilization has become too dense, too fast, overheated. It is racing too much in a direction in which there is no future.

But it can reinvent itself.
System reset.
Cool down!
Music on the balconies!
This is how the future works.

www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/lockdown-parks-beaches-overcrowded-sunshine-pm-stay-home-a4407111.html

www.liveleak.com/view?t=kj5oE_1586019605
Any one here from Richmond ?

Doubt it. Probably easier to get caught. He wouldn't want a crowd around it either.

Nobody is going to admit to being from richmond
I do know someone who lives there and they said that everyone was socially distancing very well 
and that all this hooha was just the normal tabloid journalism stir the pot to generate fear and anger an thus clicks and revenue
I am inclined to believe him
also f**kBoris 
and the evening standard 

LMAO

Why does it get rid of plurals when you swear? apologies to anyone - it was meant for the SFC's in the video