Wash your hands, stay safe — and stay socialist! Some reflections on data and COVID-19
This article began life as the last 1,000+ words of an already-over-long analysis of data about the local impact of COVID-19, with a particular focus on how the experience of Brighton and Hove compared with that of other local authority areas.
Given the 4,500-word length of the original analysis, there may have been a few people who did not read right to the end. Which turned into a bit of a polemic:
If you have read the original analysis, you probably agree that we have had enough data. It is time to draw a few conclusions. And raise a few questions.
Data is an important first step to information. Which, in turn, is a stepping stone to wisdom. It is a journey that can take a long time. So any conclusions can be only tentative and any questions may take a while to answer.
One thing is certain: a lot of people die during a global pandemic of a potentially-fatal virus.
Even as the pandemic continues, it is tempting to assign blame — not least because it requires a lot of effort to think, but it requires much less effort to judge. Hence the desire to compile a Eurovision-style “League of Death”, comparing the number of deaths in the UK with countries in the European Union (and beyond).
I hope I have shown in the original analysis that it is not easy to publish confidently such a ranking even within the UK, or even within England. There are too many variables in socio-economic circumstances and in social norms — within countries and between countries.
Even if crucial, timely and directly-comparable data were available, the perspective that comes only with time is lacking.
A lot of data is not available, certainly not to the general public.
In Brighton and Hove, we know — from the outbreak in early February — the effectiveness of “test and trace” when the number of infections in the community is low.
To make “test and trace” work across the country — especially in combating the expected “local flare-ups” in the coming weeks — a lot more granular data will be needed, ideally as fast as possible within every local authority in the UK.
As we have seen, much more data is needed about who is being tested (and why): gender, ethnicity, home postcode, workplace. More timely data is also needed about who has tested positive.
With regards to “open-data journalism”, it would help if media organisations and other institutions — even local authorities — with the necessary resources and skills published more user-friendly local dashboards than I have done in this article. (A rather poor and confused off-the-shelf example is the one I use to find out what is going on in my son’s home city of Austin, Texas.)
It would be helpful — but not necessarily essential — to generate a reliable R0 number for every local authority. Although — as we have seen from the recent “testing-for-the-sake-of-testing” approach — testing by itself does not necessarily protect anyone. Especially if results are not quickly known.
Take care homes. There have been loud, longstanding calls — in Hove particularly — for care-home staff to be tested, even when test results can (inevitably/realistically) take 24 hours or more. An asymptomatic staff-member may not have been identified as Covid-positive until s/he has completed at least two shifts or more. By which time, the infection could be spreading rapidly among residents.
It appears there was an early assumption — almost certainly wrong — that care homes (largely privately-owned) were expert in routine infection control (including the supply and use of personal protection equipment) and were therefore capable of protecting themselves against Covid (including from unchecked and untested visitors who — for too long — were allowed untrammelled access).
Rather than assigning blame, we should seek to learn lessons. One lesson is about the way we routinely care for older people in residential homes of variable quality, when most homes are owned by companies seeking — at vast expense to local authorities and individual taxpayers — to make a profit.
Four care visits a day to her well-adapted home, where she has lived for 59 years, means my 90-year-old mother, a breast-cancer survivor with leukaemia, has survived the Covid pandemic in the safety and comfort of her own home. Residential homes can be a godsend for many, but too foten they are not the ideal choice.
In addition, as the United States is learning about health care, a fragmented largely-private system is a weak defence when compared with a coherent, joined-up, socialised system. Such as the National Health Service. It also makes the goal of an integrated National Care Service almost impossible to achieve.
The big political fear of Boris Johnson and his government coincided with the very human fear that Covid-infected patients would be turned away from hospitals.
Hence the very modest ambition to “protect the NHS” and “save [some] lives”. Even if it meant paying — rather than appropriating! — private hospitals. Even if it meant not providing adequate mental health services at a time of greatest need. Even if it meant lives were saved, but forever blighted by post-Covid that are likely to be ignored as soon as the news agenda moves on.
Politically, the “Protect the NHS” slogan betrayed a truth that many of us already knew: the NHS and its workers have, for too long, been under-funded, underpaid, and under strain.
Meanwhile, the UK has remained committed to renewing the Trident nuclear missile system — a pointless weapon against any enemy that does not exist — at a cost of £205 billion. It is also committed to HS2, which will cost at least £100 billion. Money is not the obstacle to a better world.
So why were we not better protected from the threat of a pandemic? Why did we not — as David Cameron once said — repair the roof when the sun was shining?
If we had elected Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister in 2017, we would have rapidly invested money in the health and care system, possibly saving some of the unimaginable amounts of money Chancellor Rishi Sunak is now having to spend simply to keep the economy on life support.
But the real lessons to be learned from the data relates to inequality: power inequality, wealth inequality, health inequality, racial inequality, and gender inequality. Remember that, when workers are eventually asked to foot the bill in a new era of austerity, with lost jobs, pay cuts, poorer public services, higher rents, and tax increases. In shorter, greater precarity in the most precarious of times.
Unfortunately, a new political consensus is emerging — with the not-inconsiderable help of Sir Keir Starmer — about how things would be better if only we managed things better: if we had imposed lockdown earlier, if we had imposed a tighter lockdown, if we had done more testing, if we keep in lockdown longer, if we wear face-coverings everywhere. If we helped out more big corporations with huge handouts (albeit in the hope they pass some of the help on to workers).
As if the problem with capitalism is that we just do not manage it well enough.
For this reason, there is a danger that COVID-19 will mutate into an invisible enemy used by politicians and others to wage an Orwellian war without end, at the expense of individual and collective freedoms.
Information can provide the power that can prevent that, by keeping fear in its place.
To me, what the data shows is that we need — now more than ever — bottom-to-top transformational change, from capitalism to socialism. The Labour Party must not return to proclaiming its unique selling point is simply “we’re better than the Tories”, at handling the pandemic or at managing capitalism.
It is not enough only to “Clap for Carers”; we need to applaud — and agitate for — the socialist policies epitomised by the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.
Let us all work to ensure such policies shape the “new normal”.
Meanwhile, the best advice really still is to keep your distance (within reason, with your loved ones), wash your hands, stay safe — and stay socialist!
