28 October

What the virus is doing now is showing that the health sciences, including epidemiology, aren’t capable of getting us through this pandemic. Notice that their advice can get our numbers very low, sometimes to zero, but if the virus flares up again they default to the standard ‘we have to live with this virus’ nonsense. Their cupboard is bare. We need expert thinking in a much wider range of areas, to do what all pandemics eventually force on us - defining the new normal. Politicians are using the health system as a way to try to save the old normal. Our lifestyles are incompatible with infectious disease, we won’t accept that. The virus doesn’t give a shit, it’ll keep mowing us down until we learn.