up pompeii!
Hold the front page, exciting news: this winter will be terrible! Remember where you heard it first that during this Solstice season we will be dealing not only with flu and Covid-19, but mass unemployment, increased immigration via The Channel, the collapse of test & trace, the signing of a free trade deal to replace the EU with, not only Trinidad but thankfully also Tobago, food shortages, a hard-border in Ireland, an international reputation in tatters, oh, and flooding. And I’m going to take a casual stab-in-the-dark and predict the state will not be ready to deal with the clusterf*ck that’s coming our way.
OK, some of those may not come to pass, and I get that we can’t control all of life’s ups and downs but can we, as either a responsible global society or concerned individual, be accused of not preparing for entirely predictable catastrophes?
Way back in the early noughties, authors Bazerman and Watkins, in their ‘Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming’ argued that whilst the world is largely unpredictable, the real problem is our innate ability to ignore the obvious and fail to act accordingly. Currently, over thirty-one million of us have watched Bill Gates’ TED talk ‘The next outbreak? We’re not ready!’ where he predicted the level of unpreparedness and warned the next outbreak of a flu-like virus could cost the modern economy upwards of $3trn (as it transpires, the IMF now predicts it’ll come in closer to $12trn). Factor in the near-misses of Sars (2003), influenza H5N1 (2006) and H1N1 (2009), Ebola (2013) and Mers (2015) and it would appear we’ve had plenty of warnings and catastrophes such as coronavirus are, in reality, all too predictable and begs the question why we do nothing in the face of danger?
Psychologists describe this relative inaction in the face of danger as normalcy bias or negative panic. From as early as the destruction of Pompeii in AD79 we have seen clear examples where people do nothing until it’s too late. In a famous and oft-repeated experiment, smoke is pumped into a closed room where participants are diligently undertaking work. One subject alone invariably sees the individual more or less immediately stop what they’re doing and leave to raise the alarm; when more than three are participating they all do nothing, zilch, reassured by the passivity of the others and confident that if it were serious someone else would do something. This wishful thinking subsequently coined the phrase The Ostrich Paradox.
The true failure for our unpreparedness surely lies with our lords and masters? We are but humble folk doing our damnedest to keep our proverbial heads above the rising sea-levels of climate change; their business should be to recognise the metaphorical smoke and safeguard our welfare. However, this ignores that, irrespective of the expert advice we all pay for, they may not feel obliged or motivated to act for the majority, as the rich and powerful invariably feel sheltered from the concerns and anxieties of the common man. It furthermore goes some way to explain why they always appear to be the first to break their own hallowed rules handed to us on tablets of stone.
The simple truth is that the only way out of this pandemic is by collective political and economic action: countries working together to ensure all have more resilient public health systems and access to the (eventual) treatments and vaccines. These need to be developed collaboratively and, ultimately, manufactured at speed, irrespective of who’s picking-up the tab. Isolationism, independent purchasing and stockpiling aren’t merely wrong on moral grounds, it is not until every country is protected that we all become safe.
The truly horrific thought is what if Covid-19 is merely the warning for what’s hiding round the corner? Ouch. In the meantime, and in the immediacy, leave the toilet roll on the shelf and stock-up on the good times. Go the pub for a socially-distanced pint in your group of six, pop-out for a run or cycle in the park and get a sweat on, or load the family in the car for a 600 mile round-trip to Castle Barnard’s Specsavers, for as summer fades, the clouds are gathering.
