Brave sealed world –Part II: Parasite
This story is second in a five-parts reading about the pandemic. It argues that the outbreak has vertiginously accelerated a worldwide authoritarian trend that has been rampant for twenty years.
- Introduction: 28 Days Later
about the strange hopes triggered by the outbreak at its western beginning - Part 1: Contagion
about the mechanisms that triggered panic among citizens, markets and governments
Part 2: Parasite
how differing interests orchestrated the panic to mute the public debate
- Part 3: The Discreet Charm of the Authority
how the proclaimed epidemiological success of China and the Asian Dragons becomes one more nail in a twenty-years-old coffin - Conclusion: Deliverance
an argument that a tightly controlled society is already at the very root of the crisis.
The Domestic Fabric of Panic
So far, we have been drawing a rather innocuous portrait of panic. Miscommunication and a lack of communication, as worse. As if panic could not be intentional. As if panic could not be malignant. As if panic had not been engineered in some parts. It would be a real pleasure to draw conspiracy plots from the diverse elements we can observe, but there again, others will do it better than I will. Let us focus on the separate elements, and keep them separate.
Let us stay in France for a while, and talk about data science — or, I mean, statistics — once again. Statistics engendered stochastic calculus and machine learning, which in turn drove such societal breakthroughs as high frequency trading and personalized ad targeting, so no doubt political elites know how to use them.
Let us focus on one of the most debated statistics exposed in the epidemic : virus mortality. Death caused by COVID-19 have been consistently inflated in order to scare people, have them submissively observe confinement orders, and in the process applaud governmental vista for clamping down on severe measures without prevaricating. Such inflation includes (the source for later claims are from a physician in a Parisian hospital) : systematically ascribing coronavirus as the cause of death for patients suffering underlying health issues (“co-mortality”). Using confirmed cases of COVID-19 (which means : only tested patients) as a denominator to report mortality rates. Considering the policy in France we previously discussed, where only severe cases were tested, this of course constitutes a sharp inflation of the mortality rate.
Moreover, as reports from China gave early awareness of the mortality rates being dramatic in the elderly population (more than 10% of infected people aged seventy and more would die, versus less than 0.5% in all other populations), it was important for the government to strongly communicate on the risk for the young too. Hence, young victims were individually highly publicized, including one suffering pre-existing conditions or having ingested anti-inflammatory drugs (which is a contraindication for COVID-19). Conspiracy-theorists were not long in defusing the rhetoric, highlighting in particular that the flu had been particularly benign during the current winter (see graph below, showing yearly excessive death rates in France), hence explaining the lives claimed by coronavirus were already owed to the Grim Reaper.
Another way of looking at it is the mean death age of the victims, only two to three years that of the national life expectancy. Rumor quickly had it on social networks : coronavirus is not that bad. The government is sacrificing the economic prospects of the young to give a little bonus to the old and the baby boomers, who already had a fairly happier life than our generation. This comes after months of harshly debating a reform of the retirement pensions, that would impact only taxpayers born after 1974 (which very few members of the government obviously belong to).
Without debating the dubious morality underlying this intergenerational feud, we can see that once again, the French government created its own monster by denying their people a clear honest communication. Such communication should have encompassed the following elements: first and obvious, the key point here is the hospital system. Mortality rates will stay low as long as the system can cope with the flow of severely affected patients and provide them with proper care (the now famous “flatten the curve”). This vocable was not part of the government communication until Health Minister Olivier Véran drew it by hand on BFM TV… on March 9th. Second : dealing with epidemics is dealing with crisis management. Crisis management is about weighing possible outcomes, weight with their probability. Looking at averages is not relevant ; probability distribution is relevant. In the case of a virus, the curve of probability distribution is, well, as flat as a health minister would like. Which means possible outcomes include the virus mutating into a more morbid form, causing hundreds of millions of dead worldwide. This is not the most probable scenario, but one that can exist with a reasonable probability.
Not explaining the population under the assumption that they will not have the education in statistics to understand a complex message, and thus trafficking statistics to send alarmists messages to the population is extremely dangerous. The problem is anyone knows that anything can be said with statistics. And almost anyone knows by now the most esoteric theories can be confirmed with correlations ; if you don’t know the website spurious correlations, I suggest you shortly take a tour. The problem is many people have not been duped by the tricks used by official publication. The problem is these people know communication tried to dupe them. And the problem is there is a (very) limited number of times you can deceive people without your trust credit to be seriously eroded, and that number has been exceeded by far. By camouflaging death rates instead of explaining death rates could grow much higher if the hospitals were to be overwhelmed — and they will sooner or later — the government and the media are only fueling the idea that something is somehow wrong. This either because the government doesn’t judge the people educated enough to receive the truth, or maybe they don’t judge them worthy enough to be educated. “Class contempt” has a long history in Europe and certainly played a part in the declaration of independence, as referenced by Tocqueville. But the Gilets Jaunes movement and its international counterparts have conditioned the population to associate any whiff of class contempt with a likely hidden agenda of inequalities. Clumsy and misleading official communication instantly ignited suspicions of a two-tiered management of the crisis… Are the suspicions unfounded?
Parasite
Back with Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes”, soon to become a hit of the decade. “Whatever it takes” goes beyond the 1.5 trillion dollars liquidity injected by the Federal reserve, the 750 billions euros injected by the ECB, or all other sovereign recovery plans. All heads of state, from day one, promised we would all have to do “whatever it takes” to stop the propagation of the epidemic. Whatever it takes : observe confinement, with abnegation, stay home, all united, all equal.
Well. It didn’t take the same for all. Your bank account has quite an impact on how you will live in confinement.
Whether you are a whole family usually squeezed in a thirty-meters apartment in a major city with a housing crisis (hello, Paris, London, New York), or live in a bright comfortable condo with, why not, a balcony, a terrace or a backyard, the situation might be a tad different. Or might have : actually, most urbanites with a house in the country swiftly moved away from the city, using the sixteen-hours advance notice complacently offered by the government. Your bank account does not necessarily mean you have a farm or a family manor on the countryside, but it means you can play the dirty game allowed by Airbnb at the dawn of the outbreak : starting with “We’ve worked hard to find a balance between supporting your hosting business and protecting the well-being of our collective community.” The core of the message was : “You can cancel reservations without worrying about cancellation charges or impact to your Superhost status Guests have the option to cancel reservations for a full refund”. No rules. The far west. Each host is now the lord in their own ranch. Which quickly turned into auctions : bidders were invited to extend their stay upfront for two weeks more, as another bidder on the line was ready to do it.
Family manors and Airbnb auctions combined, the Parisian conurbation sent 17% or one million of its residents away to the countryside to spread the virus, while Rhode Island deployed national guard to warn, door by door, runaway New Yorkers that they had to observe quarantine.
Under these conditions, “whatever it takes” could include keeping a low profile. But in France, the first blossoms of pastoral spring suddenly stimulated the artistic sensitivity of the released bourgeoisie. Prominent newspapers started publishing “confinement diaries” of writers and songwriters in bucolic exile. Leila Slimani in Le Monde (“we had to live mum behind for her own good”), Marie Darrieussecq in Le Point (titled “we hide the car and its Parisian license plate in the garage”) or Lou Doillon on France Culture (“I am myself a hermit, so it’s not that tough”).
On March 18th, Antonio Caisili, a French researcher and filmmaker, retweeted the picture of a bandera summing up the unease : “La romantización de la cuarentena es privilegio de clase !” (which is transparent in English). In the interest of equity, let us also mention tweets from altermondialistas and green activists welcoming coronavirus as a kind of anticapitalist prophet. Posting that kind of message probably shows which social class their author actually belongs to. The crisis also points out the fundamental flaw of ecovillage models : there isn’t room for all of us.
Whatever it takes also depends strongly on your job : while some sing the agonies of obeying the injection : “stay safe, stay home!”, others are being told that “stay safe” does not include them, because the ones who have to stay home also have to be taken care of. That goes for medical staff, of course, and they are applauded and thanked every evening at eight. Delivery men (whether from Amazon or Deliveroo), cashiers, garbage collectors, drivers (trucks or public transports), warehouse workers are not. Indeed, they are rather stigmatized : in France, the Parliament voted on March 23rd the health emergency law. Among other things, it allows the executive to rule, within the next three months, on exemptions to employment laws. As soon as March 25th, the executive decided derogatory measures changing working time in specific industries. Compendium : the employer can now unilaterally demand an employee to work up to twelve hours a day and sixty hours a week, and decides on days off. These measures will endure until December 31st.
The crisis might have been an opportunity to come to perceive these jobs for what they are: a vital cog in the wheel of society. The ones that allow entrepreneurs, artists, politicians, scientists, technologists, investors, artists, to have the leisure to innovate and create. Such a vision is hardly compatible with the dominant perception that market and demand command how much you are paid. That perception makes software developers so scarce that their value exceeds the one of a warehouse worker by an order of magnitude or more. As the scarcity is reversed in times of confinement, should the wages be reversed also? It seems like a better solution is to derogate to labor rights… until December 31st at least.
Same ruling, different industry, different consequences : in short, companies can use the mechanism known as short-time working. This mechanism usually guarantees that 70% of salaries will be refunded by the state, in the case of tight economic constraints. The guarantee is currently expanded to 100%, for companies facing a partial drop of activity (10% year-on-year), or not able to provide proper health security for its workers. The issue is: the process, highly supervised in regular times, is now on autopilot, according to any accountant you will ask. Result is currently estimated to be four million workers. A number of startup founders, under pressure from their board, already declared short-time working en masse, while unofficially asking their employees to keep business as usual. That is, except for remote working, which is not that disruptive for internet companies. Startups are inherently fragile and do not represent such a large share of the economy. They are hardly the most shameful. The stone could be cast instead on telecom operators such as SFR and Bouygues. Whereas the whole country is sentenced to spending the day using 4G and Wi-Fi connection, the first transferred 56% of its task force on partial unemployment, collectivizing operator’s payroll costs to the whole nation. No wonder why the tech community keeps the faith in terms of crisis, on the verge of mysticism. I cannot recount the number of epiphanic posts on LinkedIn, clumsily following the lead of a co-founder of The Family, a French version of Y-Combinator. The posts state that “2001 engendered Google, 2009 engendered Airbnb and Dropbox. When some see a crisis, I see opportunity”.
The food industry also attracted the ink as unemployed workers are nationally called to join the fields. The French Department of Labor should soon create a dedicated platform. Back in the USSR? Romanticization again backed the agroindustry, with many heeding the call, as if what was called for was WWOOFing. But one should not forget that at stake is the harvesting season, a time when 40% of the additional workforce comes from foreign countries (Morocco, Portugal, Eastern Europe), according to the interprofessional association of fruits and vegetables. This crisis again unveils the operations of an industry, knowing that inside Europe, outcry for modern slavery in the agribusiness is regularly reported, with migrants playing the lead role.
Whatever it takes, except producing en masse COVID-19 testing capabilities : the reasons have been commented on before, but not the visible consequences. Consequences : members of the Parliament being early tested, without any symptoms, meaning privileged access to testing when the general population, including liberal staff workers, are instructed not to be tested unless presenting advanced symptoms requiring hospitalization. Superstars like Tom Hanks also tested (positive) as soon as March 13th. Entire football clubs were tested, with all Liga players being tested as a policy. Which also became a fairly good indicator hint for conspiracy theories, as before mid-March, Valencia FC announced 35% of asymptomatic positives among players and staff, seemingly indicating that one third of western European population were already asymptomatic carriers.
Soccer still, and the Barcelona Football Club communiqué stating it would reduce working time for its staff. The club generated more than one billion dollars in revenue last season. The communiqué did not mention if the salary cuts would apply to the superstar team players, which increased the pressure on the club. Lio Messi added pressure on the club with a communiqué revealing that the players themselves were pressuring the club to cut their own salaries for maintaining the staff. Which somehow reminds of the dozen American billionaires, among which Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who publicly and unsuccessfully called numerous times for higher taxes in the United States.
Whatever it takes. To keep the football club with the highest revenue on earth, or to keep the economy afloat, are the decisions different? At the national level, debates are already heated, but with a state of public health emergency already declared in most western countries, the final word goes to the executive. A quote from the French Senate: the opposition senator starts, referring to aforementioned changes in the labor conditions: “We are a bit uncomfortable, Madam Minister. Everybody must contribute, you insist. Yesterday, in less than an hour of debate, we debased established social rights and labor rights […]. And now we suggest — not a revolution, not a despoliation — increasing [taxes on yearly revenues over 250k€] from 3 to 5%, and we are told, the timing is not right”. The representative from the majority closed the debate: “Now is not the time to discuss. Now, let us vote”. A few seconds earlier, the argument was already spelled out: “no country, under these circumstances, chose to raise fiscality. We will have this debate at a later stage”. Meaning: no country decided that “whatever it takes” meant leaning harder on the rich than on the poor?
The Minister of Budget actually had other ideas than fiscality to have the wealthiest participate in the war effort: in an outlandish Twitter post, he solemnly called for “national solidarity”: by creating a donation platform, the government was empowering private individuals and companies to help the most affected. Some answers hinted that this platform had been existing for years in the form of the tax office website…
At a macroeconomic level, this debate lurks behind the opposition between partisans of the “corona bonds” and Germany, partisan of using the European Stability Mechanism. The only difference between the two, as mentioned earlier, is that the ESM comes with economic constraints, also called austerity measures, for its beneficiaries. No one would dare argue that the plan was a great success in the case of Greece. If you inquire into Greece’s crisis recoveries from 2012 on, when the ESM was put into action, results are spectacular :
Back to 2012, back to Greece, flash forward to Italy and France, flash forward to the images of hospitals overwhelmed with critically ill patients. As a text published by the Italian organ of Attac reminds us, the hospital system went from 922 beds for 10,000 people in 1980, down to 275 beds currently. In France, we lost more than 10% of capacity in ten years. The ten years during which austerity became a political program in Europe.
In the US, the same neoliberal ideologies created millions of Americans without health insurance, which could pose a threat in containing the virus. No doubt in shedding light on these inequalities, Coronavirus will prompt citizens of the world to turn to their governments for reckoning. Unless said governments manage to deflect the attention somehow.
Back in February, President Trump provided a case on how to deflect the attention from inequalities towards something else, fear of strangers, for example. He cared to comment on the outcome of the Oscar: for the first time ever, a film in a foreign language literally parasitized the Academy awards. Parasite was named best picture of the year, robbing domestic films of a marketing stunt they were entitled to. Foreign films are intended to compete for the best foreign picture of the year. The US President obviously thought Parasite was fatefully named, even without considering a grave disease was about to break in the United States (yes, I know viruses are not parasites). Beyond its title, Parasite has two astonishing features : it originates from South Korea, which is the feature President Trump used to deflect attention from the second feature. The second feature really explains why the film resonates with worldwide audiences: it’s a universal tale of inequalities. But using South Korea at the time to deflect attention was not wise: the whole world was soon to be also looking in that direction.
This story continues on: Part 3: The Discreet Charm of the Authority
