So which is scarier - Brexit or COVID?

23.12.2020 12:39

So which is scarier - Brexit or COVID? So which is scarier - Brexit or COVID?

My house is no longer a fortress

The protracted (almost like the Hundred Years War) "Brexit Saga", probably, could end not in divorce, but in a wedding. If only they tried to treat the invasion of Covid-19 (or SARS-CoV-2, as you prefer) on the old continent as a suitable occasion.

But modern politicians are not trained to admit their mistakes. And only the press can most often make them state such. However, that is why it is the fourth power, although again, as a rule, it is forced to be sold to the first three.

But we stand on that, alas. Before the divorce of Europe from Great Britain, there are only a few days left, and then the newly-born mutant virus drives us on. But someone still hopes that Brexit will not happen without a deal. And it is not necessary to reduce everything only to the problems of fishing, as it has been voiced over the past few days.

Britain managed to reach the home stretch, having defended almost all the preferences that it wanted. Up to the status of the border between the two Ireland, which will certainly be used by both sides to mitigate the negative effect of Brexit.

So is it really worth it to continue trying to "save face" in this situation? And to both: to the European Union bureaucrats, and to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his comrades?

Will the voters not understand? Voters will understand. Moreover, all sociological polls now show that with a new referendum, no Brexit would have happened anymore.

Blockade of foggy Albion

However, under the threat of a complete blockade of the islands, the British Prime Minister urgently convened a meeting of an emergency government committee in London. But again, it may turn out that everyone is simply not up to Brexit.

The new SARS-CoV-2 strain again gave a great chance and a decent reason to hit the brakes. But Londoners are in a hurry to leave the city, promptly driven into an extraordinary lockdown.

With the passage of time, you can remember as much as you like that Brexit was a consequence of the 2007-2008 crisis, became a good background for the election of the pragmatist and realist Donald Trump as President of the United States, and also cost Theresa May as prime minister.

However, Boris Johnson in this chair confused the situation even more. The current talk of fishermen is a kind of flair that covers countless real contradictions and problems.

But by no means all of them are directly related to the beginning of the implementation of Brexit, which was superimposed on the third, or rather, on the “second and a half” wave of the coronavirus. At the moment, Britain is at risk of being blocked for a completely different reason - due to the identified new mutation COVID-19, which is considered much more infectious.

It turns out that Brexit should happen a bit too early. In any case, the problem of uncontrolled migration (almost the main and much more sensitive than the Irish border and all trade, taken together) has already been solved by Covid.

Mutation for mutants

The confusion at the top, which has been noted almost everywhere since the reports of the mutant virus, can, however, be deceiving. I do not exclude that soon the media will find confirmation that very many knew very well about the impending arrival of the third wave.

They even knew that it would happen when the second was not over yet. I repeat, very many knew, and not only a select few - in a narrow circle of professional virologists. However, now a calming sound is coming from their lips:

"RNA viruses mutate constantly, on average once a month ... I want to emphasize that, according to generally known rules, the more infectious a pathogen, the less lethal it is."

This (sorry for repeating) was said not by some politician, but by Ancha (Anna Vyacheslavovna) Baranova, professor of the School of Systems Biology at George Mason University, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Chief Researcher of the Laboratory of Functional Genomics at the Medical Genetic Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow).

By the way, Anna Baranova warned about possible dangerous mutations in SARS-CoV-2 back in November - more than a month ago. However, almost no one listened to her. I did not heed, among other things, because among the reasons, for example, the following was called:

"We treat too well and the virus has to change."

Alas, the mutation of the damned virus can, under certain conditions, render useless all the newest vaccines, which the world awaits like manna from heaven. And this is also indicated to us not by politicians (for whom the vaccine is nothing but a trump card), but by many experts in mutations.

However, such assessments are in a hurry to refute too many, up to the WHO. However, is it necessary to explain how this kind of public is interested in promoting not only Covid itself, but also vaccines from it, regardless of where and by whom they are developed.

And in England, the public, which itself turned into some kind of mutants who trust only "their own", preferred to listen half-heartedly to the head of "their" Ministry of Health Matt Hancock. He again reported in November that a thousand people in the south of the country had become infected with the new strain. Today, the new strain dominates throughout Britain.

Generation Relay

The adequacy of modern politicians has long been causing not only doubts, but also fears among part of the general public. We admit - an insignificant part that is not zombified by television and social networks. And it's a shame that these politicians are mostly from our generation, the first fairly numerous post-war generation.

For them, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, the atomic threat, 1968 and Watergate are the impressions of childhood and adolescence that have stuck in their livers. They should care why there is so much bleach in the drinking water, and only powdered milk remains.

But the horrors of plague barracks, masks, gloves - how quickly such things became a habit. Almost everyone. Together with a total oxygen deficiency. To me personally, all this painfully reminds me of something half-forgotten over the years.

“Take off the gas mask, put on the gas mask”.
But there it was at least clear why and why. Today, the Covid dissidents (and in their hearts they are definitely the majority) cannot but be confused by too many things. And most of all - just the lack of consistency, logic and at least a hint of equality and fairness in the application of restrictive measures.

Even if all these measures help in some way, then there is no less doubt from this. The media chew on the Chinese and Swedish experiences almost every day: both are highly questionable. But the Belarusian experience was thoroughly trampled on with a flurry of information about the notorious protests.

About the protests, which, it seems, are already boring by the protesters themselves. However, what cannot be done for good money, especially since, by and large, there is nothing to do in Minsk or Vitebsk today.

We can't live without each other

But for some reason, not experts, namely politicians, cite all sorts of different data on the infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 and the effectiveness of vaccines, and along with them - masks and gloves. They are still listened to much more attentively than those who are really in the subject.

As soon as Boris Johnson announced that the new strain was 70 percent more infectious than the previous ones, then the countries of the world (including Russia) began to race to close themselves off from Britain. Although the same virologists are convincing that it will not help.

And the new strain has been discovered not only in Britain. Also in the Netherlands, and in Denmark, which was almost an example to everyone in Europe. But from Johnson, no one heard that high contagiousness can mean that the disease will be easy.

But about this - let infectious disease specialists keep repeating. Almost no one listens to them. And no one at all hears. And after all, again, there will be hundreds of thousands and even millions of asymptomatic patients, and again everyone will be driven to get vaccinated. The guarantor promised that she would help 95 percent or even more.

Huddling in your corners is not an option. This is the entrance. And, apparently, straight into the apocalypse. With hunger, with wars (and not only with local, but also with civil ones) and revolutions.

The latter will not please even the most rabid revolutionaries. Although their job, "red" or "black", will certainly do.

And it is possible to resist the realization of such dystopias only together - our world is adapted just for this.