Alok Rai, COVID & the ghost of Patrick Swayze

Alok Rai, whose betrothal to Patrick Swayze has previously been commemorated on this blog, writes in the Indian Express-

My epidemiologist daughter is a public health professional. On what turned out to be the eve of the fourth lockdown, she asked me in some alarm as to what was up with India’s COVID-19 policy. The following is my attempt to grope my way towards an answer.

Clearly, cretinism runs in the family. An epidemiologist asks a former Professor of Literature to explain the well-publicized 'hammer and dance' strategy. Why? How stupid is she? Just as stupid as her Daddy, apparently.

For countries around the world, there is a difficult choice to be made between two broad policy options: Containment, possibly via lockdown; or, alternatively, allowing the infection to spread, in the hope of achieving “herd immunity”.

Nonsense! The hammer and dance strategy is about ensuring the health system is not overwhelmed while preventing the economy falling off a cliff.

There are costs involved in both strategies. As for the lockdown, it imposes a severe economic cost — how severe, we will discover in the coming months and years. But the immediate costs are all too visible — not only in terms of lost jobs and closed businesses, but in India, in the form of homelessness and hunger, the searing torment of the epic caravans of workers who have been forced to become migrants. The ostensible “gain” in this lockdown strategy is slowing down the rate of spread of the infection so that “the health services are not overwhelmed”. (This is an Indian joke: There are no health services worth speaking about.)

Yes there are. India is a center of medical tourism. The joke here is that Alok Rai is writing for an Indian audience in an Indian newspaper.

But the eventual goal, even in the lockdown strategy, is the controlled spread of the infection, until an adequate proportion of the population has been infected and, hopefully, become immune.

No. It is enough for the reproduction rate to fall sufficiently within vectoral sub-populations while we wait for the vaccine.

Given this proportion — which varies from infection to infection so different bugs, different numbers — the infective virus is unable to find a sufficient number of hosts in whom to replicate itself, and the individual infection does not translate into an epidemic.

Sheer nonsense! This is only true if populations are homogeneous. They aren't. What matters is identifying relatively homogeneous sub-populations.

With a pure herd immunity strategy on the other hand, as in Sweden, there is no significant economic cost, but the infection spreads more rapidly, with a concomitant increase in mortality.

But Sweden has already seen very significant economic cost. Even under the most optimistic scenario its economy is bound to contract by at least 5 per cent. However, realistically, it will do worse on both mortality and Economic growth than its neighbors.

Sweden’s public health professionals were confident about the ability of their public health system to handle the anticipated tide of infections. However, the virus has wreaked significant havoc in terms of mortality in the care homes for the elderly.

Whereas Florida's Republican Governor targeted the elderly for protection so Florida ended up better off than New York both economically and in terms of mortality.

Anyway, back to India. While some of “us” have been locked down in relative comfort, cocooned discreetly in our “innocent” privilege, the most visible effect of the lockdown has been the crystallisation of vast mobs of hungry, desperate people who, under normal circumstances, work to keep the wheels of our “normal” life turning. They have been wrenched from their normal, gruelling lives, and forced onto the burning highways — or, indeed, onto the by-ways, walking along the railway tracks, because the police have forced them off the regular roads. Alternatively, they have been confined in “homes” that are, basically, detention facilities, in circumstances that render them rather more likely to both contract and communicate infection than they would have been under normal circumstances. So, we have some weird hybrid of lockdown, and accelerated infection, in the hope of producing herd immunity.

No. India has no such thing. This is the fantasy of a cretin who used to teach Literature.

Now, “herd immunity” has something of the rhythm of nature about it — the happily grazing herd, living through the cycles of birth and death, and acquiring immunity along the way.

This is nonsense. In a state of nature, a viral pandemic can either cause an extinction event or it creates a bottleneck. If herds are kept for meat or milk, there will be a cull to prevent this outcome. There is no fucking rhythm here. If a herd grows too small it may go extinct because it loses its ecological niche to a competitor.

But the term “herd immunity” is typically used in the context of immunity produced through vaccination, and not by letting an infection rip through a population — a mode of thinking more appropriate to our genocidal imagination.

Very true. The bison which used to roam the vast American prairie were constantly queuing up for vaccinations and flu jabs and so forth. As for genocide- it existed long before the human imagination did.

Still, what we have, whether in the milling crowds at railway stations and bus depots or in the trucks in which they are piled, desperate to get back “home”, is significantly different. These are hothouse situations — places of concentrated, intense infection. Then, ever so gradually, these people will melt away, or stumble, into the hinterland — except that the only gift which they are bringing from the metropolis this time is a “Chinese” virus. Of course, on the other side of these tides of infection — and, of course, mortality — there lies the desired heaven of herd immunity. Or so we hope.

Rai is describing exactly the thing which State Governments and the Center have previsioned and worked hard to avoid. What this cretin hopes is irrelevant.

However, there are a couple of things that have to be clarified before we start cheering.

No. There is only thing that has to be clarified. Rai may be brain-dead but his disgusting carcass is still moving about. So we have no reason to start cheering.

The first has to do with numbers. The proportion of a population that has to be immune, whether through vaccination or infection, for herd immunity to be possible varies from pathogen to pathogen. However, even a conservative (for COVID-19) estimate of 60 per cent, in a population of over 1.3 billion, adds up to a lot of human beings.

This cretin does not understand that only vectoral sub-populations matter. People who aren't exposed don't count. They can't be a vector.

And, again, even if the percentage of people who die as a consequence of infection is assumed to be a conservative 1 per cent, that still adds up to a lot of bodies — in fact, nearly 8 million.

This cretin does not get that people die anyway. COVID may reduce life expectancy but the lockdown in India reduced mortality because of other things like fewer accidents.
Where the fuck did this ex-English Professor get the idea that he knew from Math? Why did the Editor of the Indian Express publish this piffle? Does he have a secret grudge against Rai? Does he wish him to be treated as a public laughing stock? But, if so, he should publish Rai's literary essays. They are even more risible.

The actual numbers may well turn out to be much higher. But I have great confidence in the stoicism of the Indian middle-class, as evident in the ease with which they have accepted the suffering of their former servants, their maids and their handymen, the people who built their homes and serviced their vehicles. They will, I do believe, find the moral strength to bear up to the mortality of others, even in such numbers.

Children, this is what is called sarcasm. Another example of sarcasm is given at the end of this article where it is written- The writer taught in the department of English, Delhi University. The real meaning is this worthless fool prevented his students from learning anything worthwhile, including English, for the duration of his lectures.

There is however one further, cruel, twist. The aforementioned middle classes — primarily Hindu savarna — are not notable for their affection for the “herd”, any herd.

Fuck off! Savarna Hindus are notorious for the love, nay reverence, for herds and herds of cows.

But the secret and, I fear illusory, hope nurturing in their breasts is that the herd out there — dying or not dying, that’s immaterial — will generate herd immunity which will, somehow, be transferred to them.

It is perfectly sensible to isolate yourself till the reproduction rate falls so low that the chance of being infected asymptotically approaches zero.
This is no secret nor is any illusion at work. Perhaps Rai, cretin that he is, is thinking of Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death' or some other such work of scientific epidemiology.

This is, quite simply, false. Herd immunity is a statistical concept. It only means that, because a crucial proportion of the herd is immune, the pathogen cannot find sufficient hosts to produce an epidemic. But the biological immunity earned by the once-infected members of the herd — the maids and drivers — through the production of antibodies, this does not osmotically transfer to the bosses. Individual members of the herd — the properly savarna locked-down householders temporarily sharing “herd-hood” with the unfortunates out there in the slums and on the burning roads — do not become immune. They remain vulnerable.

But people who recover from COVID- as with any other virus- stop being contagious. Rai gleefully imagines a scenario where poor people get their jobs back as domestic servants but then their masters die! Ha ha hee hee! What a glorious prospect! Sadly, this stupid cunt will not live to see any such outcome.

This subtly Indian inflection of “herd immunity” has, I suggest, deep cultural roots.

No. There is nothing subtle about any fucking inflection in your mind Prof. Rai. Nor is your idiocy emblematic of India. You did your PhD in the U.K. Sadly, your professors didn't explain to you that your Doctorate didn't make you a Medical Doctor or give you any sublime insight into Epidemiology. Perhaps you believe you learned that latter subject through 'osmosis' from your daughter. Good for you! At your age it is nice to have such illusions. No doubt you are eagerly looking forward to getting your first monthly period thanks to such osmosis.

These roots go back deeper even than the insensitivities produced by inequality and the class divide. I suggest that this ties in with the brahminical tradition of transferred merit — this is the pandit who performs puja on your behalf, this is the lala who pays some tone-deaf kathavachak to regale the neighbourhood, and cleanse lalaji’s conscience.

Rai is a Kayastha. Hence his animosity against Brahmans.

In the corona version of this tradition, the poor are infected, and either die — they are expendable anyway — or they become immune in sufficient numbers to produce that very Indian herd immunity which, mysteriously but also typically, accrues to those who have done nothing to earn it.

By osmosis isn't it Alok Baba? Is there blood in your panties? Are you having your first period? How cute! Soon Alok will get married and have a baby thanks to osmosis. Ghost of Patrick Swayze will be so happy.

Vikram Patel,

 a fucking pseudo psychiatrist of an equally pseudo Leftist type

of Harvard’s School of Public Health, has described India’s erratic lockdown policy as “insane” —

because Professors of psychiatry are stupid, not necessarily mad

lockdown when infection levels are low, but in such a manner that produces intensified infection among the forcibly disrupted millions of informal workers.

There may have been a time when this was a plausible scare story. But that time has passed. Patel is keeping mum because he still has some sliver of reputation to protect. So Rai holds aloft the torch of stupidity.

Then, when the infection has been properly incubated and intensified, through some combination of incompetence and callousness, allow these millions to be disseminated into the hitherto relatively uninfected hinterland. In this way, the actual policy, as enacted on the ground, maximises both the economic catastrophe, and the ferocity of the epidemic.

Why not simply say 'Modi will eat your babies'? Why shilly shally? Tell the truth and shame the Devil. Be blunt. Say 'BJP wants to kill all the poor people. Then all your babies- including the one I will definitely after I start menstruating thanks to 'osmosis' from my daughter- will get eaten by Modi. I have reported this matter to Ghost of Patrick Swayze. He will protect the baby he is going to put in me. Then when my Swayze sasuralwale tease me for being shit at English I will reply 'I yam Doctorate of Oxforcambridge. Also I have a bouncing baby boy thanks to dirty dancing with ghost of husbandji. Tu sab barren churel ho. Mein teri chamdi nikalunge. Haan Ji Haan. Chashme buddoor.'  

But, to return to my daughter’s original question: Whence this brilliant policy, this hybrid of lock-down and herd immunity, which gives us the worst of both options — economic disaster, and a rampaging epidemic? Could it be the civil (and uncivil) servants who are, we know, the fount of all wisdom? Or is it another masterstroke from the Master, Himself?

Children, this is called 'sarcasm'. Meaning is- Modi will eat all you babies and little people. Not my baby. Ghost of Patrick Swayze will do dirty dancing to distract him and then DISHUM DISHUM he will do flying kick, karate chop! Modi ka pura maramat ho jayega. Then everybody will praise me and offer to make me Queen of India- due to I iz speak Queen's English innit? But those Brahmans will try to stop me. Fuck you Brahmans! Fuck you very much indeed!