Tag: Italy

Sunny days and coronavirus

We know that March can have wonderful days. Not this year, we thought. We were wrong. The wind is south-easterly, the sky a deeper blue than we Brits are used to, and the sun is warm, even hot by day, and the nights are chill. Floods are receding, the mud which clogs our field paths is drying out. Should we be exultant? The clocks will change this weekend…

If only. This is crisis time. Coronavirus has invaded all our lives. A time to be anxious, to worry about relatives and friends. If not ourselves. We’ve a wartime, a bunker mentality. We can’t get together to chat by conventional means, so we find new ways.

All those political disagreements, the scars of four years of Brexit enmity, are put aside because we all of us have a bigger, shared agenda.

That may sound positive. But the real world is bleak  For health workers, care workers, anyone travelling by public transport, for people working when they don’t want to, living in towns or cities, built-up areas, blocks of flats, for people who’ve lost their jobs, or the self-employed, people without work or income, relying on promises from government.

Testing kits, ventilators, masks? We haven’t had, and still don’t have, the equipment. Anti-viral kits – available when?

The real statistics – how much worse are the real statistics, with so many untested?

What of the US? Trump believes the tide could be turned, restrictions lifted, by Easter. But New York is battening down. Has Italy peaked? Check the number of deaths there as a percentage of cases. So much higher than anywhere other than Spain. Spain now has more deaths recorded than China.

Reading through the data it is evident that different countries have radically different testing regimes. In the U.K., what about care homes? They aren’t testing their residents – there simply isn’t the equipment.

The available data suggest that France and Germany have far more cases, France twice as many, Germany three times as many, as the U.K. But France has forty deaths per one million population, the U.K. eighteen – and Germany only six. That suggests far more testing in Germany, and a realistic death rate, and far less testing in the U.K., which is indeed the reality. We have far more cases than the available figures suggest.

(The demographics are helpful in contrasting the U.K. and Italy and Spain. In 2018 just 16% of (British) 25-34 year olds lived with their parents, compared with 44% of Spaniards and 49% of Italians.’ (The Economist))

India with only a small number of cases, that is, reported cases, has gone into lockdown. What indeed, would be the implications for a country as open and chaotic as India if the virus took hold? An early lockdown of 1.3 billion makes sense.

Coronavirus has scale. It has entered into very corner of our lives and, it seems, into every corner of the world. We are reminded, as maybe never before, that we are one world, one humanity, open to the same diseases, and with the same capacity for coming together in a crisis.

I try to keep up with wider news. Bennie Gantz being asked to form a government in Israel, though today’s news is that he will serve in a unity government under Netanyahu. The end of Netanyahu?The reining in of settlements? Not yet.

Joe Biden looks odds-on to be the Democratic candidate for president. The opponent Trump didn’t want. And backed by a Bloomberg billion or two. Trump has a remarkable ability to dictate agendas. It may be harder now. Especially if coronavirus heads west and south from New York across the USA.

And what of the USA and China, with their spat over the origins of the virus, and the impact it’s already had by way of expulsion of high-level American journalists from China.

But as for other news, you may search, but you will not find.

When the world does re-open, there will be some big surprises.

Infrastructure and the Genoa bridge

Infrastructure hasn’t over the years been a topic of too much debate. It simply went on, all around us, yet curiously out of sight. We’d complain, some of us, about HS2 and Hinckley Point, but these are new glamour projects. Not the day to day. The day to day is about detail, hard graft, the invisible – and the maintenance of what we have.

All has been suddenly thrown into a much sharper perspective by last week’s collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa. The human cost is terrible, the economic cost (access to Genoa’s port, north-south communication) serious, the political cost (Italians disillusioned with government now even more so – but to whom do they turn?) likely to be high.  Italy’s interior minister blames the Eurozone’s strict rules on budget deficits – but as the Financial Times points out ‘a bigger constraint is the crushing burden of interest payments on Italy’s public debt’, 132% of annual economic output. (Source: Tony Barber, FT 18/19 August.)

Italy is not alone. Germany has bridge issues of its own. Obama’s transportation secretary described the US as ‘one big pothole’. Much of the road network across Britain, once you leave the motorway system, is in a poor state of repair: not dangerous, but a significant impediment to good communication.

(How many other bridges small as well as large on motorways across the developed world are suspect? The Genoa bridge had passed all its tests. I’m reminded of the long-term roadworks on the M5 just south of the M6 junction. You see few workers on the motorway itself: there are 40 or so (notices tell us) out of sight, working below the road surface. That at least is re-assuring.)

Quoting Tony Barber again: in the UK, ‘governments of all political stripes tend to neglect unglamorous small scale infrastructure projects and repair work in favour of ostentatious schemes with predictably spiralling costs.’

HS2 (high speed rail link) is a case in point. Local infrastructure (taking in the north-west, north-east, south, and south-west of England, and Wales and Scotland – HS2 may in twenty years time, with a following wind, just about reach Manchester and Leeds) and high levels of maintenance of existing infrastructure would be a far wiser way to spend money. In the case of Hinckley B (our very own Chinese-financed nuclear power station), funding requirements have trumped political considerations – and reduced our scope for independence and influence in the world.

One other consideration, which Italy’s situation highlights. Massive infrastructure self-evidently requires massive maintenance and repair costs, and that assumes continuing stellar economic performance. Will we need our skyscrapers in fifty (or a hundred) years’ time? Will our road networks be underused, radically underused, as we develop new modes of transport?

We move too fast, too blindly, and that won’t stop any time soon. The Chinese Belt and Road initiative is one guarantee of that. Development is driven as much by political and strategic as well as economic considerations. (One powerful reason why we need to be part of the EU – only that way will we have serious political heft in the world.)

What we can do is hold to the simple truth that infrastructure requires maintenance, and put aside the money in national budgets across the world to ensure that it is carried out to the highest level. That is the imperative now. (Easy to say, immeasurably harder to ensure it happens.) As for the future, we cannot simply rely on continuing high levels of prosperity as a guarantee of the required levels of funding, via taxation and borrowing or private investment.

If we cannot be confident in the long-term maintenance of our infrastructure, then we shouldn’t be building. One day our leaps into the dark will come to haunt us.