Society

Take a step back from the COVID-19 pandemic, and compare one country against another. I wonder which will benefit and which will suffer from the consequences of COVID 19. I mean in the long run, measured over the next thirty years.

In the UK, the oldest in the population have died and will die. Their wealth will pass to the next generation. The age profile of the country will change. There will be more people of working age and more spending power for those who inherited unexpectedly early. The drain on the Health Service will be less because the vulnerable will have died. For non-COVID patients there will be an increased demand. That will come from those whose disease progressed more than it would with earlier treatment. But that will be offset in part or whole by those who died waiting for treatment.

Life expectancy will decrease because those who could have had treatment for non-COVID disease early did not. And pension funds will benefit, according to XPS actuaries:

Article In The Times November 30th 2020

Employers with large pension deficits are expected to seize on Covid-19 to justify making smaller payments in their negotiations with the funds they sponsor in the coming years.
An analysis from the actuaries XPS, formerly Punter Southall, suggests that deaths in Britain by the end of March will be around 100,000 higher than in a normal year. In its worst case scenario, which it says is unlikely, it sees 250,000 excess deaths in total.
These so-called “excess deaths”, along with a recession-induced reduction in life expectancy growth in the years ahead, will cut the liabilities of defined benefit schemes in the UK by between 1.5 and 3.5 per cent — or £25 billion to £60 billion, it estimates on its central case forecast.

COVID-19 Case Fatality Rates

Britain had a case fatality rate of 15.4% early on in the pandemic. That was in part caused by decisions made by the British Government to move elderly infected patients from hospital to nursing homes. Once in nursing homes filled with the elderly, the virus spread like wildfire.

The COVID-19 death rate when I first drafted this article at the end of 2020 was down to 3.6%. Now at the beginning of 2022, the death rate is down to a fraction of 1%.

The initial case fatality rate in Britain was much higher than almost anywhere in the world. Britain will benefit, therefore, from having a older generation die early. It’s positively Machiavellian.

The unknown is long-COVID, and how long it lasts. How long is the ‘long’ in long-COVID? And what proportion of the affected will find life less than optimal far into their lives?

As of July 2018 there were up to 24,000 patients in the NHS In England in either a permanent vegetative or minimally conscious state, according to an estimate by Professor Derick Wade, a consultant in neurological rehabilitation in Oxford.

This was reported because of the decision by The Supreme Court. The decision was that families and doctors of patients in a persistent vegetative state no longer need permission from a court to withdraw end-of-life care if both the relatives and the doctors agree.

First, the number is staggering. If you asked one hundred people to guess or estimate the number of such patients, who would say 24,000? Second, does this represent a dangerous slide towards something we might not be happy with? After all, once a law is enacted it can serve any kind of society.

Last year, the German company Thyssenkrupp declared force majeure as the reason for lawfully getting out of its obligations to complete various of its contracts or to complete them within a certain time.

Specifically, it cited the Rhine’s low water levels for disrupting the delivery of raw materials to its Duisburg plant. 

The water in the river was so shallow that the ships, laden with raw materials for the factory, could not float free of the bottom of the river. They would simply run aground if they tried to navigate the Rhine.

Photographs showed people walking on a broad stony beach that would normally be under water.

Around 40 percent of Switzerland’s diesel is brought into the country along the Rhine, with the rest by cargo trains, pipelines, trucks and the country’s own refineries.

Switzerland stores diesel against the possibility of interruption to its supply. This Monday, the Swiss Federal Office for National Economic Supply decided to allow the release of 30,000 cubic metres of diesel.

That is about two-and-a-half percent of the amount Switzerland has in storage.

It has done so because they cannot bring any diesel into the country by ship up the Rhine because the Rhine is dry.

James Francis Edward Stuart was just a few months old when his father, King James II of England and Ireland and James VI of Scotland, was sent into exile in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The king was exiled because he would not bow to a populace that wanted Protestantism and not Catholicism as the religion of the realm.

After King James’ exile, the country invited his Protestant elder daughter Mary and her husband William III (William of Orange) to be the joint monarchs of the United Kingdom. And so it went on until James Francis Edward Stuart, prompted by his cousin Louis XIV of France claimed the throne in 1715 in the First Jacobite Rebellion. He actually claimed the throne after his father’s death in 1701. Specifically, he claimed the English, Scottish and Irish crown as James III of England and Ireland and James VIII of Scotland. But he was not ready to make his move until the allies in Scotland were ready in 1715.

The rebellion was unsuccessful. And when he died in 1766, his son Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) tried again in the equally unsuccessful Second Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

The Old And Young Pretenders

James Francis Edward Stuart was known by his opponents as The Old Pretender, and his son Charles Edward Stuart was known as the Young Pretender. Pretender to the throne has such a strong negative connotation that it is no wonder that the epithets stuck.

And with the clarity borne of this distance of time it is hard to imagine how the rebellions could ever have been successful. The country had split from Rome under Henry VIII in the late 1530s. Now, nearly two hundred years later, how could anyone think the country had a taste for returning to Catholicism?

The National Archives has a photo of an exhibit from the West Highland Museum in Fort William, It is a wineglass in clear glass decorated with a white rose and two buds in frosted glass. The white rose refers to the James VIII, the exiled Stuart monarch, the ‘King across the water’. And the two buds are his sons Charles and Henry.

Henry Benedict Stuart

Henry was Henry Benedict Stuart, a Catholic Cardinal and the last of the line to claim the throne. He went to France in 1745 to help his brother Charles prepare the Jacobite rising. And in France he was the nominal commander of a cross-channel invasion force of 10,000 men of the French army. But the group never left France, and Henry subsequently served under Maurice de Saxe at the siege of Antwerp.

On 16 April 1746, at what is called the Battle of Culloden, the Jacobite army was defeated by a British force under Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, on Drummossie Moor near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. And that was the end of the Jacobite rebellions.

After the defeat at Culloden, Henry Stuart returned to Italy and died there in 1807, aged 82.

So what do we learn? James Francis Edward Stuart suffered fits of melancholy until his death. Bonnie Prince Charles became an alcoholic.

So, if you are pushing a doomed project against the tide of history, it is better to be an ineffectual third son and die peacefully at a ripe old age.