By Maya Evans

In a week when the Coronavirus crisis sent millions into isolation in their homes, and the NHS was braced for an influx of patients, Planet Earth sent its loudest warning shot to date – human behaviour needs to change. COVID-19 is thought to have originated from the capturing and selling of wild animals for meat. This lack of respect towards other living creatures reflects the general lack of regard for our ecosystems such as the large-scale burning of fossil fuels, which is causing the planet to rapidly warm. What we are seeing today is a relatively small indication of what to expect in
20 to 30 years time, unless we take immediate drastic steps to change. 

In the same week UK Covid-19 lockdown was declared (23rd March), Hastings Borough Council played its part in preparing to avert catastrophic climatic change by passing its emergency climate change strategy and action plan. This follows the climate change motion of last year, pledging to go carbon neutral by 2030. Since then, HBC have been working on a strategy, with a key focus on renewable energy.  

The Covid-19 crisis has, for now, put our ambitions and action plan on hold.  But this tragic crisis has demonstrated a number of optimistic lessons for the task of tackling climate change. 

Government action

Maybe most importantly, the Government can make dramatic and radical decisions overnight and, when necessary, it can throw a LOT of money at a crisis.  Covid-19 has proven that, within a week, big money can be freed up, legislation passed, and human behaviour can dramatically change via a three-word message ‘stay at home’. 

In the same way that climate change has been a scientifically proven fact for decades, a global pandemic has been on the cards for over 10 years. Bird flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS – all triggered warnings which the government ignored, leaving the NHS without the appropriate resources and government without an adequate action plan. 

Global pandemics and climate change also share another thing in common: many people, mostly the vulnerable, are sadly going to die. The key difference between runaway climate change and Covid-19 is that a pandemic will eventually subside; sadly the same cannot be claimed for the planet post-climate tipping point: once the global temperature increases more than 1.5c, there’s no return to ‘normal’ and many more lives will be at risk.

Lessons to be learnt 

The UN’s Environment chief, Inger Andersen, said this week: “Nature is sending us a message with the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis: not taking care of the planet means not taking care of ourselves”. 

Incredible stories about the planet miraculously rejuvenating in just a few weeks are now appearing, everything everything from NASA images showing air pollution levels plummeting to dramatic improvement in the clarity of water in the canals of Venice. Optimistically, the planet has demonstrated an incredible ability to bounce back. However, the current dramatic energy scale-down has been hurting people and is unsustainable, which is why now is exactly the time to lay the foundations for a just and sustainable transition – a less chaotic scale-down which will benefit people and the planet.

Transition has now proven to be relatively easy and fast – within a week leading arms companies BAE Systems and Airbus re-skilled their workforce and tools into making desperately needed ventilators. It has been a longstanding demand of climate change activists for the multi-billion-pound arms industry to transition into making cutting edge renewable energy technology. Only a few months ago Jeremy Corbyn was ridiculed for suggesting that the British Forces should become a global emergency climate crisis response service. Today we see the British military mobilised to build the Nightingale Hospital in East London and distribute food parcels to the elderly. 

No temporary fix

Inspiringly, we’ve seen 700,000 step up to help the NHS, while in Hastings HEART volunteers have signed up for activities such as calling vulnerable people who are self-isolating and delivering essential supplies. All of this speaks to a community spirit, mutual aid and a sense of solidarity that can be harnessed to tackle climate change. The last few weeks have seen the world participate in a mass action never witnessed before – this precedent is key for our future fight against climate change.

What we’re seeing now is the practice run for the impacts of climate change. Once this crisis is over, we cannot go back to business as usual. It cannot be a temporary fix. This is the wake-up call telling us that things need to dramatically change, and it can potentially signpost us in the right direction.

• The writer is cabinet member for Climate Change on Hastings Borough Council.

Humans love a plague – it triggers some atavistic terror. But so far the most contagious thing about coronavirus is the worldwide panic attack it has provoked. It’s been a boon too to the depressed post-Brexit media. What can they report on now that’s half so exciting? Even floods and storms are a bit samey. Let’s pimp a plague.

Maybe it’s been picked up from bats or civets or snakes (past plagues have come from pigs, cattle, camels, horses, rats, chickens, monkeys). And always it has to start somewhere foreign (German measles, Spanish flu) before coming to get us – we virtuous innocents who happen to travel, pick our noses, cough and sneeze just like all other  humans.

The Facts
So here is the factual bit, generally well-reported across the media if you’ve been following:

1. The technical name for this virus is Novel corona virus or Covid 19 or SARS COV-2-2019. It is genetically 96% the same as the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) virus which peaked in 2003. SARS, though, made you quickly ill, so you knew earlier and could be isolated sooner.

2. Corona viruses are responsible for the common cold – they are numerous, ever-changing and much studied. As well as SARS we had MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) and one that decimated poultry stocks in 1937. They are very difficult to wipe out. The Common Cold Research Unit  (free home to honeymooning couples who didn’t mind being given the sniffles together) gave up in despair after about 50 years of getting nowhere.

3. This coronavirus is contagious  – but not on a par with other virulent diseases. The R0 infection rate (defined as the expected number of secondary cases produced by a single typical infection) is 2-3 for Covid 19, 10-12 for chicken pox, 12-18 for whooping cough.

4. Morbidity is no worse than seasonal flu: lots of people are exposed and don’t get ill at all; 82% of people who do develop symptoms get  a mild illness akin to a heavy cold or flu; 15% (mostly smokers, the already ill, the very young or the very old) become more severely ill; 3% get critically ill – hospitalised with pneumonia – and some 1-2%  die, as you would expect, but probably higher in China because of air pollution and smoking. 

5. There is no magic treatment. The hospital will supply oxygen to support patients’ breathing, keep them hydrated, inhibit smoking, and ventilate with machines. Drug companies are out there testing their ‘anti-virals’ in the hope of making millions by KILLING the virus    Maybe they don’t notice it rarely works for long – the bug just mutates – but let’s KILL anyway. Any vaccines are months away and, when they arrive, will be (like flu vaccines) already out of date. 

Any vaccines are months away and, when they arrive, will be (like flu vaccines) already out of date

For bird flu (2006) and swine flu (2009) the UK government is calculated to have spent an aggregate of £473m on the antiviral Tamiflu, sold by Roche, which the researchers not paid by Roche have dismissed as being less use than placebo, while making babies and old people more ill (see www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26954482 and https://traders-paradise.com/magazine/2020/01/la-roche-caught-lying for more details). 

6. Face-masks are useless. They don’t fit tight enough, leave eyes exposed, and need a filter (expensive and probably not that effective for viruses). 

What your mother told you
Then how should you protect yourself? It’s really all you know already – what your mother told you endlessly before you took charge of your own health.

As with other infections, adopt simple hygienic measures –

• Wash your hands with soap and water (not anti-bacterials—KILL! KILL ! to our detriment –which mess up the good bugs that your hands need to retain). Soap halves the under 5s death rate from cholera in Karachi, and it can help here too.

• Avoid touching surfaces or your own face. Cover your mouth if you cough or sneeze, and bin the tissue immediately; And wash your hands again.
• Avoid handshakes. I have my own no-touch greeting   ready for use: you can think up your own.
• Keep 1-2 metres away from sneezers.

Immunity
Brace your immune system, which has been brilliantly designed to survive viral attack for a few hundred millennia, by 
• cutting out sugar (crashes your white cells); 
• staying hydrated (not with alcohol); 
• getting out in the fresh air and daylight; 
• exercising daily; 
• sleeping well  (bed by 10 30pm — the hours before midnight boost your in-house steroid rhythms); 
• eating real food which might have some vitamins and minerals in it. 

Vitamin C and zinc are good 
Getting stressed and working to the point of exhaustion (like doctors in Wuhan) is bad.

Paracetomol, Lemsip etc  are bad. The body’s best age-old defence against viral attack is a nice high fever. Go to bed, stay hydrated, and kill the bugs with your own heat treatment. In healthy adults, if you stop the fever, the bugs start to party.

And of course it helps not to be a smoker: if you are, you’ve already chosen your slippery path downhill with virus-friendly damaged lungs (it does what it says on the pack).

For most of us there’s no need to panic. Looking really spooky with all those suckers AND being best friends with bats, this year it’s Covid19 that’s out there. But some bug or other always will be.

• Kathryn Vale is a retired GP who practised in London, Hastings and Hawkhurst for 30 years. The medical facts she sets out above are based on currently available information, with particular thanks to Dr Robin Murphy (USA) and Dr Russell Malcolm (UK).