I’m in Venice where today is supposed to be the climax of Il Redentore, an annual festival held on the third weekend in July celebrating the end of the plague in 1576 that killed 50,000 people. In 1576, the Senat decided to build a small wooden church on Giudecca Island, now known as the Redentore Church (Church of the Redeemer). It’s actually opposite the hotel I’m staying in on the main island and I can see it out of my window as I write. If things were unfolding as planned, a temporary bridge would be built out of barges across the Grand Canal and thousands of people would cross to the Church and give thanks to God for ending the plague.
But of course it’s been cancelled. The local authorities took that decision on July 10th, just one week before the festival was due to begin, delivering yet another blow to the local businesses that depend on tourism, which is the vast majority. Tourism is the city’s main source of income, with 23 million people visiting in a normal year, but that’s dwindled to almost nothing during the pandemic. The cancellation of the Festival of the Redeemer follows the cancellation of the last two days of the Venice Festival in March, as well as the postponement of the next Venice Biennale from 2021 to 2022. The hotels, museums, restaurants, bars, cafes, water taxis and gondoliers are all struggling to stay in business.
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The irony is that the absence of tourists makes this the perfect time to visit. Normally in July, the old city is like Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon, with the main thoroughfares becoming virtually impassable, let alone the narrow streets. But now, almost the only people here are Italians, either the local residents, or visitors for the day from nearby areas. I’m having a lovely time wandering around museums and churches with my family, and eating at the city’s finest restaurants. You have to wear face coverings in shops and all the visitor attractions, as well as the communal areas of the hotels, but apart from that it’s heavenly. Or it would be if I wasn’t constantly being reminded that without a massive bailout a lot of these businesses will go bust. Not only will that mean tens of thousands of people losing their livelihoods, but also less tax revenue to spend on the city’s crumbling buildings and infrastructure. Not that the Italian Government will be in a position to plug that hole. The entire Italian economy has been propped up by tourism for years and the ongoing travel restrictions around the world, as well as the public’s irrational fear of the virus, will mean a huge black hole in the country’s finances this year. I fear for the future of this beautiful city.
Must-See Interview With Professor Carl Heneghan
Freddie Sayers, the Editor of UnHerd, has done another of his interviews with high-level lockdown sceptics, this time Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson from Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. And it’s a blockbuster. Both pour scorn on the conventional wisdom about the virus. Here are some of the highlights of Professor Heneghan’s contributions:
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- On the effectiveness of masks: “By all means people can wear masks but they can’t say it’s an evidence-based decision… there is a real separation between an evidence-based decision and the opaque term that ‘we are being led by the science’, which isn’t the evidence.”
- On whether this a proper pandemic or just a bad bout of seasonal infection: “One of the keys of the infection is to look at who’s been infected, which shows a crucial difference when comparing the pandemic theory to seasonal theory. In a pandemic you’d expect to see young people disproportionately affected, but in the UK we’ve only had six child deaths, which is far less than we’d normally see in a pandemic. The high number of deaths with over-75s fits with the seasonal theory.”
- On the lockdown strategy: “Many people said that we should have locked down earlier, but 50% of care homes developed outbreaks during the lockdown period so there are issues within the transmission of this virus that are not clear… Lockdown is a blunt tool and there needs to be intelligent conversations about what mitigation strategies can keep society functioning while we keep the most vulnerable shielded.”
- On whether trying to suppress the spread of the virus is a good idea: “The benefits of the current strategy are outweighed by the harms…When it comes to suppression, only the virus will have a determination in that. If you follow the New Zealand policy of suppressing it to zero and locking down the country forever, then you’re going to have a problem… This virus is so out there now, I cannot see a strategy that makes suppression the viable option. The strategy right now should be how we learn to live with this virus.”
- On the infection fatality rate: “We will be down about where we were with the swine flu: around 0.1-0.3% which is much lower than what we think because at the moment we are seeing the case fatality.”
Worth watching in full.
