Project: Evil – The Coronavirus Meeting

‘Why are we all sat two metres apart?’ asked O’Feld, fiddling impatiently with his revolver.  Daw sighed.

‘It’s the Government directive.  To slow down the spread of Coronavirus everybody has to keep a social distance between themselves and everyone else.  It’s playing havoc with the Thugs, grade three on kill missions,’ he said.

‘Sod the Government directive, I want a group hug,’ said O’Feld, holding his arms up, not securing any enthusiasm.  Everybody remembered the last time he’d offered a group hug and it turned out to be a body double wearing a suicide vest.

‘I’ll pass,’ said Daw, tapping his notepad with his pen.  Silence hung in the air as everyone watched O’Feld’s reaction, relaxing when he merely shot a henchman delivering sandwiches to the boardroom.

‘He looked like he hadn’t washed his hands properly,’ explained O’Feld, tucking into the beef and horseradish.  ‘Brown bread, my favourite,’ he added.  ‘So, why the emergency?’ he asked.  Brian sat up as he’d been detailed by Daw to present the technical briefing, which consisted of five minutes on Wikipedia and ten on the BBC website.

‘It’s a pandemic, sweeping across the world, killing people left, right and centre,’ said Brian.  O’Feld looked interested, then a cloud crossed his face.  ‘It is one of ours, isn’t it?’ he asked in his Irish brogue, levelling the revolver at Brian.  Brian flushed, then washed his hands.  As he always did whenever he shit himself.

‘Well, yes, I’m working on a biological weapon, but you always said you wanted it deployed from space and since we lost our rocket capability it’s been on hold.  I’ve been concentrating on a simpler pocket-sized thermo-nuclear weapon system recently, tapping his breast pocket.  ‘Oops,’ he said, pulling the device out and stopping the countdown timer.  O’Feld sneered.

‘So, which one is responsible?’ he asked.  ‘Brass Digit?’

‘Gold Digit,’ sighed Daw scribbling on his pad.

‘Or that nippleless bastard Scaramouche?’ asked O’Feld, reeling off his direct competitors, not that anyone in the room would suggest any of them was competition for O’Feld.  Not waiting for Brian to answer he added, ‘Or is it Doktor Negativ up to his old tricks again?’   Brian shook his head.  

‘It started in China,’ he explained.

‘Who did it?’ asked O’Feld, only to be interrupted by the Diversity Officer.

‘Mr O’Feld, that’s a terrible racial stereotype,’ she said.  ‘You’re capable of much better racial stereotypes.’  O’Feld shrugged his shoulders and looked back at Brian, who continued his explanation.

‘It appears it is just a random mutation of an existing coronavirus existing in the animal kingdom that has crossed the species line and is infecting humans,’ he said, breathing in for the big spiel.

‘Enough of the science talk already,’ said O’Feld, ‘how does this affect our business?’  The catering manager looked up eagerly.

‘Half of the staff are self isolating, so my budget is going to look pretty good next month,’ he said.  The finance manager looked at Brian.


‘How is this affecting our staff levels?’ he asked.

‘Well, here in Basildon there is a lot of absenteeism at the moment,’ he confirmed, adding, ‘and the hookers and the thugs have agreed to work from home for the foreseeable.  There’s no reports that it has reached our uninhabited island in the South Seas yet, but I’m concerned that if it does it’ll sweep through the uninhabitants like a dose of salts,’ said Brian.  The meeting fell silent as the members considered the slave labour uninhabitant population for approximately three seconds.

‘Can they be replaced?’ asked O’Feld. Daw nodded.

‘That’s why you pay me the big bucks to be your HR director,’ he said.  O’Feld glowered.

‘I pay you?’ he asked.  The finance director leaned across the table.

‘Don’t worry, his salary is tax deductable.’

‘I pay tax?’ asked O’Feld, panic rising in everyone downwind of his revolver barrel.

‘Not so much pay as claim State benefits,’ explained the finance director, defusing the situation and, critically, the C4 bomb O’Feld had brought out of his bag.  He put the detonator to one side while O’Feld turned his attention back to Brian.

‘So, what’s the impact on the business?’ he asked Brian.

‘Well, it’s pretty much business as usual.  The protection racket’s going well, especially as we take PayPal now.  We’ve just issued social distancing guidance for thugs smashing up premises behind on their payments,’ he explained, ‘although the hookers are struggling to comply.  

‘And everyone is washing their hands,’ he added.

‘To eradicate the virus?’ asked O’Feld.

‘Oh, er, yes, that as well.  But mainly for corporate plausible deniability,’ he explained.

‘What about the people who work here?’ O’Feld asked.  The finance director was all over this.

‘We can claim 80% of our employees’ salaries from the Government if we furlough them,’ he said.

‘We pay employees? This gets worse by the minute,’ said O’Feld, his head in his hands while he contemplated whose head he’d prefer to be holding.  The finance director’s head looked favourite for leaving his shoulders.

‘Of course not, we feed them, clothe them, kill them when we’ve had enough of them.  But we’ve got a wonderful forgery department that can produce any amount of documents pretending to pay them,’ said the finance director, feeling his head was a little more secure.  Brian pitched in, if only to ensure his head didn’t replace the finance director’s.

‘But, the best bit is, we now know how much they’re prepared to pay.’  O’Feld looked up, questioningly.  Brian continued.  ‘Up until now, when we’ve decided to hold the planet to ransom getting the amount to ask for has always been the hardest.  Pitch too low and you’re the laughing stock of the megalomaniac underworld, too high and you’ve got a brace of nukes on your hands,’ he said, popping the pocket-sized thermo-nuclear device back in his pocket.

‘But now we know the UK are prepared to pay £350 billion, the Yanks up to $2 trillion and the Italians 25 pizzas.  It’s easier to make our demands,’ he said.  The finance director pulled a sheet of paper from under his notepad that had ‘pay us £2.3 trillion in used notes or the planet gets it, signed B L O’Feld’ using letters cut out from daily newspapers.

‘I’ve had this awhile, I only had to insert the amount,’ he crowed.  O’Feld was impressed.

‘I hope that typeface isn’t from the Daily Mail,’ he said, standing, indicating that the meeting was over.  ‘Hateful newspaper’, he said.

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I hope you enjoyed this topical extra Project: Evil instalment.  If you have and you missed Project: Evil first time around then catch up on Brian, Daw and, of course, Barry Liam O'Feld, the famous Irish Megalomaniac in the original book.

You can catch up on any or all of my books in ebook and paperback format on the links provided on this page.  If you are a Kindle Unlimited member then these books can be downloaded for free.

Why measuring the virus is important - could a truck skew the CV stats?

As I mentioned in a recent blog, the numbers presented nationally and internationally, are virtually useless.  The amount of people diagnosed with CV 19 is likely to be a fraction of the likely infection rate, and what size fraction depends on which country you look at.  South Korea has invested in aggressive testing and have a better idea of the demographics affected by the disease than most other countries.  In the UK we are still waiting for front line NHS staff dealing with the pandemic to be tested.

Another worrying number is the number of recorded deaths.  It's not at all clear if the deaths recorded against CV 19 are reporting deaths that are wholly or largely attributable to the virus, or just recording the number of people known to have died while the virus is live within them.  As the main health scientist for the UK admitted a few weeks ago, there 'may be some overlap' between the number of CV 19 deaths and deaths that would have occurred with or without the virus.  In all probability many of those deaths may have been brought forward by an indeterminate period of time - hours, days, possibly weeks - but it could be argued that it didn't substantially change the outcome.

Put another way, suppose a bus was transporting 30 CV 19 patients who were otherwise fit enough to travel in this way to one of the field hospitals being set up around the country.  A truck goes out of control and rams the bus off the motorway, killing everyone on board.  Would we class those deaths as CV 19 as all 30 passengers were diagnosed with the virus at the time of death? I know, you could argue that without the virus they wouldn't have been on the bus in the first place, but the distinction is still important.  Without knowing or appreciating how dangerous the disease is to those of us with a reasonable expectation of life into the end of this year, into next, hopefully the decade after it will be difficult to maintain the lockdown conditions.  Assuming it is considerably more than the imminently dead that are at serious risk then until the population have a reason to believe this then many will start to challenge the lock downs until perhaps the stats locally show them that there is a reason.

Getting clarity on the recording is difficult, and this in itself isn't a new thing.  The annual winter flu deaths are openly recorded in the US - they seem to be available in the UK but are harder to drag out into the open - but seem to make the same assumption that I suspect is being made with CV 19 - if someone dies while fighting the flu it is recorded as a winter flu death.  I suspect not all are only attributable to the winter flu and many wouldn't have seen the spring without being infected.

Some are openly critical of the UK government's stance, notably a renegade Scottish GP based in Cheshire, England.  I'm generally a fan of Dr Malcolm Kendrick, he makes bold and well measured arguments about over medication and is particularly outspoken on Cardio-vascular disease (CVD), which he has spent all his professional life studying and unravelling.  He is especially critical about the apparent and officially supported link between cholesterol and heart disease, and the subsequent mass distribution of statins.  If you have an apparently high level of cholesterol and are on or being advised to take statins then I highly recommend your read his book The Great Cholesterol Con.  I also recommend his book Doctoring Data where he looks critically at the way Big Pharma distorts data to support their industry, at our personal financial and health costs.

Dr Kendrick has taken a pop at the way the CV 19 pandemic is being managed in his latest blog entry  (dated 29 March 2020 in case you're stumbling across this some time after being published) - be warned, the man doesn't pull his punches and doesn't mind being controversial.  He thinks the costs associated with the government strategy outweighs the good it actually will do, particularly if we are merely helping to prolong very ill people for a relatively short duration at the expense of other people who will suffer harm through missed appointments and the harm to the economy that affects peoples' health - he has evidence of this which is repeated in his books.  I'm not convinced by the good doctor's opinion in this case, although I believe it bears reading and discussing.  There are many reasons I'm unconvinced, but one reason is back to the points I made at the top of this blog - I don't think we have enough quality data from anywhere to make a really hard-nosed decision.

My greatest fear is not the virus but the missed opportunity governments around the globe are creating by not testing and retesting early and often enough.  This is data we really can only obtain in the here and now - what we've missed already, we've missed.  We need to start gathering quality data now, if not for this pandemic then for the next one so the world can be better informed and better prepared.

Is the lockdown necessary?

I'm going to start with a spoiler alert, if only to save you scrolling to the last paragraph.  Yes, I fully believe the lockdown is necessary and, if I'm honest, started way too late.  My last week in work before the lockdown I was identifying students clearly unwell, and others that openly were stating that members of their household were self isolating because of displaying symptoms.  I sent a fair few students off campus and hopefully home during the week.  At least two such unwell students asked me to take assignments off them before they left - er, no chance.

I'd complained the week before to management about being asked to teach in classrooms with half the students clearly unwell - there wasn't any government advice in place at that time but common sense and a brief scrutiny of the world news was sufficient evidence to me that we shouldn't be cramming twenty plus students into rooms designed for sixteen with the corona virus spreading so quickly.

Social distancing isn't a problem for my wife and I - I've been practising it for decades anyway and my wife has been preparing for Armageddon all our married life so we really didn't need to worry about the idiots panic buying.  But it's clearly a problem for a lot of people, as locally and nationally people were ignoring the pleas to not visit places that are traditionally crowded.  I suspect many agreed in principle, but didn't think it applied per se to them.

It's easy to see why some might think that way.  Outside of the large cities most of us haven't experienced personally anyone definitely contracting the virus, let alone falling seriously ill.  That's going to change dramatically - today in the UK the death rate increased by 25% of the total to date in one day.  It's accelerating and it's not going to slow down until the lockdown takes effect in at least two weeks' time, possibly longer if people keep on flouting the rules.

The stats, horrible that they are, are far from useful.  Like many of you I'm frequently referring to the Johns Hopkins Covid 19 tracker website, watching the numbers ratchet up.  There's three key numbers on there - amount diagnosed, deaths and amount recovered.  None of the numbers are remotely useful when we think about them.

Take the deaths total - that should be useful as it records the known deaths associated with CV19, however we know that many of these deaths would have happened anyway, perhaps not on that date but within a reasonable time.  What we really need to know, if only to focus minds, is how many deaths are absolutely as a result of the virus, that the person who passed away would be with us and living a normal life if only they had avoided the virus.

The recovered statistic is almost certainly an underestimate.  Most countries aren't testing anywhere near enough to determine the infection rate, and most have put retesting people who did test positive to see if they have recovered on the to-do list.  Perfectly understandable, but if we want to be reassured that most of us will survive this then that statistic is the one most will look at.

The infected stat is, as suggested above, almost certainly meaningless as most people with symptoms are not being tested.  Front line staff dealing with patients aren't being routinely tested in the UK at the time of writing - that will change in the next week, but as well as staff in the NHS and other allied services being exposed to risk without sensible health monitoring, there's a risk that  some of them are passing on the virus inadvertently to vulnerable patients.

This pandemic, terrible that it is, is almost certainly the dress rehearsal for the pandemic to come that doesn't spare 80% with a mild cold but kills a serious proportion of those who contract it.  I wrote in Parallel Lives about the race to prevent such a pandemic in a future UK that was isolated from the world but was under terrorist threat of a SARS type infection.  Incredibly, the pandemic situation wasn't the worst event in the book, but there you go.

In summary I think the worst is yet to come, please play your part in containing the spread.  If not for yourself, if you're youngish and fairly healthy it should do you little or no harm, then for the vulnerable in your circle of influence - those you know and those you pass in the street. Stay safe and follow the rules.  If you never stray onto my blog again or ever consider reading any of my books that's fine, I just hope you and many, many more have that choice.  What all of us do in the next few weeks will determine how many people have the choice.

All of my books are available for free on Amazon Unlimited

After posting my last blog I made a rash, and heavy hearted, decision.  For the time being I've gone exclusive on Amazon instead of the halfway house I'd considered.  I can revert to non-exclusive listing sometime in the future, but I'm going to give this a good go first.

One of the opportunities of being in KDP Select is that I can run promotions and have a raft of these scheduled for the next few months.  In fact two are running as of right now.  

Project: Evil is currently free to anyone through Amazon (link is to UK store, but should let you redirect to your registered location).  This book is almost certainly the only comedic book on Project Management, a subject close to my heart.  I always felt project teams took their role over-seriously and secretly found much of the environment funny.  In this book I've tried to capture the funny side of PM, albeit from an unusual viewpoint - just how would you go about project managing the building of a super secret evel lair in the South Seas complete with planet destroying missile capability?  Act before 21 March and find out for free.  Otherwise it is free to all Kindle Unlimited customers - those of you self isolating with your Amazon Prime subscription could take advantage at any time.

In addition Hotel California is on a Countdown offer where the price is reduced to £0.99 for a period, before rising to a price a little higher for a few days longer.  Follow the trail of Ricky Maggott and find out what really happened to Elvis.  Offer ends 24 March, but again the book is free to Kindle Unlimited customers.

Please feel free to take advantage of these offers, and don't forget to spread the word to your self isolating and free friends.  My other seven books are also on Kindle Unlimited so are eligible for free download for those with the right subscriptions, plus they will all feature in promotions sometime soon - watch this space.