I’ve just been talking to a Government official about ‘how the market is being sounded out’ about the cost and availability of ‘mobile morgues’. It is obvious this sort of contingency planning – emergency procurement of industrial refrigeration, in essence – is sensible and necessary, given reasonable worst case scenario estimates that additional deaths stemming from Covid-19 would run to several hundred thousand. The practicalities are grim.
That said there is seemingly reassuring news out of China today, in the disclosure that the daily rise in new Covid-19 cases has fallen to a relatively small 19. Even if the stats aren’t rock solid, they must approximate the truth, given that president Xi Jinping has emerged from his self-imposed purdah to celebrate them. This stabilisation of infections at circa 80,000, in a population of 1.4 billion, is – on the face of it – an extraordinary achievement, and shows what can be done when the might of an all-powerful centralised state takes action to restrict the freedom of movement of its people.
Apart from anything else, if the number of deaths at 3,000 is any sign of what draconian ‘social distancing’ measures (de facto 24 hour curfews) can achieve, then our new mobile morgues would remain unused.
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