The news that Cath Kidston are in trouble(see various news media) is disturbing. This was quite a successful business, with strong growth, a distinctive brand, and a nicely targeted market- adult women. OK, not my bag-but if you saw inside their shops, it was well designed, and the whole seemed more that the sum of the individual parts.

The issue here is not whether they survive or not, but that they and so many other brands and stores are in trouble. What happens next?

Any retail brand emerging from the corona virus crisis will need money. The trouble is that investors may look at the successful new parts of retail-distribution, storage and on line marketing. Many retail companies trade from premises owned by someone else, and so it’s hard to see where the collateral for big loans will emerge from. Certainly, funds will have to be competed for.

Which brings us to the second point of angst- investor portfolios may well look shy of retail property, and even parts of commercial property altogether. It is no exaggeration to state that retail shop clusters (that’s High Street to you and me) have been at the centre of our lives for at least eleven hundred years. They provide the very focus for communities, where things like charities, politics and just simple social networks thrived. For a very, very long time.

Of course all societies change. But the sheer size of such a change in such a very, very short time, may be very hard to manage indeed. Ideas, anyone?

Some of the most intelligent people on the planet are making heroic efforts to develop a vaccine for the SARS-Cov-2 virus. You can find good coverage of their efforts in all the best media, New Scientist, Guardian, Mail…you name it. We know they are doing their best, but safe manufacture and production take time, and there’s no point offering an easy target for antivaxxers. Eighteen months seems a pretty good estimate, and anything that comes in ahead of that would be good indeed.

But there’s one thing that worries and concerns: could this virus mutate, and jump away from the vaccine? I am not a virologist. but here’s my scenario, for what it’s worth.

I start with that excellent site Live Science http://www.livescience.com/coronavirus. Way way back in February (seems a lifetime now, doesn’t it?) they reported how Chinese scientists in Wuhan had identified two strains of SARS-Cov 19, which they called S and L. Other experts criticised the extent to which these variations were significant, and assert that virus mutation rates are quite slow. Slow enough to ensure that a vaccine will protect a very large number of people for a very long time.

It’s certainly true that some viruses never seem to overcome our vaccine defences. As the article points out, measles , mumps and yellow fever have stayed largely under control, where a vaccine is deployed.

However, and this is where my speculation takes over, some don’t. We all have to get a new flu virus every winter. Partly this is due to a slight decline in the efficacy of our immune system. But, it’s also due to mutations in proteins in the outer coat of the flu virus, due to a process called antigenic drift. Your immune system no longer recognises the slight change in the virus, and -bingo-you either get a new vaccine or you get the flu.

Most people will object that the influenza virus belongs to the family orthomyxoviridae, whereas our friend SARS Cov 19 is in the coronaviridae family. (see Wikipedia).

Well………. The Devil whispers in my ear, thus. Both viruses have a an RNA core. They both have glycoprotein coats. The transmission mechanisms are eerily similar. So why would one mutate, and not the other? Watch this space, gentle readers. Watch this space.

en.//Wikipedia.org/wiki/coronavirus

That most excellent scientist, Professor Colin Garner makes an excellent case why the Corona virus crisis would be a lot, lot worse in the absence of good antibiotics. I have taken the liberty of cherry picking the key points from his recent newsletter here

“A recent scientific paper from Wuhan, China published in the well-known medical journal, the Lancet, reported that sepsis was responsible for all the deaths in the study group. Of this group, half had a secondary bacterial infection that failed to respond to antibiotics. How heart-breaking. Sadly secondary bacterial infections are very common in coronavirus victims as the COVID-19 virus attacks the body’s immune cells. It is vital therefore that antibiotics keep on working and that new ones are found. Eventually a vaccine will be developed for COVID-19 in contrast to antibiotics where no new ones are on the horizon. This is why we believe our research to be so important.”

I have highlighted the key learning points.

This man’s battle is on behalf of us all

To gather ideas from intelligent people from all walks of life who can make things better.

Are you a teacher who can really transfer learning? Tell us here!

Are you a carer who is holding society together in the face of crisis?

A scientist with a new idea? A manager who thinks it’s wrong to bully and scream at people?

Or just got your own mind?

WE WANT TO HEAR! WE WANT YOUR STORIES!

I once had the honour and privilege of meeting Anthony Hilton at a certain party in a certain building. He should be anybody’s first go to on all matters political and economic. And as an avid reader of his column for many years, I slowly began to appreciate his advice on how important the small to medium sized business is, as an engine of innovation and dynamism. Count me among the converted for the rest of this read.

Now with the coronavirus crisis, this sector is in real, real trouble. We should all give full marks to the government for trying to help http://www.gov.uk covid 19 support for businesses. But….in a worse case scenario , what if it isn’t enough? Imagine your favourite little local restaurant deciding it can’t, it really just can’t, go over to take-aways. So it stops buying from suppliers of food, IT and labour. They in turn do the same. As the businesses shrink, the banks can no longer lend—oooops it’s 1933 all over again. And once a business is gone-well, it’s gone, there is no simple re start

So how do you jump start an economy that is completely and utterly dead. Stalled. Kaputt? I am afraid that the answer could very well be by Direction of Labour. Picking projects. And putting the recovered to work on them. Consider the following. Not far from where I live is a large wind farm .It stretches along the outshore waters from Brighton to roughly Worthing. Imagine that you took a lot of unemployed workers and made them extend it all the way to say Chichester. First, you would have created real wealth, in the form of extra power. It’s not as efficient as how capitalists would have done it, but it’s done. Secondly you put unemployed people back to work. They then take their wages and spend them in local businesses on beer, chips and goodness knows what else(this is a family blog) At this point, with money circulating again, a capitalist economy begins to reboot. Far fetched?It’s actually what happened between 1939 and 1951. After a dozen years of socialist planning, the economy was beginning to tick over so well that a Conservative Government was able to take over again.

Now the point of this blog is to generate ideas: I bet I have missed something. So….what do you think?

Firstly, apologies, we slightly misspelt the name of Professor Colin Garner in the last post

What Professor Garner has done is to :

-identify an urgent need and formulate a thoroughly professional response

-create a linked “ecology” of researchers and experts, who can now be redeployed to help with the COVID 19 crisis. If you look below, you will see how he has responded to this

If a society is to thrive and grow, it needs a few more like Professor Garner and a few less whizz kids who just want to make a million!

Below, I give the charity website link- although I cannot seem to preview it

Homepage New

The great Covid 19 crisis, however bad it gets, will one day pass. It is a serious medical emergency; yet it masks an equally great one- our utter deficiency in new antibiotics. Without them, all surgical interventions become terrifyingly hazardous-whether it is routine surgery, childbirth,or major interventions like cancer surgery.

A few years ago, a great man called Professor Colin Gardiner set up a charity called antibiotics research UK. Their aim is to promote new research, and to encourage best practice . To help him, Professor Gardiner has worked with some of the finest minds in the country, including Dame Sally Davies and Lord Jim O’Neill. In the coming months, I will be covering more of the work of this most timely charity. As soon as possible, I will post a link to their website, which I cannot reach now for technical reasons

http://www.antibioticresearch.org.uk

My first day as a blogger, Wednesday 1st April 2020. At the height of the Coronavirus crisis, in what TS Elliott called “April, the cruellest month.” My aim is to gather together interesting information on developments in science, economics, and the we way people behave. It’s stuff that has caught my eye, or that of my friends. It will be non political in nature; bitter experience has shown me that the most unexpected people can save your life. No side has a monopoly on wisdom or virtue.

I will also be trying to speak in English. Which means the use of relative pronouns such as which and that. More on this in due course

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton