This article was originally published in Danish on March 17, 2020.

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I may well be a grumpy old man – but precisely because I am an old man and therefore in the high-risk group for dying from this Chinese virus, which has been imported with our eyes wide open over the last month without anyone doing anything about it, I will take the liberty of lambasting the completely brainless Mette Frederiksen and the other lunatics surrounding her.

We have flu epidemics every year – some worse than others. We have seen Hong Kong flu, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, and what have you, without it causing any further panic. The same was true during the polio epidemic in the early 1950s. My mother was nervous, and we probably stayed at home in our remote village, but the country was not shut down for that reason, and polio is a serious matter, I should point out. Influenza epidemics burn out at an infection rate of about 60% of the population, who are then more or less immune to that type of influenza.

In 2018, according to Statistics Denmark, 2,103 people died of pneumonia and influenza, 3,789 of bronchitis and asthma, and 6,627 of heart disease—out of a total of 55,232 deaths, just to give us some concrete figures to work with. The Danish Health Authority estimates that the coronavirus will kill between 1,600 and 5,600 people, the vast majority of whom will be elderly people who already have serious illnesses and whose remaining life expectancy is short and perhaps not particularly pleasant. This may sound cynical, of course, but in my view, it is not a national disaster that threatens the country’s existence!

Mette Frederiksen’s cure, on the other hand, is! Shutting down the country will totally destroy the economy for a long time to come. This applies to both the national economy and the economy of individuals, and as usual, it will be pensioners who will suffer the most. People who are now dependent on their pension savings will find life very difficult and will probably not live long enough to see the economy recover. Many businesses will simply close down. Hotels, restaurants, cafes, SAS – the list will be long, and it will also include manufacturing companies if this circus goes on for too long. Now I ask, how much is a human life worth? It’s not that I think we should put a price on human life, but the healthcare system already does so on a large scale. People are denied vital medication if it is too expensive. Recently, the press reported on a couple of girls who would go blind – and therefore at risk of becoming a burden on society – if they did not receive a rather expensive medicine. They did not receive it. It was too expensive – and never mind the expenses that blind people often incur. That is another box that does not concern the healthcare system!

In addition, the healthcare system can now postpone check-ups, treatment, and diagnosis of people who are genuinely ill and who will die if their treatment is not initiated immediately and followed up with check-ups. How many cancer and heart patients will Mette Frederiksen kill with this legislation – which also deprives us of fundamental freedoms and “human rights”? My guess is that she will kill more than she will save! And you can bet that this precedent will be used on other occasions. The threshold for what constitutes a national emergency has been lowered alarmingly!

Mette Frederiksen’s fumbling government has an urgent need to show “decisiveness” – especially since it has so far failed to do so in response to this epidemic, which did not come creeping up like a thief in the night. At a time when other countries had long since introduced – albeit superficial – health checks at their borders, it was possible to fly freely and unhindered into Copenhagen Airport from both China and Italy, even though both countries were danger zones. Had something been done at that time, it might have been possible to stop or slow down the epidemic. But the decision was made to do nothing. Now panic is spreading, but in any case it is too late. Today, we will only reap the disastrous consequences.

What is the plan after the first two weeks? No one has thought about it. The hope is that the epidemic will be prolonged so that hospitals will be better able to cope with large numbers of patients because they will have less to do when the weather gets warmer. However, two weeks will hardly make much difference in this regard. As it gets warmer, however, the virus will spread more slowly and possibly disappear on its own, or more likely go into hibernation until autumn, when the circus can start all over again. Mette Frederiksen will take credit for the virus possibly going into remission naturally, but she will wash her hands of it if it returns in the fall. Politically, she is playing a familiar social democratic game.

Common sense dictates that we need to get this flu over and done with as quickly as possible so that we can return to normal and hopefully restore our economy. If we let diseases run their course now, we would create immunity in the population and could sit back and wait for the next Chinese virus, because it will definitely come, unless we do away with globalisation. There will be some deaths – but there would be anyway, even if we prolong the agony. However, the costs of this prolongation will be astronomical and will cripple us for a long time to come. We could simply implement measures to protect those who are particularly vulnerable.

I was raised according to the principle “The good of the whole comes before the good of the individual!” I still think that is a very sound principle!

Mette Frederiksen will, of course, defend herself by saying that the disease itself and the measures taken by others have already destroyed the global economy, and she is not wrong about that. She is not the only incompetent leader in the world. Incompetence is a prerequisite for rising in the political system, because the forces that buy and own politicians do not need puppets who try to think for themselves. They need nobodies. Mette Frederiksen fulfills this requirement perfectly. The entire current system is rotten – and the role of the press is the same everywhere. Panic sells well, so we must create more panic. The airwaves were cleared to announce that Denmark had finally got its first coronavirus patient, and again when we had our first coronavirus death, a patient who would probably have died anyway and who, mirabile dictu, had been infected in the hospital that was supposed to try to cure him – probably by the staff! The healthcare system could certainly have used some of the money that is now being wasted on improvements that would benefit everyone.

The so-called “free press” is a plague. In this case, it is shouting “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater, provoking both people’s completely insane behavior in stores and the government’s attempts to show “decisiveness.” It has cost us dearly!

These days, people are philosophizing about whether the coronavirus will change our world order. It’s a good question, but it’s a little too early to answer. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be the case in the long run, unless the people rise up against the government that is threatening to push them over the edge of bankruptcy.

However, if we were sensible, we could at least learn three things from this self-inflicted crisis. Firstly, it is evident that globalisation is an evil. A Chinese virus should be a local Chinese matter that we should not even need to hear about. The Chinese eat everything that flies, swims, crawls or walks, and their food hygiene is often below all standards – outside the large internationally oriented hotels and restaurants. A Chinese delicacy is bats, from which this virus is believed to originate. In other words, not something that civilized people would normally be exposed to. China is today solely an economic and military superpower because the West has closed its own factories and moved its production to China to exploit the low slave wages paid to Chinese workers. Without this, China would still be a backward country of little importance.

Secondly, a modern society cannot rely on an economy that appears to be run by a bunch of frightened chickens. The values are still there. There will be losses in certain sectors, but most of it will be recouped. However, the values suddenly belong to others, because what is traded on the stock market is not really values, but rather hot air in the form of hope and fear, which is somewhat misleadingly called confidence. Some people and capital funds will become very rich because they have bought up assets for a song that people who need to raise money in this situation have been forced to sell in a panic. Here, too, the press is pouring gasoline on the fire by making daily economic doomsday predictions instead of waiting to see what happens. Such predictions tend to be self-fulfilling. If you were into conspiracy theories, it would not be difficult to see a direct link between the press and the circles that profit from the panic. We need to establish an economic system that is, first and foremost, not globalized and, secondly, stable. I am a staunch opponent of stock market capitalism, but stocks are currently the only way to protect your assets against inflation. That is why this will hit hard. Everyone who has a pension plan is a small capitalist—they just may not know it. We must have a nationally based economy based on fixed values such as land and labor-produced goods. The stock markets must simply become a thing of the past, and Danish capital must remain in Denmark, and foreign capital must stay out. Only then can we once again become an independent country that is immune to panic. I will deal with our economic system later, if I survive.

Thirdly, we must necessarily rethink our form of government. We need experts on the scene, and decisions must have nothing to do with the next election. Russia (population 147 million) currently has 59 cases of coronavirus, despite a long, uncontrollable border with China. Russia closed its border completely yesterday. This virus has been on the agenda in Russia since it broke out, with extensive media coverage and daily television broadcasts that were more about informing than creating economic panic. Perhaps the Russians are doing something right that we have not understood here.

One could well think that the corona panic has been created or promoted to distract us from other far more important and dangerous things, such as the millions standing at the Greek border wanting to enter Europe (many of whom probably also have the virus, which, as we know, is also rampant in Turkey). When we wake up from our self-inflicted nightmare, they will probably all be on their way here. And then there are the announced “climate taxes,” which we should preferably not talk too much about—but which we can probably forget all about anyway, given the economic situation. This may actually suit the Social Democrats very well, as the implementation of draconian taxes would be costly for the economy – and also in terms of votes, once people realize what they mean. But the shutdown of the country gives us a taste of the economy we will have if Greta Thunberg and the so-called Climate Council’s dreams are realized. Yes, strictly speaking, it is Thunberg’s ideal society we are testing: no flying, no consumption, no work, no transportation, no production. The Stone Age Marxist ideal society.

In any case, these viral diseases are part of the natural order, even if we should not have imported this Chinese specialty here. We should not be surprised by them, nor should we panic about them. This virus is relatively harmless. We are not talking about Ebola (mortality rate 50-70%) or the Black Death (mortality rate close to 100%), nor about the so-called Spanish flu, which actually had nothing to do with Spain and which cost 15,000 Danes their lives in 1918-19. Of course, we will develop a vaccine in case the coronavirus returns, and that is a good thing – but even without a vaccine, the world is not about to end, as one might think when reading the newspapers. The younger generations live so far removed from nature and have been wrapped in cotton wool to such an extent that they believe they control nature. As we can see, they do not – and they probably never will. And that is just as well.

One of my favorite crime writers is Domingo Villar, who writes his novels in both Galician and Spanish. In his latest book, El Último Barco, a police officer tries to persuade his father to put bars on the windows to protect himself from criminals. His father replies: “I can live with the fear of dying, but I don’t want to be afraid of living too.” Perhaps something to think about!

Povl H. Riis-Knudsen

Translated with the help of AI