Celtic Diary Thursday March 19: Too Much Information

Whilst the airwaves and sports pages are full of who should be awarded what and when, it’s worth noting that outside your window there’s a bit of a crisis going on that means nothing will ever be the same again.

Nine or ten in a row pales into insignificance when the military are on the street preventing people from spreading a disease that threatens to, and indeed most likely will, decimate the population and bring about a world wide recession/depression that changes everything forever.

From the Guardian, written by the editor of British medical journal “The Lancet ”

On 24 January, Chinese doctors and scientists reported the first description of a new disease caused by a novel coronavirus. They described how a strange series of cases of pneumonia had presented in December in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people and the capital of Hubei province. At that time, 800 cases of the new disease had been confirmed. The virus had already been exported to Thailand, Japan and South Korea.

Most of the 41 people described in this first report, published in the Lancet, presented with non-specific symptoms of fever and cough. More than half had difficulties in breathing. But most worryingly of all, a third of these patients had such a severe illness that they had to be admitted to an intensive care unit. Most developed a critical complication of their viral pneumonia – acute respiratory distress syndrome. Half died.

The Chinese scientists pulled no punches. “The number of deaths is rising quickly,” they wrote. The provision of personal protective equipment for health workers was strongly recommended. Testing for the virus should be done immediately a diagnosis was suspected. They concluded that the mortality rate was high. And they urged careful surveillance of this new virus in view of its “pandemic potential”. 

Britian largely ignored the warnings, and when they did look at the problem, they made the wrong call about public safety.

Even now, some are blaming china for keeping it all a secret, but the warnings were made…in a respected British medical journal.

We’re about to find out just how wrong the government , and its advisors, actually were.

So, all the tittle tattle and arguments about football kind of have to take a back seat. We’ll be lucky to have football , or any other form of mass entertainment back for quite some time yet.

Unfortunately, as with national government, those dealing with the footballing problems haven’t got a clue what to do either. There’s talk of some clubs going under, and Hearts have asked their squad to take a fifty per cent pay cut.

When I say asked, they’ve been told they’ll be sacked if they don’t, which would cause outrage if it was any other company in any other indusry.

The problem here is that once again we see money being the issue.

And as with national government, there are too many experts giving too many opinions on too many things they really shouldn’t be.

This results in confusion, and too much information around which in reality is mostly useless and self serving for those issuing it.

The real problem right now is that if the global health crisis continues, then season books won’t be renewed, which makes me, a natural cynic, wonder exactly why the adverts at Celtic were a little bit earlier than usual.

With the uncertainty around how events will fold, and how long it may be before things return to any semblance of normality, those who look right when they think of business matters will be more concerned about selling season books and merchandise than actually being concerned if there’s anyone left to buy them.

Gordon Smith, for instance, is worried about the Sky TV deal…

“I just hope that one way or another we can complete the final part of this season.

“Of course the biggest dilemma is if we can’t get these remaining games played by June 30 then it is a worry for what we do ahead of the new season.

“Because other thing you have to consider is that the new exclusive Sky Sports deal is set to kick in and they will want the slate wipe clean in time for that starting.

“I’m sure the broadcasters realise this is unprecedented and you would hope they would be understanding and try to help the Scottish game.

“It’s yet another issue that has to be considered but we have to be diplomatic about all these things because it’s one of the toughest situations any of us have ever experienced.

“There needs to be a waiting period because with the European Championships postponed it does leave the summer months open.

“This is now like a winter break so they can reanalyse the whole situation in a month and at that point a decision has to be made.

“The coronavirus is showing signs of easing in China and it could be the same here because we’re taking a lot of measures with theatres closing down and the advice to avoid pubs and restaurants.

“There might be a time where we get it more under control but we need to time to assess that and it’s the right thing to do to delay that rather than judge it now.

There are people who read that that will consider his views on the health crisis as fact, and sadly that is a factor in perhaps the shoulder shrugging  attitude being shown by the public and the media.

The coronavirus is not going away, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

The media needs to stop giving space to people to talk about something with an air of authority when they know the square root of fuck all about it.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that things are going to get much worse before they get better, and all of our energies should be focused on this, and we should not be concerned about whether or not we’ll see a fourth consecutive treble.

For me, I’ll be happy to see the day when we can go to a football match again.

We all should.

For an idea on how a football club should behave towards the community, have a look at this inspiring statement from Nairn County , who may well have a few more season book holders when all this is over…

Now, after that remarkably dismal outlook on the future,  ( although Nairn do offer a welcome  ray of hope for humanity, )and the impending arrival of the rest of the four horsemen of the apocalypse….

Let’s try to cheer ourselves up.

The first two horsemen, of course,  are already here..

The new Craig Whyte, a chap called Steve Gibson, sounds like a fun guy. thats if this is him, so widely shared on social media yesterday…

A bit creepy, and there is an indication that he likes to use whatever wealth he has to make friends.

Well, he’s about to find out that those staunch fellows over at Ibrox are a little selective about who they get into bed with.

Or maybe that’s why he’s sought them out….

Seems like these days the world is full of people making the wrong decisions…

Yesterday, we had this…