As in communities across the land, the lockdown appears to be slowly – but increasingly – breaking down. Here in the leafy shire community of St. Mary in the Wold vehicle traffic, especially during the working week, is certainly busier on the main road which bypasses us and foot traffic is on the increase too as people gain confidence in that by taking reasonable precautions they are very probably safe walking for exercise along the lanes with close family and dog and making the occasional trip into town to buy supplies from the supermarket.
Returning to work has not been an option for many, as employers, particularly in the construction, building maintenance, utilities and transport industry have not really had a choice but to ask employees to return to work. The food retail sector too has asked staff to stay at their posts and increased temporary staff positions, along with many people who do the thankless job of working in call centres that deal with banking and insurance for example, all working under pressure as the countless redundant, laid off (furloughed), or now unemployed self-employed, try to salvage something or put off the day when financial hardship will hit them.
Following the trend reported in the main stream media, many remain unconvinced that it is, or will be, safe to return to work, send the kids to school or resume at some point some sort of ‘normal’ life. The government and its allies in the main stream tabloids have certainly done a really good job of frightening half the nation into unquestioning total compliance and its mantra of ‘we are doing this for the nation’s good’, and continues to believe in total adherence to the appliance of science, just as it has done with the same appliance of science when talking about and dealing with ‘climate change’. This is why the taxpayer is about to be hit by a tsunami of as yet undiscussed green and Covid recovery taxes, this time to pay for all the money borrowed to ‘support’ the nation during this health emergency .
The other half, law abiding mostly and currently fairly quiet with their doubts, have given the government the benefit of the doubt. In St. Mary on the Wold that is exemplified, as in many other middle-income earning communities, by the residents of Audi Avenue, mostly employed in the public service sector, local and civil service, education and the NHS. Leaving the NHS aside, private sector employees and those not able to work from home or, as it has now been re-titled ‘working remotely’, are increasingly getting irritated by those luxuriating, in many cases, on full pay while also accruing holiday entitlement and proclaiming apparently that they would not be happy to return to the workplace until it is perfectly safe to do so. Teacher unions have indicated that schools have to be perfectly safe and as many of their members have had the stress of working with, and caring for, the children of key workers during the emergency, they would expect that holiday provision will also be honoured! Some even proposing that schools should not re-open until September.
All this is in the face of ‘science’ that says there have not been any cases of the virus being passed on by children to an adult while at the same time ignoring the economic effect that school closures will have on many working parents.
The NHS is also coming in for some quite acid comments from patients who have had previous poor experience from various hospitals or services. It is now emerging (to use that favourite media expression) that people needing life-saving procedures or treatments have had those and operations cancelled, while reading, or hearing from staff or family, that their local hospital is not, as the media implies, struggling to cope with the influx of seriously ill Covid-patients, all needing intensive care nursing and equipment, and that Nightingale Hospitals have either few or no patients. It is now said that more patients are needlessly dying because of lack of treatment than have sadly died from Coronavirus.
Most people reasonably would realise that the government and the NHS was, and is, as they say, between a rock and a hard place. Despite historical modelling, no-one in the NHS or civil service anticipated this ‘black swan’ event. Whatever the response it was likely to be a case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’, but none of that explains the cries that it was all the government’s fault or lack of funding, particularly as the moment the situation was realised, some £12 billion pounds was effectively written off to enable the NHS Trust management to buy whatever they needed without worrying about financial implications. More people are now questioning the way that NHS and staff, whatever their role, are being treated as heroes. Millions of pounds have been donated. Where is this money to be spent and for what? would seem to be a reasonable question (and by whom?). All over the country well-meaning people have volunteered to assist, private companies have bent over backwards to provide supplies and have, in the end, said do you want this or not? when it came to protective equipment.
Many more people have donated. Food parcels for NHS staff, special times allocated for NHS staff to shop, free car parking provided by local councils, and so on. Comments pages in newspapers and blog sites now have many negative submissions by those who realise that they, or family members, may be affected by a virus that seems to have less effect than seasonal flu. If that is the case, just why, many ask, are we still locked up, and if the NHS is a world-beating organisation, why has the management been so slow to react. Why are we being asked to protect the NHS from sick people? Is that not its main role?
Part 2 will be published here tomorrow.
just read of Golden Brown writer went in to hospital for his heart, went out with COVID.
I reckon we need protecting from the health and care system… that where people catch it
The UK is headed the same way as a failed Football Club ! ….. ”Sod the Manager, we will do it our way”, says the Centre Half and the Centre Forward. – ”The wings, the backs and the goalie take too much notice of what the Manager is asking. – We alone will do the scoring” ! ….. So two self opinionated players effectively cut out the other nine players. – They lose the crunch end of season match, and the Club is relegated ! – The fans and the ‘Sports Media’ all blame the Club’s Manager ! ! !
Does this football nonsense strike a parallel with those ‘Self Isolation Denial Folk’ ? – ”We have had enough of this, and we don’t agree with it anyway. – Sod the rest, and sod the NHS too” ! – A second high in virus deaths follows, and the PM and Tory Government are to blame for it. – Simple init ! ! ! ….. Could we designate a date for our ‘National Moron Day’, for those unable to activate self discipline behind the elected leader ?
Part of 77th Brigade’s role is:
Monitoring and evaluating the information environment within boundaries or operational area
They not only ‘counter’ disinformation, but also watch social media, analysing how disinformation, including their own, spreads; mapping the internet and the networks of people sharing content between each other.
And for that, they have thousands deployed, and tens of thousands in reserve, not only in 77th Brigade directly, but right across government and the third sector.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/british-military-information-war-waged-their-own-population
We should discern very carefully!
This isn’t really a black swan event. Epidemics happen all the time. It’s only become a disaster because of the government’s incompetent response. Had the borders been quarantined in January, there would have been no outbreak, no sick people, no dead people, no lockdown and minimal economic damage. Just to be sure, everyone could have been told to wear a mask and that would have taken care even of any cases coming in via illegal immigration or any already in the country before January.
SARS-2 is not less deadly than seasonal flu. It has only caused the relatively small number of deaths it has because of the draconian lockdown. In the UK, it has already killed nearly 30,000 who died in the NHS and many more who died at home and in care homes who are not included in this count – some estimate at least 45,000 in total. Oxford (https://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/influenza-flu) estimates that seasonal flu kills 600 in the UK in an average year, 13,000 in the worst recent year (2008-2009). Some others put this estimate at 17,000. The Spanish Flu killed 220,000 in the UK in 1918-1920 over 3 years (SARS-2 has killed ~45,000 in the first 3 months). If the lockdown were to end, exponential growth would resume. According to Worldometer, there are 180,000 confirmed cases in the UK. Even if this is an under-estimate by a factor of 50 (the most extreme underestimate anyone has suggested), that’s still only 9 million. The population of the UK is officially 67 million, the true number is higher. Even assuming the lower number, the final death toll will be 7.5 times what it is now – 335,000 – if we fail to eradicate the virus. If 180,000 is correct and there are 80 million people in the UK, the number would be 20 million. The truth is somewhere between 335k and 20 million. Either way, that’s more people than the Spanish flu killed.
Cancer, transplant etc. patients are not dying because of the lockdown. They are dying because of the pandemic. Someone on chemotherapy is immunocompromised. A transplant patient must take immunosuppressant drugs. If they catch the virus, they will die. If they go into a hospital now, they will probably catch the virus. Most won’t go into hospitals if the lockdown is lifted. It is not the lockdown that’s killing these people, it’s the failure to eradicate the virus.
Having missed the opportunity to evade it by a strict UK wide quarantine in Jan we were well on the way in the third week of March to eradicating the virus via achieving herd immunity. The people who are dying with it as a complication are overwhelmingly near the median mortality age and have an average of 2.7 comorbidities. The deaths track the existing mortality graph by age rather well.
The vast majority of people would have suffered no or mild symptoms. There was never any rationale to lock the majority of the workforce up and damage their general health and wellbeing let alone the schools. Protection for the most at risk (voluntary) and otherwise let it rapidly move through the population, the virus weakening and weakening as it evolves. Job done, limited impact on the economy, the at risk can leave their houses again as everyone else is now immune and cannot infect them.
Again there are 550k deaths each year in the UK most of natural causes and therefore mostly old people with comorbidities. Do you think there may be some overlap here?
The IFR is coming out as between 0.1 and 0.4 in most studies I have seen which is comparable to a bad flu year.
There are many more factors than simply dying ‘from’ the virus. And yes, people ARE dying because of the lockdown. To say otherwise simply displays narrow-mindedness and a lack of understanding of the human condition that is simply breathtaking.
The best comment so far is on this unbelievably destructive Lockdown is “Have we saved the NHS yet?” and would add ‘if so can we be go back to normal as promised please’? – Any bureaucracy is inevitably run more and more for the convenience of those in it and the more monolithic it is the greater this inevitablity.
The NHS is beyond saving without a top to bottom reform.
Peter Hitchens is saying exactly the same thing in his online blog/Daily Mail article but nobody is listening. The s–t is definitely going to hit the fan.
I say it again, Norman. PEOPLE TELL LIES. And the People we believe we vote for aren’t immune from this generalization.
“NHS is a world-beating organisation”!
Who are they trying to fool? From my experience and that of my family it is a great example of the proverbial Curate’s Egg. It needs top to bottom reform if it is to provide a better service at a reasonable cost.