Week 3

“So that’s alright then, we may have made mistakes in the past, but let’s pull together, and solve today’s problems” (Many “expert” supporters of HM Government on TV)

 

No, not alright.

 

Until we are out of today’s frightening problems, there is at present no point in going over the past – others can do that much later.

 

The problem is that our present government is still locked into highly unhelpful attitudes, that are destructive of our future.

 

* Why did our EU representative not even attend the EU meeting to decide on best policies for sharing ventilation machines?

* Why are we still without adequate quantities of high quality clothing to protect NHS staff that must treat severely ill covid-19 patients, when no high technical skills are required to make such materials? (Yes, there is some, but still not nearly enough).

* Could we be told, now, what the chemicals actually are that are preventing us from manufacturing our own equipment for testing for covid-19?

* Could the government please say on what authority it seems to be heading for the hardest Brexit of all, despite the previous tory government having repeatedly decided against it, and when it appears likely that the EU will bend in order to continue to trade with us?

 

It is sensible that the government will give absolute priority for those who are at present in hospital, in whom it is important to decide whether they actually have Covid-19. That is correct, but the priorities after that are not. A second group are the NHS staff (at least half a million) who must risk their lives treating these same patients; after these a third group are the doctors and nurses in primary care who need the tests in order not to send patients without the virus to out-patient appointments?  The NHS staff, who are taking a risk with their life caring for these patients, should come before others.

 

The present government consists of flag-waving Tories, carefully chosen to be MPs after excluding all who opposed  Brexit in the previous conservative government. For Boris Johnson to claim to be a ‘One Nation Tory’ makes one suspect that it is quite a time since he read his Disraeli. But perhaps it is just ‘newspeak’, an Orwellian joke, and we should not make too much of it.

 

At present we have no idea how many cases of the virus there are in a given country – all we have is the number suspected by GPs and referred to hospital. These figures are likely to be wildly wrong. The are likely to be much too low, as they fail to take account of the many people who have either had the virus already and recovered, or have developed immunity to it. But those they refer are likely to include many patients who do not have the virus, as the referring GPs have no way of getting their referrals tested. Yet public health authorities continue to publish quite meaningless figures for ‘those with the virus’.

 

Since we have no idea whatever how big the number with the virus is, we cannot possibly know what the risk of mortality is in each country. Without a denominator, the risk is unknown.

 

It is understandable for the Health Secretary to say how much he hopes we will all soon have both a vaccine and an antigen test for antibodies to the virus – but at present we have neither, and we are in our 4th month with a new virus. (His plans for ‘100 thousand tests by the end of this month’ seem wildly over optimistic).

 

However, in troubled times, I would like to end on a cheerful note. However many faults – and he has a good few – Boris has, he is not in the same ball-park as that American genius, Donald Trump. Although we have made many mistakes, and could in theory have as bad an outcome, it looks as though the USA will have an even worse one.

 

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