Pandemic’s blight goes further than deaths from Covid

RESEARCH suggests that in the UK Covid-19, now officially over, took 185,000 lives. Even that figure is in dispute for the authorities still refuse to clarify how many really died “with” Covid rather than exclusively “from” Covid – meaning the one and only cause of death.

Yet such was the official and national obsession with the pandemic that every other affliction was put into the non-urgent category – with a total life-cost that has not yet been calculated.

Yet enlightenment cannot be far delayed. We know that 4.7 million ill people are now on the NHS waiting list, and the number for whom medical help is already too late remains shrouded in mystery.

Yet that figure cannot be long delayed either. Sceptics like me remain convinced that when all is revealed there will have been more deaths due to the panicstricken reaction to Covid than from the pandemic itself.

THE ARBITRARY firing of 800 P&O ferry crew at a minute’s notice and by zoom lens was a pretty miserable story but as with so many there are two sides. The company had been making huge losses – reportedly over £100million

– and clearly something had to be done. But round-table discussions with all concerned would have been nice. And the manner of dismissal was brutal and stupid.

There is an enigma over why there are these huge losses – other ferries across the Channel seem to be viable.

But in all this gloom there was one ray. The Dutch skipper of the Pride of Hull backed his crew, closed the doors and refused to let the team, sent by P&O to throw his team off the ship, come aboard.

At the risk of his job Capt Eugene Favier, inset above, was standing up for his crew as a good skipper does. If he is fired one hopes another shipping company will snap him up.

MY EYES popped to learn of a hiker in the Lake District who fell off a mountain, dropped 650 feet yet got up and walked away.

Breakfast reading for a codger who could trip over a kerb and go straight to A & E. He must have bounced like a rubber ball all the way down.

Keswick Mountain Rescue who found him were stunned and escorted him to hospital for a check-up. He was pronounced OK.

I do not know whether he prays, but a candle at the altar would be nice, just to say “Ta”.