A sense of deja vu
I see we're showing again the serial 'Lockdown Revisited' this week.
Where hoarders can perhaps stock-pile toilet rolls and entrepreneurs on eBay can sell soap at lockdown prices. Supermarkets telling you ‘no way’ if you want your groceries delivered. The repeat of those famous catchphrases, such as 'Stay Home' and 'Play Safe'. The appearance of someone acting as the 'grim reaper' every ad break, making sure that we're kept anxious and on our toes. Where we can resume our weekly exercise by standing on the doorstep every Thursday at 8pm and do some clapping for the NHS. Wondering if redundancy is looming and debt perhaps around the corner.
Sorry to be cynical, but I think the medicine is becoming worse than the disease.
Of course, the virus is not to be treated lightly. The government are worried that the NHS is going to become overwhelmed, mostly by the the elderly and vulnerable. Then why, in heaven's name weren't the vulnerable the only ones to be isolated in the first place and let the rest of the population carry on as they did in the last pandemic of 1957? Apparently the healthy ones, some 80 per cent of the population express mild to moderate symptoms. The publication of figures denoting number of people infected and those who have died are not helpful. The figures do not record those who have been infected and have not been recorded.
The term used to describe the situation is ‘unprecedented’. The situation is not unprecedented, as experienced in 1957, the way the government has handled this is unprecedented.
What it shows is that the NHS is not capable of handling a crisis. Even before this virus came, patients were left waiting in ambulances outside of hospitals because there was no room inside and not enough staff. The reason this is happening is simple – the population of this country is too large. In the 1950s it was 45m, today it is 68m. No new hospitals of note have been built, only existing ones enlarged. Investment in the NHS is ridiculous, to be able to cope with an increase of a 50 per cent increase in population.
I am intrigued with some of the laws that are being implemented at a stroke. When we had Brexit, we had weeks and weeks of prevarication and filibustering, trying to get laws passed. All of a sudden, they are now passed without parliament approval. Signs of dictatorship to come? Is our country now being run by just one or two people, and not parliament?
The sad and ironic part of this is that this is happening when we remember the Battle of Britain, the 80th anniversary. Young pilots with