Is it time to give up on capitalism?

BACK in March, when the pandemic was still young, millennials on Reddit, Twitter and Instagram started sharing jokes and memes under the hashtag “Boomer Remover”. The idea was that Covid-19 was some kind of karmic revenge against the “gammon”, as they call old white men. Well, they weren’t far wrong.

This has been very much an epidemic targeting old men. Men are twice as likely to die of this disease as women. Those over 65 are 34 times more likely to die than people of working age. Last week, we learned that 57% of deaths from coronavirus in Scotland are in care homes for the elderly.

Many thousands of boomers have been removed, but it’s no joke. They have died alone and distressed, uncomforted by loved ones, often isolated from all human company save for care-givers wearing masks and visors.

Epidemiologists talk of diseases like flu and Covid-19 “harvesting” old people, as if this is old father time swinging his scythe under people who have lived beyond their time. That is not only a callous way of describing the deaths of human beings, but misleading.

Many of the thousands who died in care homes did not die because it was their time. Their lives were cut short by a misguided policy implemented by the NHS with Government approval.

This involved decanting thousands of elderly patients, untested, to care homes where they were exposed to – or exposed others to – serious risk. Some of those discharged already had symptoms.

The objective, made clear in NHS directives to hospitals on March 17, was to remove around 30% of the elderly from hospital wards.

The rationale was that they were better looked after “in the community”. It was to protect the NHS, but it didn’t save lives.

At the time, the media was attacking both governments for not having enough ventilators and intensive care beds. We had one-seventh the number of ICUs as Germany. The priority seemed clear: increase capacity at all costs.

It was achieved by clearing the non-acute and by building pop-up hospitals like the Nightingale and Louisa Jordan. These have lain almost empty as the pandemic moved into the care homes along with the discharged geriatrics.

SNP supporters reacted furiously last week to reports that the rate of deaths in Scottish care homes was twice that in England. The UK Government, they said, was fiddling the figures. There may indeed be an element of under-reporting.

But they miss the broader point that, both north and south of the Border, a policy was implemented which left thousands of elderly people, and their carers, exposed to a deadly virus with precious little protection.

Underpaid and under-strength care