Holding the handrail won’t kill you – but the Covid Hezbollah might

HOW very sad that people travelling on the London Underground are tumbling down escalators in greater numbers because they are afraid to grasp the handrail. They fear that they will become infected, fall ill and perhaps die. But instead they fall and are injured or even killed.

As far as I know the evidence that anyone will catch Covid by touching the escalator rail on the London Underground is scanty, to put it mildly. But the evidence that it is safer to hold the rail, and that serious injury can follow a fall if you don’t, is strong.

This grim piece of news perfectly sums up the problem with making people so frightened that they stop thinking. It is a metaphor for our current national madness. By trying to attain total safety, we in fact expose ourselves to greater risks.

The tragic mess which the NHS has now become is the most obvious example of this. We shall never know how many people have died

SINCE everyone else is using the new tennis star Emma Raducanu to make some point or other, may I just mention that this obviously well-educated, confident person attended a single-sex grammar school, of a type ‘progressives’ have been trying – with much success – to stamp out for 60 years?

or will die, needlessly, because doctors were harder to see and appointments harder to make during the great national shutdown. But there is no doubt that this has happened, and – despite the latest bucketful of money chucked into the NHS by the Government – the problem is far from solved. Yet this was done in the name of saving life, and indeed of saving the NHS.

The health service, very far from perfect, will probably continue its long decline because it is now politically impossible for any government to get a grip on it. I do not think we saved it. But there are severe permanent effects on health and society that may linger for years. The worst of these is the pervasive fear, which may yet see us engulfed in another state-sponsored panic as the days shorten and the cold weather inevitably brings more patients to surgeries and hospital wards. I see this fear everywhere, often in highly intelligent people with good education and even scientific training.

And this is good news for the Covid Hezbollah, the faction which longs to close down society and the economy again. They also dream of forcing us all into covering our faces like the devotees of some new religion of submission. And they will not need to try very hard to bounce the Government into doing their bidding. The liberation which should have followed the successful mass-vaccination programme never happened, because of repeated warnings of supposedly terrifying new ‘variants’, and I suppose it is about time another one of those came along. You can hardly listen to BBC news programmes for five minutes without hearing presenters taking sides on this issue, chiding Ministers for not wearing masks and assuming that shutdowns are actually effective in containing the disease.

Evidence from round the world simply does not back this belief up. I cannot even be bothered to discuss the, er, lack of usefulness of loose cloth masks again. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. Much of the media regurgitate statistics which they do not even try to understand. Nothing can stop them referring to supposed ‘cases’ which are merely positive test results, often quite without symptoms.

They cannot grasp that if you have many more such tests, as we do, you will get more positives.

Then there are the hospitalisations. Once again, it is very hard to discover how many people are actually in hospital because of Covid, or because of something else. Have they tested positive for Covid after arriving in hospital (where it is horribly easy to catch diseases)? Or have they actually contracted Covid in hospital?

The same thing applies to death figures, where the formula seems designed to blur the distinction between people who died from or with Covid. Anyway, bear all these things in mind in the months to come, in the hope that one day we may have a sensible debate. And also in the hope that one day people will have the sense to see that they are safer if they hold the handrail on the stairs than if they do not. And that being scared does not necessarily make you safe.