The Flu (Health)

[Mick Harper]

I think you're both being unnecessarily alarmist. Everything will settle down, you'll see. The world always gets alarmist about stuff it can see. It's the other stuff that they (and we) should be alarmed about.

[Grant]

It takes about two years for madness to become boring. Salem happened in 1692 but it wasn’t until a year had passed before “witches” were being found not guilty. It took five years before the General Court declared a day of contrition for the hysteria.

In 2025 Whitty, Johnson, Vallance et al will be publicly vilified by the same media which supports them today

[Boreades]

2025 sounds about right. Can we put a note in the AEL diary for 19th July 2025, for us to check how close we were?

[Mick Harper]

I'm afraid the AEL rule about Diary entries is the same as the Catholic rule about declaring someone a saint. There have to be two examples where using a vague timeline involving one, two and five years something or other not very clear happened. Sorry, I don't make the rules, I just work here.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Wile E. Coyote]

The great villains in all this are not the do-gooding experts or liberals, we expect them to run scared, but the hard-nosed business folk. It was their historic job to tell the government to stick its lockdown, instead they meekly complied. We are creating a generation of woke, capitalist, snowflakes. No wonder the Chinese are going to win.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The problem for us on freedom day is that, having locked-down on the basis of "scientific" risk assessment, we have now created millions of bed wetters. The most worried, enthusiastic proponents of lock-down are now becoming the new skeptics of the Government's policy of opening up, and going back to work etc.

Boris is the Grand Duke:

Oh, the grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again
And when they were up, they were up
And when they were down, they were down
And when they were only half-way up
They were neither up nor down

[Mick Harper]

My mate Jayce (Jason Tarry, CEO at Tesco as you would know him) wrote to me on the QT saying what 'Freedom Day' actually means

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Hello Mr Harper [we keep it formal for propriety's' sake]

I hope you and your family have been keeping safe. [He's such a card, we're both 'confirmed bachelors'.] Throughout the pandemic, we’ve focused on making sure everyone can get the food they need in a safe environment. As government guidance on COVID-19 continues to change, I wanted to share an update on the safety measures in our stores.

While the easing of restrictions means that some safety measures will no longer be a legal requirement, we’ve listened to customers and our colleagues, and we know a lot of people remain cautious. In line with the government advice to act carefully, we feel it’s important to continue with certain measures to be on the safe side. Here’s what we’re doing to make sure everyone feels as safe as possible in our stores.

Please keep wearing a face covering in our stores if you can. [None of us could on Saturday when I popped in to see how the gang were getting on.] Although the legal requirement to wear a face covering in England ends on 19 July, the government expects and recommends that people continue to wear a face covering in crowded and enclosed spaces. So we’re encouraging our colleagues and you, our customers, to continue wearing face coverings if you can.

Having our cake and eating it has always been our motto, Mick. We've told our 'partners' not to sling anyone out if they're not wearing masks because nobody is apart from the Waitrose goody two-shoes brigade. See you at the lodge as usual. Where masks will be worn, right?

[Mick Harper]

So now we have another example of 'I'm out of step because it's a question of scale' I've been writing about elsewhere. But this time I don't feel altogether sure I've got a full handle (or a full set of anything, as health professionals would put it) so I'll just set it out as I understand it.

The weird bloke on Newsnight (and who I trust, because being weird means he wasn't hired for televisual reasons cf Evan Davies) says half a million have been pinged into ten days isolation in the last week. Or, looking at it from the perspective of business, half a million people just went down with a particularly nasty case of Covid. The vast majority of these people would have done better to have actually had Covid and just carried on with their lives (or spent a coupla days of bed rest). So what was the purpose of the pinging exercise? It was, as I understand it, a purely broad brush prophylactic device because they might have been exposed to Covid, they might have been infected with Covid and might pass Covid on. Meanwhile, thanks to the Delta Variant, Covid is careering through the population anyway, though with quite limited effects in terms of deaths and hospitals.

On the latter point, I see the hospital sector is already cranking up the 'OMG, we'll never survive..." Well, bubs, you did last time and the time before that and it was one hell of a lot worse both times. That was the both times when we didn't even have to use the Nightingales et al.

I am now persuaded it's safe to let it rip. No pings, no packdrill of any kind The vaccination rate plus the-already-had-it means herd immunity can take the strain from here on in. And, yes, that means some people will die unnecessarily and some people will get Long Covid unnecessarily and Gawd knows what else unnecessarily but, on the scale of things, it ain't nothing to worry our heads about.

And I'm entirely relaxed about the fact that I was plumb wrong last time I said all this. Remember the old AE proverb: "If you're not wrong at least half the time, you're not being radical enough."

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

I do see the strength of your arguments but, yet again, I insist people (including Sir W Coyote MD AEL) are misunderstanding the nature of health provision. All ailments have such a vast range of treatment (including non-ailments in the form of screenings, tests, preventative medicine etc) that there are no such things as capacity, waiting lists, routine/elective surgery, follow-ups et al in any absolute sense. These are just professionally selected artefactual criteria and can be adjusted to a different set of criteria at will. The ultimate being letting people die. That's a perfectly respectable medical outcome.

I don't say they are not useful, even necessary, definitions in the day-to-day operating of a vast operation, only nobody should take the professionals' word for the fact that things must be done their way if the system is not to seize up before our very eyes. (I'm sure they can arrange that if it becomes really necessary.) (Except it didn't happen when most of the hospital doctors went on strike the other year.)

[Boreades]

I agree with all of you.

My own reflections started from noting that the NHS is supposed to "save" everybody, regardless of the ultimate mortality of all of us, and that many people would rather depart this mortal coil in a manner of their own choosing. Not attached to NHS equipment for a long slow decline.

On further reflection, I've noticed that the "Do Nothing" option is much undervalued.
i.e. the NHS not treating people is an excellent way of reducing the waiting lists.
People then have three options.
(1) Get better
(2) Drift on aimlessly, neither well nor terminally unwell
(3) Die earlier
(If there are more options, I'm sure you will let me know)

The soppy sentimental part of me would say "(1) get better" is the better option. As it implies taking some personal responsibility for your own health, and a positive outcome.

The Eugenically-inclined would agree with "(3) Die earlier". Do us all a favour and decrease the surplus population.

But "(2) Drift on aimlessly" is a good British compromise.

[Mick Harper]

I learned this lesson for myself when my mum collapsed with something or other and was rushed to a major hospital in a county town in Dorset which I won't identify. They told us, "Sorry, but she needs x and y and z and this is not offered to people over sixty for x plus y plus z reasons. You must prepare yourselves for etc etc." They knew my mum was ninety but what they didn't know is she had a family consisting of a) some people who spoke their language fluently and in the correct accents b) some people who also worked in a major hospital in a county town in Dorset and c) a great many people who knew how to hang around rather menacingly but in the best possible taste. An exception was made, the Grand Old Lady went under the knife and swanned around for another ten years.

There was a coda though. One of her sons was heard to say, "In AE terms, that was quite the wrong decision, irrespective of actual outcome. I'm never going to pay off my more pressing creditors at this rate. Pete, can you sub me?"

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

While Wiley wiles the while wiling his last post into a readable form and not a vast and forbidding wodge -- but he's doing really well otherwise! -- I must tell you about a shouting match in a Congressional hearing between the chief of the lay sceptics, Congressman Rand Paul, and the chief of the professional boosters, 'Doctor' Anthony Fauci. Paul had a perfectly reasonable point about the official line changing about who funded what kind of bug research at Wuhan but ruined his case by putting it in a maximalist, conspiratorial and confrontational style. So Fauci was able to escape in an octopal cloud of ink indignantly denying he was a maximalist conspiratorial confrontationalist.

Whereupon CNN turned to camera and said, 'To clear up the position for aw-shucks just plain folk like us, here's one of Dr Fauci's colleagues to explain. After that we'll have a panel discussion between three CNN trusties explaining why it is that Rand Paul has to be such a lying hyena. You can expect lots of phrases like "appealing to the base", "Donald Trump" and "lying hyena" to feature prominently, so don't go away. Y'all.'