The Flu (Health)

[Mick Harper]

I was having a Zoom discussion yesterday with an American about whether AE-ists should subscribe to the germ theory of illness. He wasn't making much sense on account of having a streaming cold but was putting forward some kind of at-a-distance effect.

This morning I woke up with a streaming cold!

[Mick Harper]

I have at least (at last?) come up with an at-a-distance explanation. Or at any rate, come up with some ingredients.

1. I have in my body all the requisites for 'a streaming cold' in the form of disabled viruses, antibodies, genetic ragtags etc.
2. As a recluse I do not come into contact with other people wholesale in the normal way and consequently suffer almost no colds.
3. I went off, on public transport, to spend Christmas with a few people.
4. Unusually I spent an hour pushing a trolley round a crowded major supermarket.
5. I spent forty minutes having a Zoom with a visibly 'streaming' person and discussed streaming colds with him.
6. My brain or my endocrine system or whatever was watching with me and was alerted to the importance of having streaming colds from time to time.
7. In a highly attenuated form, it's already practically over.
8. Still, it's given everything a nice workout.
9. So that's all right then.
10 Next!

[Mick Harper]

Here's a factual question to which I don't have the answer and which has a bearing on the previous post.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

So you don't know the answer either. Interesting.

[Boreades]

Good news chaps!

Despite the Professor "Pants Down" Ferguson-style worst-case models and the annual hysteria by the BBC, the seasonal flu peak appears to have come early this year.

Our BBC would have us believe that “flu” alone was pushing hospitals over the edge - again! - just as it does every year. But the deeper, chronic pressures (staff shortages, long waits for community care, A&E performance below targets) were the real background problems. Not so much reported, as it's harder to make Fear Porn out of the boring issues.