For the Fallen
I’m kicking off the first update of 2021 with a comment that appeared beneath the last update of 2020. It was by Freddie Attenborough, a regular contributor to Lockdown Sceptics.
To mark the last day of 2020, this post is dedicated to all those whose lives and livelihoods have been lost, diminished or tainted by our nascent, deeply illiberal and socially, economically and psychologically destructive lockdown societies; for all those whose jobs and businesses have been destroyed; those whose medical conditions have been left undiagnosed; those whose cancers have been left untreated whilst the Government ‘saves the NHS;’ those whose aspirations have been crushed; whose financial lifelines and supports have been laughed at, ripped up and thrown to the wolves by well-paid, cosseted and conceited scientific bureaucrats; those who’ve seen loved ones die long before their time at the hands of rescheduled and/or cancelled NHS appointments; for those citizens out on the streets exercising their democratic right to protest against lockdown who’ve been roughed up by the police; for the young woman in Victoria State, Australia, strangled to the floor by a policeman for the ‘crime’ of not wearing a mask; for the heavily pregnant woman led away from her home in handcuffs on a charge of promoting an anti-lockdown event on a Facebook page; for all those who’ve been fined for upholding the most basic tenets of any self-respecting liberal democracy – civil society, laughter, human touch, communion; for those whose elderly relatives have been left to die alone in care homes, bereft of the love and attention that would have eased their passing; for the pain and the hurt felt by those who never got to say goodbye to a loved one; for the children who’ve been left psychologically scarred by an education system now in thrall to semi-functional neurotics; for the university students being taught to fear the unknown, to look before they leap, to strip the joy out of life and to replace it with a risk assessment, to cede personal responsibility to Authority and to always value Security over and above Freedom; for all the women trapped at home with abusive partners; for the children who social workers can’t see on Skype video calls; for those whose mental health has deteriorated, who feel irreparably broken, who’ve got to thinking that they’ll never be able to find their way back to who they once were; for the people who lie awake at night worrying about where the next mortgage payment is coming from; to those who, at some point this year, have felt that they’ve had nowhere to turn but The Samaritans; and to all those troubled souls who’ve slipped unnoticed through the cracks of our desiccated society, and then out into one last lonely, bewildering descent into silence.
We won’t forget. We won’t forgive. There will be a reckoning.
Welcome to the Year of the Vaccine
Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson has written a good column for today’s Telegraph in which he expresses some scepticism about the Prime Minister’s target of lifting restrictions by Easter.
When Boris Johnson cheerfully declared that things should be much better by Easter, hearts will have sunk all over the country. One of the few reliable features of the pandemic is the Prime Minister’s optimistic predictions being quickly disproven. He spoke of “normality” by November. Then Christmas. We were also promised no more lockdowns, or school closures. So now, when he says we could be less than three months away from the taming of Covid, it’s hard to banish the idea of something going rather drastically wrong.
His aides are, by now, familiar with his trend. He hates giving bad news. So after a particularly bleak press conference, he’ll seek to end on a high note with an unscripted promise of dazzling success (such as a “world-beating” test-and-trace system). “We need to break that habit of overpromising and underdelivering,” says one of his lieutenants in the Covid battles.
He acknowledges that there is some cause for optimism. The UK is among the first countries in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines and the roll out has already started. But realism dictates the deadline probably won’t be met.
The Oxford vaccine needs to spend 20 days in sterilisation, so there’s a waiting game – which is why just 530,000 of the promised 4 million doses will be ready by Monday. Then, the safety tests: each batch needs to be checked by the regulator. The speed of rollout will be affected not just by social distancing, but the regulations: everyone is being observed for 15 minutes in case of nasty reactions. When the vaccines come, they’ll do so in splurges – there will be times when everyone is waiting for supplies.
Let’s go back to the Prime Minister’s deadline – or, as he prefers to call it, his “terminus ante quem” of Easter Sunday, April 4. To hit this timeframe, a lot of things would have to go right. Vaccinations would have to run close to 1.5 million a week by the end of this month, rising to 2.5 million – perhaps more – over the next two months. This is more than Astra can make, but Pfizer vaccines are due in February. Factor in the three weeks that the vaccine needs to take effect, and an Easter deadline is a stretch. But it’s doable.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Professor Martin Marshall, Chair of the Royal College of GPs, asks: Why do you need diversity training in order to give a jab?
Stop Press 2: The Times reports that GPs are rebelling after being instructed not to give elderly patients second jabs of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in order to give first jabs to as many people as possible
ICU Occupancy Still Below Average
On Monday, we noted that ICU occupancy on December 20th in NHS hospitals in England was lower in absolute terms in four out of seven NHS England regions than it was in December 2019. If you measured ICU occupancy as a percentage of all ICU beds available, it was lower in all seven regions.
Several people pointed out that our figures were out of date. Since December 20th, we were told, ICU occupancy had increased dramatically thanks to the spike in Covid admissions caused by the new variant.
We now have the figures for Dec 27th and while there are more ICU beds in use, the situation hasn’t changed dramatically.
First, let’s look at the total number of ICU beds occupied in the seven NHS regions.
It’s true that the total number of ICU beds occupied in London, the South East and East of England on December 27th was higher than the December average last year, but in three of the seven regions it was lower (the South West, North East and Yorkshire, North West) and in the Midlands it was only fractionally higher. So not much change, then.
What about the percentage of ICU beds occupied on December 27th compared to the three-year average for December? Again, not much change.
As before, in six of the seven regions the percentage of critical care beds occupied on December 27th was below the December average for the past three years and in only one region – the East of England – has it climbed above. True, the number of available ICU beds increased between December 2019 and December 2020, but the fact that capacity hasn’t been exceeded in the vast majority of areas suggests that, contrary to the impression given by the BBC (see below), the NHS isn’t at breaking point.
Hysterical Outburst From ICU Doctor
Yesterday, Radio 5 Live broadcast an interview with an emotional intensive care doctor who said that people who don’t follow social distancing rules or wear masks “have blood on their hands”.
Professor Hugh Montgomery said hospitals were facing a “tsunami” of Covid cases and he feared it would get worse after New Year’s Eve. Among his more outlandish claims were that one person could infect “hundreds of thousands of people” and “whole families are getting wiped out”, including children. Really? If an entire family had died of COVID-19, I think we’d have heard about it by now.
No doubt Prof Montgomery has the best of intentions, but he should pause to consider that between 20% and 30% of Covid patients in hospitals have become infected since being admitted. In reality, no one has “blood on their hands” because no one intentionally infects another person. But if you’re going to assign blame, surely he and his NHS colleagues have to accept some responsibility as well?
All Hands on Deck
Today we’re publishing an original piece by Dr Ann Bradshaw, a retired Senior Lecturer in Adult Health Care at Oxford Brookes. She delves into the mystery of why the Nightingale Hospitals were built for precisely the contingency the NHS finds itself in at the moment but aren’t being used.
The huge body of student nurses in training is not being mobilised onto the front line in the Covid pandemic crisis, as I wrote in Spiked recently.
Beds aren’t the problem, it is said. It’s the shortage of doctors and nurses. On December 27th the Sunday Times stated that hospitals have been ordered to mobilise their “surge capacity” in the face of soaring Covid infections, staff absence and longer patient stays. Amanda Pritchard, NHS Chief Operating Officer, ordered trusts to use the independent sector, community provision, specialist hospitals and the Nightingale Hospitals. Some hospitals in London are now operating above 100% ICU capacity and are said to be near “breaking point”.
The following day the Telegraph reported that the London Nightingale hospital was even being dismantled.
naufrage/sauvetage 