We’re only four days into this social distancing shit show and I’ve had just about enough. We are in what the media like to sensationally refer to as lockdown for an initial three weeks, but the likelihood is that it will go on for longer. Every time there is a headline or article offering cause for hope or optimism it seems to be immediately followed by something contradictory.
Take yesterday for example. It was reported by several sources that a Public Health England official had claimed that coronavirus testing would be widely available by next week. That testing will be crucial in telling us who has had the virus and who is still at risk of contracting it or passing it on to others. Today Chris Whitty, that odd-looking bloke you might have seen at government press briefings or in hastily produced government information films about social distancing, poo-poo-ed all of that. Whitty, who might be part of a cunning ruse to frighten the virus away, says that further testing needs to be done to make sure that the tests get the correct information that we need to make a difference. So we are awaiting tests on the tests. That sounds absurd but kind of encapsulates where we’re at.
It always seemed fanciful that this government would be able to arrange such a quick roll-out of mass testing despite the higher levels seen in other countries. I’m always genuinely surprised when I see Boris Johnson at one of his press briefings because it means he’s managed to remember to turn up. That he smirks his way through delivery of the gravest public advice since the Second World War is not endearing or reassuring. It just reinforces the view that the mop-headed toff is doing what he’s always done, bluffing his way through a situation that he is ill-equipped for. The only qualification he has for leading the country is his massive sense of entitlement. Quite how we are meant to put our trust in him to lead us out of this mess is a mystery that Fred Thursday wouldn’t have anything to do with.
Despite my scepticism about Johnson I had allowed myself to believe that we had made the strides towards widespread testing that were suggested yesterday. That was born mostly of the fact that it was a public health official making the claim and not Johnson or a member of his government. That immediately gave it extra gravitas for me. I’m not noted for my optimism as you know, but I wanted to believe it. A week of working from home, unable to go anywhere except the Co-Op which has become the new highlight of my day, has done strange things to me. My normally heightened, Olympic levels of cynicism have been swept aside. Social distancing is as mind altering as Stella Artois. Much more of it and I’m sure it will make me want to punch people in the same way too. I’m unable to contemplate many months of this, particularly if televised sport continues to be absent. Literally the only way I can imagine getting through it without eating my own leg is to stay optimistic. To check developments every day and look for positivity and encouraging signs. And, if you’ll humour me, writing the odd blog in an attempt both to lighten the mood and to organise my thoughts.
But if it isn’t health experts like Whitty pissing on any good news that I find it is the relentless doomsayers on social media. Some of them are perverse, revelling in any bad news because it ‘proves’ that they were right when they told everyone what should have been done weeks ago. They like to also make predictions about death counts, rubbish any suggestions that death rates have slowed across Europe, and generally hammer home the message that the UK will be in this state for the next 18 months. If we come out of this in anything like the time scale that has been achieved in China and South Korea, if death rates slow as they are reported to have done in Italy and Spain, these people will no doubt be sorely disappointed.
Tomorrow is a big, possibly pivotal day. I was due to go to my nephrology appointment at the hospital but they phoned me yesterday and asked me not to attend. It is difficult to practice social distancing in a hospital waiting room. Many of the patients are probably on the list of those at extra risk who have been told not to go out at all. Not even to the Co-Op. Thankfully I have not had that advice myself. If I’d had my transplant early in the New Year as was initially thought there would be no Co-Op for me. Not even Bargain Booze. With few patients to attend and with social distancing an issue for those who can make it they’ve just called the whole thing off. Instead they will be conducting the consultation by telephone. The virus has put paid to hopes of my transplant taking place for at least the next few months so I need my kidney function to hold up. They are unlikely to rush me off for dialysis given that I am still reasonably well and that to do so would place an extra demand on the NHS, but it would be ever so slightly unsettling to find out that my function is falling at a time when I’m understandably not a priority.
A few minutes ago I was watching television coverage of people standing outside their houses clapping NHS staff for their efforts during the crisis so far. Those staff deserve more than applause but it is right that they at least get this level of acknowledgment. I can’t help but wonder though how many of those people out on their doorsteps (palpably failing to observe the social distancing advice that they have been screaming at everyone else for allegedly flouting) voted for the Tory party which has consistently, deliberately underfunded the NHS for the last 10 years? Do those people imagine that their applause compensates for their irresponsibility in giving these entitled, arrogant fools the controls to the country during the last decade?
It’s odd that I’m finding this so difficult in some ways. When I have the freedom to do so I rarely go out. I haven’t had a beer since the middle of February and when I get home from work during the week I’m always more inclined to stay in watching a game than go anywhere. But there isn’t any sport. What is more, the same people who barf on about how long we will be locked down for, how many jobs will be lost and how many will die, also have a few thoughts on the comparably trivial effects of the virus. They are insistent that none of the sports that are currently suspended will come back this year.
The Euros and the Olympics have been postponed and the lowest levels of football outside the professional league have had their season voided and results expunged from the record. This has convinced some that all football will follow suit, which ignores repeated statements from club owners, managers and players and those running the professional game that the season will finish even if it has to be behind closed doors. Over in rugby league some fans are using the suspension as an excuse to push their vom-inducing franchising agenda. A chance to reset is what they’re calling it. Most of them are World League advovates who might be intrigued to learn that the biggest obstacle to rugby league clubs receiving the help with salaries announced by Rishi Sunak last week is the presence of two non-UK teams in the competition.
I’ve gone off the point a bit. I suppose what I deduce from my cabin fever is that although I don’t go out a lot I don’t like to have that decision taken out of my hands. This is not freedom or anything like it and I just wish more people would have a day off from jumping on the doom and gloom bandwagon and do something to spread a little more optimism. Putting a bit more pressure on the government to speed up testing would be a far better use of time than telling me the finer detail of what UK death tolls mean in relation to Italy, France or Spain.
I’ll be checking that myself, albeit looking for a more positive slant and for signs of hope.
Thursday 26 March 2020
Friday 20 March 2020
Coronavirus - For One Blog Only
I’ve had enough. I’ve tried to hold back on having my say on the current crisis because frankly it is the most depressing event of my lifetime. Thinking about it at all is a serious threat to my mental health so writing about it regularly is a non-starter. So this is an attempt to get it all out in one chunk.
To summarise. Your esteemed racist Prime Minister De Pfeffel has just treated us to one of his now daily briefings on the coronavirus crisis. These were never going to be a good idea. I understand the clamour for more communication from the government at a time of national crisis but you have to remember who is the leader and therefore the public face of that government. All half an hour of dispiriting, daily waffle from him will ever achieve is anger and subsequent criticism for the things he doesn’t say, irrespective of what he does say.
It wasn’t until yesterday that he announced that schools should close in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus. He had been widely panned for refusing to take this step in any of the previous briefings which started this week. So you might think the announcement would be met with widespread relief when it came. That went out of the window when he added a not insignificant caveat. The children of so-called ‘key workers’ will be allowed to continue to attend so that their parents can do their jobs without having to worry about who is looking after the kids. So schools are demonstrably open then. Especially given that the list of key workers is quite lengthy. Those who Tory drawbridge-puller Priti Patel has recently referred to as ‘unskilled’ in her shameless attempt to deport everyone except herself and Sajid Fucking Javid are now key workers.
Whether you are a key worker or not you were advised from Tuesday of this week to work from home if possible. A list of vulnerable groups was published and if like me you were on it then it was made quite clear that staying in your place of work was a risk to your very existence. If this isn’t your first MOAFH rodeo you will know that I have chronic kidney disease, a condition which was quite prominent on the list. Those over 70 and those with asthma or other respiratory conditions and those with diabetes were also amongst those deemed to be at greater risk. It was a list almost as long as the list of key workers. If you did not have the capability to work from home then basically you had no choice but to go to work and take your chances with Covid-19. In some cases that meant either risking your health or missing your mortgage or rent payments because - like Susannah Hoffs from that famous Bangles song written by Prince - you just wouldn’t get paid.
Until today. Today the Tories, led by good cop Chancellor Of The Exchequer Rishi Sunak, finally announced measures to help this economically vulnerable group. He pledged to fund up to 80% of salaries for businesses large or small. This came on the back of some rather high profile I’m-Alright-Jackery from entrepreneurs as they scrambled to lay off their staff as quickly as possible. Working class hero and absolute wanker Richard Branson took a scandalous approach for somebody who owns an actual island, asking 75% of his staff to take eight weeks of unpaid leave.
Well, he wasn’t sacking anyone, right? Branson, who will no doubt welcome the cancellation of school exams (did I mention that?) because he never tires of telling everyone how he left school with nothing but a kick up the arse, is estimated to be worth around £4billion. His wage bill over the period is said to be somewhere in the region of £34million. That’s a gigantic sum of money admittedly but not one likely to stir him from his 40 winks on his island hammock.
The reaction to Sunak’s announcement of the new funding was overwhelmingly positive. And why wouldn’t it be? He’d just saved thousands of jobs. But you couldn’t help but think back to a pre-Election Theresa May looking a nurse in the eye and telling her that there was no more money, no magic money tree, to properly compensate those on the front line of our NHS. So who planted the magic money tree since then? If you squint you might just see Sunak’s pledge as an act of socialism, something which pre-coronavirus was painted by these people as the most dangerous evil on the planet. I guess it’s fine in a crisis which can be loosely defined as a time when people who hate socialism suddenly find that they do need it.
I want to know if there is any more money on the tree. The World Health Organisation has repeatedly warned that the most important thing in getting through the pandemic is testing for the virus. Yet still the UK lags behind most other affected countries in this area. Which means that we are learning less about the virus than others. Piffling matters such as who has already had it without knowing? Have they built up antibodies as a result and are they therefore less likely to pass it on to others? We don’t know any of this, so our strategy is still to bring society to a complete halt until, like the Martians in the Mini advert, the virus gets bored and goes home.
The effect on the country’s mental health if we are all confined to our homes for months on end is incalculable. Last week they had to replace Match Of The Day with fucking Mrs Brown’s Boys. Yet mental health and general psychological well-being does not seem to have been considered at this stage. Ever the optimist, Johnson spoke only yesterday of ‘getting it done’ by which he meant beating the virus presumably by an indefinite period of hiding from it. Does the phrase ‘getting it done’ seem familiar with Johnson? Is someone pulling a chord in his back? What else does it spew out? Racist insults? Homophobia? A tactless warning about losing your loved ones? We can only speculate.
He claimed that we could ‘turn the tide’ within 12 weeks but he made no promises nor even hints that the already draconian social distancing measures - stepped up today with the closure of all pubs, clubs, restaurants, gyms and leisure centres - would be relaxed after that 12-week period. We could conceivably spend the whole summer in our houses. This is no fun for anyone but for those of us who face the prospect of a kidney transplant and around three months recovery after that, it is the shittiest of sandwiches. This is a best case scenario if we are holed up all summer. Live donor transplants will not take place while there is a risk of infection so I could also be facing a period on dialysis if my kidney function drops before the surgery can be arranged. I genuinely cannot say with any great certainty that dialysis is preferable to contracting coronavirus. Avoiding dialysis has been my life’s work for the last 12 years. I have been bloody good at it considering the amount of alcohol I have consumed in that time. I am close, but the way this outbreak has been handled inspires about as much confidence as I have in Johnson’s ability to locate Wakefield on a map. Of Wakefield.
I don’t mean to be totally negative about the situation so here is some good news. China, which had its first case in mid-November, is currently reporting no new cases while in India there are suggestions that they have developed an effective treatment through a combination of drugs not dissimilar to those which make it possible to live with HIV. South Korea has also had significantly reduced rates of infection after a period of lockdown. So maybe we just need to take our medicine for a few months before we come out the other side? The difference it would appear is that there has been greater testing in those countries. Without that - if we continue to combat it with social exclusion and the magic money tree, we could be in for a somewhat longer haul than has been necessary elsewhere.
To summarise. Your esteemed racist Prime Minister De Pfeffel has just treated us to one of his now daily briefings on the coronavirus crisis. These were never going to be a good idea. I understand the clamour for more communication from the government at a time of national crisis but you have to remember who is the leader and therefore the public face of that government. All half an hour of dispiriting, daily waffle from him will ever achieve is anger and subsequent criticism for the things he doesn’t say, irrespective of what he does say.
It wasn’t until yesterday that he announced that schools should close in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus. He had been widely panned for refusing to take this step in any of the previous briefings which started this week. So you might think the announcement would be met with widespread relief when it came. That went out of the window when he added a not insignificant caveat. The children of so-called ‘key workers’ will be allowed to continue to attend so that their parents can do their jobs without having to worry about who is looking after the kids. So schools are demonstrably open then. Especially given that the list of key workers is quite lengthy. Those who Tory drawbridge-puller Priti Patel has recently referred to as ‘unskilled’ in her shameless attempt to deport everyone except herself and Sajid Fucking Javid are now key workers.
Whether you are a key worker or not you were advised from Tuesday of this week to work from home if possible. A list of vulnerable groups was published and if like me you were on it then it was made quite clear that staying in your place of work was a risk to your very existence. If this isn’t your first MOAFH rodeo you will know that I have chronic kidney disease, a condition which was quite prominent on the list. Those over 70 and those with asthma or other respiratory conditions and those with diabetes were also amongst those deemed to be at greater risk. It was a list almost as long as the list of key workers. If you did not have the capability to work from home then basically you had no choice but to go to work and take your chances with Covid-19. In some cases that meant either risking your health or missing your mortgage or rent payments because - like Susannah Hoffs from that famous Bangles song written by Prince - you just wouldn’t get paid.
Until today. Today the Tories, led by good cop Chancellor Of The Exchequer Rishi Sunak, finally announced measures to help this economically vulnerable group. He pledged to fund up to 80% of salaries for businesses large or small. This came on the back of some rather high profile I’m-Alright-Jackery from entrepreneurs as they scrambled to lay off their staff as quickly as possible. Working class hero and absolute wanker Richard Branson took a scandalous approach for somebody who owns an actual island, asking 75% of his staff to take eight weeks of unpaid leave.
Well, he wasn’t sacking anyone, right? Branson, who will no doubt welcome the cancellation of school exams (did I mention that?) because he never tires of telling everyone how he left school with nothing but a kick up the arse, is estimated to be worth around £4billion. His wage bill over the period is said to be somewhere in the region of £34million. That’s a gigantic sum of money admittedly but not one likely to stir him from his 40 winks on his island hammock.
The reaction to Sunak’s announcement of the new funding was overwhelmingly positive. And why wouldn’t it be? He’d just saved thousands of jobs. But you couldn’t help but think back to a pre-Election Theresa May looking a nurse in the eye and telling her that there was no more money, no magic money tree, to properly compensate those on the front line of our NHS. So who planted the magic money tree since then? If you squint you might just see Sunak’s pledge as an act of socialism, something which pre-coronavirus was painted by these people as the most dangerous evil on the planet. I guess it’s fine in a crisis which can be loosely defined as a time when people who hate socialism suddenly find that they do need it.
I want to know if there is any more money on the tree. The World Health Organisation has repeatedly warned that the most important thing in getting through the pandemic is testing for the virus. Yet still the UK lags behind most other affected countries in this area. Which means that we are learning less about the virus than others. Piffling matters such as who has already had it without knowing? Have they built up antibodies as a result and are they therefore less likely to pass it on to others? We don’t know any of this, so our strategy is still to bring society to a complete halt until, like the Martians in the Mini advert, the virus gets bored and goes home.
The effect on the country’s mental health if we are all confined to our homes for months on end is incalculable. Last week they had to replace Match Of The Day with fucking Mrs Brown’s Boys. Yet mental health and general psychological well-being does not seem to have been considered at this stage. Ever the optimist, Johnson spoke only yesterday of ‘getting it done’ by which he meant beating the virus presumably by an indefinite period of hiding from it. Does the phrase ‘getting it done’ seem familiar with Johnson? Is someone pulling a chord in his back? What else does it spew out? Racist insults? Homophobia? A tactless warning about losing your loved ones? We can only speculate.
He claimed that we could ‘turn the tide’ within 12 weeks but he made no promises nor even hints that the already draconian social distancing measures - stepped up today with the closure of all pubs, clubs, restaurants, gyms and leisure centres - would be relaxed after that 12-week period. We could conceivably spend the whole summer in our houses. This is no fun for anyone but for those of us who face the prospect of a kidney transplant and around three months recovery after that, it is the shittiest of sandwiches. This is a best case scenario if we are holed up all summer. Live donor transplants will not take place while there is a risk of infection so I could also be facing a period on dialysis if my kidney function drops before the surgery can be arranged. I genuinely cannot say with any great certainty that dialysis is preferable to contracting coronavirus. Avoiding dialysis has been my life’s work for the last 12 years. I have been bloody good at it considering the amount of alcohol I have consumed in that time. I am close, but the way this outbreak has been handled inspires about as much confidence as I have in Johnson’s ability to locate Wakefield on a map. Of Wakefield.
I don’t mean to be totally negative about the situation so here is some good news. China, which had its first case in mid-November, is currently reporting no new cases while in India there are suggestions that they have developed an effective treatment through a combination of drugs not dissimilar to those which make it possible to live with HIV. South Korea has also had significantly reduced rates of infection after a period of lockdown. So maybe we just need to take our medicine for a few months before we come out the other side? The difference it would appear is that there has been greater testing in those countries. Without that - if we continue to combat it with social exclusion and the magic money tree, we could be in for a somewhat longer haul than has been necessary elsewhere.
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