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.