Testing Times

This story starts with Emma unexpectedly coming home early from work yesterday. She’s a key worker at the crown court. Though there are no jury trials going on amid social distancing in the current crisis they remain open for sentencing. Somebody has to staff them.

Until yesterday that is when it was discovered that two members of staff had tested positive for coronavirus. The building was evacuated and will be closed now until Monday at least. Although the two staff members in question have been off with symptoms in recent days their diagnosis obviously increases the chances that Emma could have contracted the virus. Last night she said she thought she might be getting a bit of a sore throat as well as some aches. By this morning the sore throat had not developed but the aches persisted. Matt Hancock had announced yesterday that key workers outside the NHS were eligible for a test along with their co-habitants. So it was time for us to get a test.

Emma went online to find that we had three options in terms of testing centres we could visit. Two were in Manchester at either the airport or the Etihad Stadium while the other was in Knutsford. Not ideal if you live in St Helens especially at a time when the government don’t want people venturing far from their own localities. But this was essential. We decided that Knutsford was just about the best of those options and were given a time slot of between 1.00 and 1.30pm today.

It wasn’t that easy to find. The website claims it is on Toft Road but when we got to Toft Road we had more to do. There is some very small white signage, hastily printed no doubt, leading you to the Covid-19 test centre. It would be very easy to miss and considering the litany of problems we had with the testing process thereafter it is a small miracle that we managed to find it without missing our time slot.

When you get there two things immediately greet you. Queues and soldiers. It was extremely hot inside the car this afternoon so we had the window open on the passenger side as we approached the queue. We were barked at to close the window by one of the soldiers. He was wearing a flimsy looking mask and full military uniform. There were dozens like him, all shuffling about from car to car giving instructions to an increasingly bewildered public.

At this point the barking stops. Once inside the grounds of the centre you cannot have your window open more than just a crack. Even then that is only for brief, simple instructions. More commonly they stand next to your car window holding up a card that reads ‘please call.......’ and then a mobile number is written underneath. So you call and have a conversation on the telephone with a soldier who is six feet from your car window. I didn’t read the full instructions on the website. Emma did that. So I don’t know what happens if you don’t have your mobile phone to hand.

The first part of the conversation is about scanning. When your appointment is confirmed they send you a text message with a link on it. You are instructed to open the link which takes you to a scannable (is that a word?, Pages for the iPad seems to think so) code. You are asked to hold up the code to your car window to be scanned which is supposed to allow you to register so you can be given your testing kit. Only it doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. This is me and Emma, remember? After a few minutes twiddling with knobs and muffled whispers between soldiers our man is back on the phone. He says there is a problem with the scanner. This has been fine all day, he tells us, until now. Again, has he not heard about us?

All is not lost. There’s a phone number on a receipt card that is part of the testing kit. We can ring that number to complete our registration at home once we have taken the test. He says something about attaching a bar code to this card and I have no clue what he means because what he doesn’t explain is that within the testing kit are four stickers each with bar codes on. He says it will all become clear when we get the testing kits. He asks me to wind down the back window so his colleague can drop two testing kits on to the back seat. We are then asked to move out of the queue and park up by a hedge on the edge of what is actually just a big car park next to Knutsford Leisure Centre. He attempts to reassure me that this will not be difficult but says that if I have any questions I should put my hazard lights on. He doesn’t state the obvious by telling me not to get out of the car which is a shame because I was looking forward to the look on his face when I told him that to do so would be more trouble than it’s worth since my chair is in the boot of the car at this point.

You need a nursing degree to decipher the testing process. If we ever get back to the office I might ask some of our nursing academic staff to give me a few pointers because initially I was clueless. You get four pages of instructions where one would have done. Part of those instructions is a diagram, ambiguously labelled. It is meant to identify all the items in the testing kit so that you know exactly what to do with which item. You wouldn’t want to be downing the contents of the vial, for example, or sticking the swab in the wrong orifice. The vial looks just that - vile. Like something they used to put in the cocktails in Maloney’s when the bar men thought they were Tom Cruise. Maloney’s is still the only Irish bar I’ve ever been in where buying a pint is frowned upon.

The swab is for your nose and your throat. You only get one so it is dual purpose. The instructions are to take a swab of the throat first. There might be a medical or hygiene reason for this but if there is it is not elaborated on despite the forest-decimating amount of paper they are using. When I swab the back of my throat I gag and splutter like someone who has downed the vial or a cocktail at Maloney’s. There’s also a self consciousness that comes with having to twirl the swab around inside your nostril for 15 seconds. It’s like picking your nose but without getting your hands dirty or removing any significant bogey-age. That’s definitely not a word whatever iPad Pages says.

The swabbing is the easy bit. It’s the labelling that causes the problems. The four stickers containing bar codes are there for a reason. There is meant to be one on the vial which by now should have the used swab inside it. That’s another difficulty. The swab is too long to fit into the vial so you have to snap some of it away. It bends easily but it does not break for what feels like several months. By this time we have been here over an hour. I have had to put those hazard lights on for assistance long ago. Anyone who thinks this is like going to a McDonald’s drive-thru think again. You don’t even get a happy meal at the end of it. Eventually the swab snaps, I can now close the vial and attach one of the bar code stickers to it. Another goes on your receipt card which we have to take home. Remember, we have to ring the number on the receipt card to complete our registration. The other two labels are for the clear plastic back now containing the vial with the swab inside and a bigger grey plastic bag into which the whole lot should be placed.

Except we’ve lost the remaining bar code stickers.

I had them just a second ago. I insist several times that I have put them in the bag but Emma has emptied the contents of said bag twice and there are no bar code stickers. To borrow Hancock’s phrase the pressure is ‘ramping up’ now. The soldier is back by our window, this time on Emma’s side and he’s trying to explain to us as patiently as possible how everything should be packaged before we can leave. As the search for the missing stickers continues and gets ever more fruitless, and as we start to bake inside an air-tight hunk of metal with the sun blazing down on us - conditions that would kill a good sized dog - Emma breaks into uncontrollable laughter at the farcical nature of this scene. I’m not laughing. I’m panicking. I’m worrying that Covid-19 will be a note in human history by the time we get out of Knutsford. Or that we may never get out. Perhaps to protect the public in a time of crisis the army will be authorised to just shoot the idiot that has managed to lose the fucking sticky labels! My fear turns to anger. Anger at Emma because she just won’t stop bloody laughing. Yet the angrier I get the more she laughs. What hope is there for us?

Eventually some sort of arrangement is made. I’m barely listening to what has been suggested or agreed but Emma is writing something on the various bags and bits of paper that seem to have multiplied faster than Covid-19 itself. Finally we are set free, still debating where the bloody hell those stickers got to as I negotiate the one way system which leads back to the outside world.

We stop at a Co-op on the way home. Since there is a chance we’ll test positive there a few things we need to stock up on if we have to isolate. Emma is slightly symptomatic and more likely to be positive (we think) so I go in. As I climb off the driver’s seat into my chair I notice something under my foot. Something yellow that looks like an office sticky that you write notes on. I pick it up and turn it over. It is the remaining two white sticky labels that we had just wasted half a lifetime not to mention the military’s time and resources looking for. I had seen this at the time but hadn’t bothered to explore it any further. It was yellow and I was looking for two white sticky labels. I hadn’t noticed that the reverse was office sticky note yellow. I just get a look from Emma. She doesn’t need to say anything. She still thinks it’s funny which considering how angry I was earlier at her fit of the giggles is a result.

I go into the shop. A man in the queue turns to me and tells me he has forgotten his card and needs to go back to his car. I’m not sure why I need to know. Perhaps he’s just making conversation. After all he probably hasn’t seen anyone for six weeks. It is only when he gets back from his car and thanks me before stepping back into the queue in front of me that I realise that he was expecting me to save his place in the queue. He shapes to leave no fewer than four times to let me have my turn before on each occasion turning to grab some other essential item (a 24-pack of Carling) off the shelf.

Finally served I make my exit. On my way out I decide against using my ruck sack to carry my shopping back to the car. It’s right outside the door and I’ve only bought bread and milk, some biscuits and a six-pack of Coke. I’ll be ok, right? Wrong. The top hat is placed perfectly atop my afternoon when I drop the plastic bag sending the biscuits rolling along the shop floor as the loaf plugs at the base of my front wheel. Only the milk and the Coke stay put. Ignoring social distancing because a biff who has dropped a bag is much more important than public safety, a woman comes to my aid, scooping up the biscuits and handing them back to me with the loaf. I thank her and apologise. Wisely, she doesn’t hang around.

The results will be in in the next 48-72 hours. I fully expect mine to come back positively brain dead.

Boris Is Back - But So What?

Well I feel a lot better, don’t you? No. Not really. The government and an increasingly compliant media are framing the return to work today of Boris Johnson as some kind of measure of relief if not an out-and-out saviour. You can almost hear them collectively exhale at the prospect of their beloved leader returning to lead the ongoing effort to eliminate coronavirus. Personally, I feel more secure now that Johnson is back in situ in the same way I would if you told me that Kyle Walker was organising a party for one of my elderly relatives.

The narrative that he has ‘taken one for the team’ after recovering from coronavirus is as sickening as it is false. First because he had previously boasted about shaking the hands of coronavirus patients and was therefore at least partly culpable for his own predicament, but also because it implies that those who do not recover somehow lack the requisite level of good old English bulldog spirit. Far too often we apply this narrative to illness, as if the outcome somehow depends on the will of the victim to just bloody well get up and go on living and not on other factors like human biology and absolute dumb inexplicable luck.

Even if you are naive enough to view Johnson’s recovery as heroic there is still very little evidence that his return will have a positive impact on the situation. As well as the arrogant, oafish handshaking in which he engaged Johnson spent two weeks away on holiday at a time when much of Europe was starting to enter the most dangerous phase of the pandemic. The bit when shit got real. Johnson missed no fewer than five Cobra meetings before the UK was finally locked down on March 23. That delay has translated to more than 20,000 deaths related to coronavirus in hospitals alone. Thousands more are thought to have died in care homes. To put that into context the government’s scientific advisors told us that if we could keep our overall death toll under 20,000 it would be ‘a good result’. We have failed to do that. The final tally could be double that figure.

The government have consistently claimed that their decisions were guided by the science. They have stated publicly that it is not problematic nor even unusual for a sitting Prime Minister to miss out on Cobra meetings. As if they are entirely voluntary and ultimately inconsequential like my failure to turn up for more than one shorthand session in three years of a journalism degree. Yet they will also tell you that it is absolutely necessary for Johnson’s closest advisor and vile architect of Brexit Dominic Cummings to be present at meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Let that sink in as absolute weapons on Twitter sometimes say. Prime Minister at Cobra meetings - optional. Spin doctor and political influencer at science think-tank gatherings - essential. Just who is running this country? Perhaps that question isn’t so easy to answer when you consider that there were people expecting the Queen to announce some game-changing policy when she made a televised speech recently.

Though it happened way too late the government did finally start to get things right in terms of tackling the pandemic. Social distancing is working in as far as infections and hospitalisations are now decreasing, even if the death tolls announced at the daily briefings are still horrific. Lockdown has worked to that extent but hapless supply teacher Dominic Raab was right when he told us yesterday that now isn’t the right time to be relaxing the lockdown measures. There is a debate to be had. The people who would have us locked down for two years are just as dangerous and batshit crazy as those who go round licking shelves in Tesco. But measures need to be relaxed gradually with proper thought and consideration at every stage.

The right, driven to distraction at the thought of an economic crash, have been pushing for some relaxation of measures for weeks. They argue that the damage it is causing economically will lead to more death and destruction of lives than the virus itself ever could. They suggest that we should just shield what they call ‘the vulnerable’ so that the rest of us can go back to life as we know it. What they fail to understand is that we have moved on from the belief that only the elderly or the sick are at risk from the very worst effects. We haven’t yet established what it is that makes coronavirus lethal to some people but a mild inconvenience to others. Until we do we need some form of lockdown or social distancing until a sophisticated and effective programme of contact tracing is established or a vaccine is available.

Yet you can see where this is going politically. Johnson’s return coincides with the important improvements we have seen in the statistics on infections. If lockdown measures are relaxed within the next few weeks it will be Johnson who is presented as the saviour. The poor old rudderless UK bumbling along, failing palpably to control infections, acquire PPE or ventilators until Johnson rides in on his white horse and lo.....light appears at the end of the tunnel. The man is conceited and deluded enough to believe that his return has made all the difference and so are his idiot public. Voting for his party’s debilitating cuts to public services over the last decade yet absolving themselves of any responsibility for that dismal choice by clapping every Thursday night until their hands sting like a Portuguese Man O’ War. Even then some of his disciples can’t manage to show their appreciation for the NHS without breaching the very social distancing rules that their exalted leader announced before his enforced quarantine.

Johnson and his government have done too little too late. They are not heroes saving the day. They are only now doing what is and has been required of them for months. Those who feel they are in an impossible predicament and therefore not accountable forget that when you put yourself forward for the highest office in the land you have to accept your accountability. It is not all weekends at Chequers, multiple mistresses and hiding in fridges. That Johnson and his followers don’t accept that is evidence of how unsuitable he is for the role.

To finish and with due apologies I’m going to borrow, slightly embellish and eventually strangle an analogy from a friend of mine on Twitter. He pointed out that Johnson’s return at this juncture is like Ray Wilkins’ return to the England side after the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Wilkins has been sent off in a group game with Morocco which ended goalless. In his absence England breezed past Paraguay in their next game, free from the constraints of Wilkins’ crab-like horizontal but impotent distribution. They then went toe-to-toe with Argentina in an epic quarter-final which is infamous for both the genius and the villainy of Diego Maradona. Johnson is Wilkins, a man who some feel we cannot do without but in whose absence we are perhaps more likely to progress. The problem is that the government doesn’t have a squad as strong as the one Bobby Robson had featuring Peter Beardsley, Trevor Steven or Glenn Hoddle. Though it does have plenty of Hoddle-esque enemies of the disabled. The virus is more powerful and more villainous than even the great Diego. But all we have to throw into the game when Johnson is not around is Raab and Health Secretary Matt Hancock. Essentially we have Steve Hodge and Terry Fenwick.

Perhaps that’s why Johnson’s return is being pitched as a blessed relief.

Lockdown Update

It’s difficult to relay any amusing access-related anecdotes during lockdown. Since I was sent home to do my job on my sofa on March 17 the biggest access problem I’ve had is slaloming through Padme’s litter trays to throw my jeans in the washing machine at the back of the house. The Co-Op is still the only place I have ventured out to, adorned as its floor now is with X’s meant to indicate social distancing that are clearly not two metres apart. They must have been put down by the same person who decided how much space there should be either side of the disabled parking bays at work.

A lot has happened elsewhere since then, however. The headlines should probably about the rapidly increasing coronavirus death toll. Yesterday a record 980 people succumbed to the illness. In total the number of deaths in the UK is close to 10,000. That’s an almost unprecedented number even taking into account the annual and largely unreported deaths we see from seasonal flu. Yet it has not only been normalised after a sustained period in which hundreds have died every day, it has also been pushed to the margins of the news agenda by the fact that Boris Johnson is still in hospital with coronavirus.

You might be thinking that you feel sorry for the virus in that case. Now that he seems to be over the worst of it I’m inclined to agree. When he was taken into intensive care the kindest thought I could muster was that I hoped he didn’t die. Politics should never push us to the point where we are wishing death on individuals we don’t like or agree with. However, the media coverage of his situation has been nothing short of sycophantic rumination. His recovery has been pitched by Pravda the BBC as an act of heroism - his illness as some kind of martyrdom - irrespective of the fact that as recently as March 3 Johnson was boasting about having shaken hands with coronavirus patients on a hospital visit. If ever there was a man too arrogant and ignorant to read a situation, too convinced of his own infallibility then it is Johnson.

Because of this, while the media focus should be on attempts to flatten the curve of infection and so slow the death rate, it is instead on what films Johnson is enjoying during his convalescence. While he kicks back in front of Withnail & I a succession of even more witless clowns have replaced him at the daily press briefings. Dominic Raab - a man who it transpires does not know what an island is - is second in command while Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been trying his best to dodge what awkward questions there have been. Home Secretary and all around bucket of shit Priti Patel made a rare public appearance in that capacity today. You remember Priti? She’s the one whose immigration ideas would have prevented her own parents (and therefore her) from living in the UK and who wants to introduce the death penalty for farting in a bakery. Between these luminaries they cannot explain why NHS workers still don’t have enough Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for treating infected patients or why several flights a day still land at our main airports without checks.

People tell me constantly that this issue should not be politicised. Invariably, these are the kind of people who voted for this idiot government ‘because Brexit’ or ‘because Jeremy Corbyn’. Or the kind of people who refuse to engage with politics at all because ‘they’re all the same’. Often this last group go on to post all kinds of political statements on their social media which is fine because they ‘don’t vote’. All that I’m hearing from these people telling me not to politicise it is that they do not want to be made to feel guilty for the stupid and ignorant choices they made in the General Election in December.

The irony of it all is that in response to the economic crisis created by the lockdown the government has had to do exactly what it and its supporters told us was the greatest threat to our way of life and why Jeremy Corbyn ‘had to be stopped’. Spend public money. And lots of it. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has had to pledge billions to cover 80% of wages for businesses to stop them going bust. Yet those same voters will be comforted to know that he has already warned that it will all have to be paid back. What does that mean? In all likelihood it means another two years of austerity, job losses, pay freezes for the lucky ones, before a slight relaxation of the purse strings prior to the 2024 General Election. At which point the grateful idiots vote them back in and the whole cycle starts again. Only without a deadly virus next time. That should make Johnson look like Nye Bevan to his retarded disciples. Assuming they know who Bevan is which I know is a stretch. Rather like expecting Padme to name the England batting order in the 2005 Ashes series.

The money we are ‘paying back’ to Sunak when this is all over is our money. Money you have already paid in tax. Meanwhile, Hancock has the brass stones to single out footballers who, he argues, should take a pay cut to help their billionaire clubs through the lean period during which no football is being played. The PFA have not helped the situation, reacting slowly in their own self-serving fashion, but why is Hancock calling out Dejan Lovren or Phil Jones and not his billionaire banker mates or the irksome super rich in other fields like Richard Branson, Tim Martin or James Dyson? Footballers will no doubt do their bit financially, and many of them have already made massive donations to the cause. Who is to say that if they took a pay cut that the money saved would find its way to the places where it is needed? Do you trust the owners of Tottenham Hotspur, Newcastle United or - until a recent shame induced u-turn - Liverpool - to not pocket that money for themselves when they are (or were) all happy to furlough non-playing staff at the government’s (tax payer’s) expense?

It hasn’t been announced yet, but anyone who has been furloughed can expect that to continue for a while longer. Ludicrously - despite the absence of any evidence that we have reached the peak of this thing - despite warnings from science and health experts that we need to take things slowly even when we reach that peak - the media has nevertheless spent much of their time at this week’s daily briefings raising unrealistic expectations about ending the lockdown. What they might have been better served asking is not when it will end - that’s currently impossible to say - but what the stats might have to look like for restrictions to be lifted. For how long would we need to see a reduction in cases and deaths before restrictions are lifted? What structures will be in place to prevent further waves when we do come out of lockdown? None of this has been asked or answered, but we know that Johnson is well enough to tackle a sudoku puzzle so that’s something.

I have one last point to make. The restrictions that are in place have gone far enough. We do not need to see a complete lockdown that I know some people are calling for. A land where even your daily walk (push?) to the Co-Op would be off limits and all the local parks closed along with the already abandoned pubs, restaurants and cafes. Every day I see posts on social media from people foaming at the mouth because they have seen hordes of people on the roads, in the parks or in the shops. But what were the people writing the posts doing there? Everyone is entitled to go out for the reasons specified in the current guidelines and it is unhelpful for anyone to judge others for it. Let the police do that. They have been the powers to do so now and in any case, one of the few bits of useful information gleaned from the briefings is that the percentage of people flouting the social distancing rules is far lower than the great and the good of Instagram would have you believe. We are making a difference. It is just hard to appreciate that now because the figures we are currently seeing are the result of the government’s catastrophically slow decision to lock down which only arrived on March 20. Until then Johnson was shaking hands, telling us to take the loss of loved ones on the chin and hoping that the disease would only be as deadly as flu while offering the rest of us herd immunity.

I’m not suggesting that exaggerated levels of flouting of the social distancing measures means people should feel free or safe to ignore them. To those people protesting that they were more than two metres away from anyone else when they were sunbathing in the park I would say that if we all went sunbathing in the park it would become a very crowded, virus-friendly scene very quickly. You are not the exception while the rest of us sit at home watching endless repeats of Homes Under The Hammer and a coronavirus briefing that we are sure we saw word for word the day before. Do your bit. Take your stroll, walk your dog, enjoy your run, do your shopping. Whatever. Just piss off home when you’re done.

Otherwise there will be a lot more blogs like this than either you or I would ideally like.