Is it a good idea to make a cult out of a public service? Credit: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty
I can’t remember exactly where I was when I first heard the depressing news. I had somehow, in spite of all the rules making it almost more trouble than it was worth, managed to have a drink with another human being. And we may have been celebrating the fact that the vaccine had arrived, faster than anyone had dared to hope, more effective than we’d expected, and was now being put into the arms of vulnerable people, not just hundreds of thousands of volunteers on clinical trials.
But I do remember very clearly that when I heard that Health Person solemnly say that, vaccine or no vaccine, we would still be wearing masks and social distancing and so on for the next 18 months, my response was not fit to print.
Now, I’m no idiot. I know that a vaccine in a vial is as much use as those gym weights gathering dust under the bed. Vaccines don’t work till people are vaccinated with them. Getting them into the people at serious risk from Covid-19 will take a few months. We’re going to be firefighting till Easter, stoically trudging through the grim, dark, post-Christmas months before normal life can be resurrected with the Spring.
Then it will take more months to vaccinate the rest of us, not everyone perhaps, but enough to provide herd immunity. So no, I am not expecting Covid-19 to vanish overnight, just because a vaccine exists. And I do expect that some of the vulnerable population who can’t be vaccinated will still end up in hospital with it. And that, despite improvements in medical treatments, some of them will die.
But I also expect that the risk of death and serious illness from this novel disease will, by next summer, genuinely become comparable to seasonal influenza.
And that’s why I am worried about the way our relationship with the NHS has been reconfigured during this pandemic.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeMaybe if the hallowed NHS spent lass cash on administrators, diversity tsars, equality impact assessment officers, pen pushers and paper shufflers fat salaries and fat pensions they’d have a little bit more cash to spend on treating people with illnesses instead of treating people with well paid jobs for life.
…….just a thought…..
You are aware that matching the proportion of GDP spent on healthcare by other Western European countries would require increasing NHS spending by 20% overnight…….. are you?
How about giving us the percentage of tax take per country, rather than GDP?
Most European countries insist that if you can afford to you must pay for some private health insurance, and they seem to work better than here.
This can’t be true, there’s only the sainted NHS model and the nasty US model. Any deviation from the NHS model is truly evil.
A British friend who currently lives in Germany tried explaining their system to people in the UK, he said they seemed unable to handle the idea that the British system might not be best, regardless of outcomes.
Funny really most of the biggest advocate of the NHS would run a mile at the thought of British exceptionalism, yet for this fundemental service they’re convinced we’ve nailed it and pretty much every other country has got it wrong.
The only other country with the NHS model is – drum roll- Cuba.
I would say Canada is a close third…..although….shhhhhh…..don’t dare say that out loud or the pitchforks and cries of “but at least you won’t be bankrupted by a heart attack!” will be hurled your way. Canadians are very smug about the healthcare system and only seem to use the US as a comparison. While it might be true, basic and emergency healthcare won’t cost you the roof over your head, if you require any peripheral treatment (chiropractor, dentist, god forbid orthodontist or long term medication for a chronic condition) and you don’t have employer benefits, it will cost you a fortune. Also, if you need any diagnostic testing or referral to a specialist, you might, without exaggeration, die waiting. We lived in Austria for nearly a decade before moving “back” and knew we would be sorely disappointed in the healthcare system in comparison. The narrative here is also lockdown to keep the healthcare system from being overwhelmed, even though due to staff shortages (most of our “good” doctors and nurses leave to work stateside where they can actually earn enough to pay back their student loans) and never ending federal and provincial budget cuts, the system’s natural state of being is overrun……COVID is just the stick we’re beating the dead horse with.
You’re forgetting that Canada borders the US and Canadians can come to the US for care they would be waiting for in Canada.
They can, if they can afford to…..and some do.
Not all of it is patient paid or even private insurance paid. About 30% of healthcare spending in Canada is through private care. Canadian Medicare will pay for care in the US in some circumstances (patients having to wait too long in Canada, testing and/or care not available in Canada, or better in the US, etc) Also, it allows Canadians who can, as you say pay, or those who purchase private insurance to cover what Canadian Medicare does not cover, to jump the line.
As the UK doesn’t border the US, this option is less frequently available to NHS patients.
“[Crossing the US border] allows Canadians who can, as you say pay, or those who purchase private insurance to cover what Canadian Medicare does not cover, to jump the line. As the UK doesn’t border the US, this option is less frequently available to NHS patients.”
I doubt whether the gold-plated (a US friend of mine had a consultant paid $2million a year), private-profit-obsessed, lawyer-influenced (–> defensive medicine to cover legal backsides rather than help the patient), etc US healthcare system would have much to offer the NHS in terms of cost-effective capacity augmentation. And if people in the UK want to go privately because cost is no object, they already can – and if their condition deteriorates there, the private hospital picks up the phone and calls an ambulance to take them to an NHS hospital.
Don’t confuse private pay care with Canadian Medicare. NHS patients don’t live in a country that shares a border with the US. Most Canadians live in the southern part of Canada, close to the US border. So it’s not hard for them to get here for care.
And while some pay privately, they don’t all pay privately. Canadian Medicare will cover care in the US if it cannot be accessed in a timely way in Canada or if the care needed is not available in Canada.
Oh so true. The Canadian systems (they vary from Province to Province) are nothing like the NHS.
and Brazil? We call it SUS.
The principle of free at the point of use is great, but then there is the reality of outcomes and we are far from world class in the treatment of many illnesses.
With the NHS being put on a saintly pedestal, the full debate we need about whither the NHS is going to be postponed whilst a mediocre level of service continues.
The figures are not comparable nearly so simply. It depends what is included as hospital care, social care, local community care, etc, etc. On that adjusted basis we are big spenders compared with anybody
This is a sensible and informed comment – the NHS is so much more than acute healthcare and outpatients. There is merit in many of the comments on ‘bean counters’ as well and internal market inefficiencies. However there is a much larger debate about the wider purpose and function of the NHS which is much more difficult due to the vast and complex nature of the offer. In terms of outcomes, there is no perfect system in the world surely?
Except we’re fairly mid ranking GDP spending in health care for western European countries. Not as high as some, higher than others. Spending 20% more would put us near the top.
Not quite ,the Uk spends 9.5% on a poor service, in Europe they pay 11% for a far better service. The concept of a state monopoly provider needs to be examined. If you increased NHS spending to 11% would it be as good as Germany’s private insured provision ?
No because the NHS is a financial black hole and any extra will be wasted on more bean counters and managers – and that is before the car crash NHS Wales is in the equation.
Dogma.
But it’s not fully taxpayer funded in those cases.
Mixed funding : private and taxpayer. Won’t happen her ….sadly.
Are you sure that’s true? As there is no equivalent to the NHS in any European country I am not sure on what you base your calculation.
We have fed ever-increasing quantities of cash into the gaping maw of the NHS for ages, and it’s still unfit for purpose. It needs a thorough reform. It won’t get one, of course – that would upset people like whoever painted that vomit-inducing mural above.
…and they would still claim it was not enough. In fact, few other health services are funded in the same way as the NHS, and the political class should look seriously as why this is; and why it is that many of them seem to have better outcomes. To do so is not an attack on NHS staff or on the principle of free at the point of need. Still less is it heresy.
.
Maybe some of the £350 billion could have been spent on the NHS instead of paying for perfectly healthy, low-risk people to stay home and do nothing.
Here in Scotland we don’t even have an internal market. Our Trusts cooperate instead of competing. We don’t employ armies of bean counters as a result.
Ever wonder how we can afford other good things? That’s part of it.
What good things?
All those nice houses covered in beige pebbledash, which are the universal housing stock outside of historic districts.
Huge subsidies, a massive deficit and terrible health outcomes?
Still good to get rid of some bean counters, though I think in Scotland now public sector admin roles are the best paying.
You sir, are a legend. Comment of the Week.
Though you could have added “leaching off of England and giving back nothing substantial”.
Please leave the Union guys, please? I cant wait to see the brain-drain and the constant trickle of Scottish refugees across old Hadrian’s Wall.
Yep, you are definitely over compensating Aaron. Just relax and stop trying so hard, honestly, poor thing.
You can’t afford those other ‘good things’.. free prescriptions, free uni tuition etc – they are paid for with English money by people who have to pay about £9 per item on prescription and 9 grand a year for uni. You get £2000 per capita more than England…get real !
But would you seriously consider living in Scotland, for a free prescription and subjecting your offspring to the torture of a Scotch University?
Off course not. As Dr Johnson observed mote than two centuries ago, the ” finest sight a Scotchman can behold is the A1 to England”
It is still the same!
I believe it was the high road to England, pal.
And the reason the sun never sets on the Empire? Even God wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark.
Scotch is whisky, btw. We are Scots or Scottish.
Quite, but check what Johnson actually said.
Good comment ref Johnson (not the chippy English-hating bit). In fact, I think he said it was the “finest prospect”, which makes the original quoter even more inaccurate.
You are correct, but I thought I would bring it up to date for younger readers.
You second point, yes God was correct, not forgetting that many Scotch were great Imperialists.
The Oxford English Dictionary has you as Scotch, as in egg, and Scotch Corner on the A1/A68 Junction. What is the problem?
The problem, as ever, is Scotch/Scots/Scottish chippiness. Always has been always will be.
Fortunately, they “always rise to the bait”.
Mark I’m disappointed, you need to find a new game to play!
My apologies, puerile behaviour and guilty as charged.
My only defence, recurrent attacks of Lockdown Syndrome (LS).
Only joking, I have been known to play the game myself every now and then 😉
I don’t know how the Scots get this reputation for being chippy, they’ll deep fry anything up there, not just potatoes.
Yes its true, did you know we invented Southern fried chicken…
Comes from their knowledge that they always are, have always been, and always will be, the smaller and far less important nation in our little Union, you ken? I know smugness is ugly, but envy is even more so.
Hmmmm, smelling a major whiff of inferiority complex about your posts here Aaron, feeling a wee bit threatened by your Scottish neighbours there are you lol. Love it :0
Smaller yes, but I wouldn’t say less important. I’m of the opinion that all the countries that make up the Union are of equal value and have all contributed to its history and well being. Look at the Scottish Enlightenment, or the scientists, mathematicians and writers from all parts of the UK. True, I get fed-up with all this breaking-up of the Union talk and in the end it’s up to the individual countries, but I for one, will be sad to see what has been a generally successful union of countries, from which all have gained, broken-up.
Well, ackshually….smart boy indeed. Scots, Scottish, Scotch, You are parasites is what you are. I could easily forgive that, its just the damn whining.
Ahh there it is, the male English ego, for all to see. Make your mother proud son 🙂
He has form this guy. Abuse is his thing.
Oh Isla! Just as xenophobic as Aaron and sexism added for bad measure.
This is satire, right? Or simple trolling?
Please – go and do your homework. Scotland has terrible performance on health, healthcare, education, fiscal responsibility – and manages all that uselessness despite free cash from England.
Free cash almost always leads to failure. If you can’t earn it well, you won’t spend it well.
Pity that no longer enables you to afford Scotland’s once world class education system.
I suggest you read “Scotland’s drug problem is a national scandal” in The Spectator.
I’ve not worked in NHS England but trust me NHS Scotland still has a ton of excessive admin. Folk work hard to make it work but the sheer fact it’s the only employer in town for most medical careers causes it to tend towards bureaucracy.
I would have thought that part of the answer to you affording good things is that under the obsolete Barnet formulae you are still paid a large subsidy per capita out of public funds
Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyup!
Possibly, but please remember that many of these admin people were brought in under the privatisation and internal market measures which were supposed to make the NHS so much more efficient. There seems to be approximately zero evidence that they have done so.
Alas, the internal market was taken out to the back of the NHS and quietly strangled. Then thing went on as before except in very nice new hospitals
Privatisation is and always has been a grift.
The Grenville fire was an outcome of privatisation.
What is an ‘internal market’ when its at home? Nothing about the NHS is even vaguely like the private sector, and never will be.
instead of everybody being secluded until we can get the vaccine into the vulnerable people – why don’t we just seclude the vulnerable people until we can get vaccines into them.
How do you seclude the 70 year old heart patient with a younger partner who works in a supermarket? And a 30 year old son who lives with them because he’s employed in the gig economy?
They could do as I mentioned above or they could all seclude together. Leaving the 28 and 35 and 42 year olds not living with vulnerable people to get on with life. Lots of people with elderly parents living with them secluded along with them.
This kind of argument really amounts to a technicality when compared to the upheaval of the solution we used instead – the closing of the economy and the mass incarceration of huge sectors of the poulation.
A functioning costs and benefits process would have realised the cost of the chosen approach and re-allocated resources accordingly to Local authorities and their partnerships to provide community based support to those who wished to isolate.
Also, note the word ‘wish’; the elderly have been denied their agency with this whilst, at the same time, being isolated and put at greater risk of other neurological deterioration and neglect issues – giving lie to the claim that it’s ‘for their own good’.
Would “wish” is something we tend to forget about when considering the elderly. There are all kinds of elderly, some are in vigorous health and might hope for an extra decade or two. They would likely think a year of social distancing a worthwhile price. But if you’re really frail you probably think each day is a bonus, you may think this year will be be your last, do you really want to sacrifice your last good year for a few more months in a nursing home?
The 70 year old with a heart condition has been more or less secluded for the last nine months. You’re actually arguing for 90% seclusion, which is seclusion on the cheap, only offers partial protection, which likely just increases the chance of catching Covid-19 over the next year.
I suspect one of the reasons why no country has adopted a Barrington approach is that it would require actual planning and organisation. You would need to arrange food drops to those who are vulnerable. You’d need to isolate not just care home residents but also care home workers too. And so on. Our current approach is so much easier, just get Boris in front of a camera to tell us what the rules are, allow the police to enforce petty tyranny, “track and trace”, job done.
You don’t, you make sure Granny has taken her Vitamin D, Zinc, and vitamin C, and hey presto, no covid bug, and no problem..
I’m sure you’re being sardonic at the expense of the ‘natural health’ fantasists.
Or just move her to a room in the west wing.
I’d settle for a nice bit of hydroxychloroquine myself, but then I wouldn’t want to ignore the advice of the “experts”. Trump supported it, so it must be bad.
You can’t. You might as well ask, how can I stop myself from dying, like, ever? We you are 70 with a heart condition, you mut accept that you treasure every day. It’s not callous, it is speaking the truth in love.
This is the essence of The Great Barrington Declaration – despite the clinical expertise of its founders, considerable effort has been invested in trashing it – I wonder why?
Because it makes too much sense. Why should two 28 year olds be stopped from working? Even families with one vulnerable person can easily protect that person. My sister is married to a doctor who went to the hospital every day. She has some breathing issues so he stayed in another bedroom, they shared no meals or bathrooms. He used another door in and out of the house. Not pleasant but doable. But some folks would rather inconvenience everyone.
So they had two bedrooms and two bathrooms and two doors from the house to the outside.
Annette, you are American, this is often not the case in the UK. Flats above the ground floor (US: first floor) do not have two doors to the outside. The majority of British homes have one bathroom irrespective of the number of bedrooms. And the whole point of the Bedroom Tax, introduced by our cuddly Conservatives, was to penalise those people receiving Housing Benefit who had a spare bedroom – in other words, couples who had more than one bedroom, and couples with 1-2 children who had more than two bedrooms.
Isolating vulnerable people was considered by the Government. It was rejected because it’s not workable.
Of course it’s workable. Just because one 30 year old has to isolate with an elderly parent or grandparent doesn’t mean that all 30 year olds have to stay home from work. It makes no difference how many bathrooms a 30 year old couple have. Families with vulnerable members simply have to follow isolation procedures.
Chris C – you’re right about the bedroom tax, it’s a shameful policy. But isolating everyone is no more effective than isolating the vulnerable. “”Oh but it is, it would have been so much worse if we hadn’t!!!” Sure, maybe, no. We’ll never really know.
Leaving aside the fact that most people don’t have two bathrooms – this is a virus we are talking about. If it could find its way from China to all parts of the world in record time, you are really going to struggle containing it in a small house.
It’s not about bathrooms. Two healthy 28 year olds should not be locked up even if they only have one bathroom.
Who is suggesting containing a virus in a small house? Who even mentioned people with a virus in a small house? If you have the virus you HAVE to be isolated, no question about it.
My elderly parents live in an assisted living apartment with one bathroom. They are vulnerable and so, appropriately are isolated. It can be done.
Vulnerable people and those who live with them should surely be protected. But that isn’t everyone. The damage done to young, healthy people has been criminal.
We were discussing the possibility of isolating individuals within households.
Yes we were. And it’s possible to isolate vulnerable people without locking up non vulnerable younger people.
My better half caught covid, positive test, I had to laugh at track and trace telling him to use a separate bathroom, cutlery, cook his own food, load his own dishes into dishwasher, wash his own clothes etc as he could barely get out of bed. Myself and kids waited with baited breath till end of our isolation period, I was sure I must get it, there was no way I wasn’t exposed… Not one other person in the house caught it…. Go figure
“My better half caught covid, positive test, I…… I was sure I must get it, there was no way I wasn’t exposed… Not one other person in the house caught it…. Go figure”
What is your actual suggestion? Please could you make it explicit for the benefit of the rest of us? Are you suggesting that this disease is not infectious, and is not spread by proximity? Seriously?
And BTW, how can you exclude the possibilities that (a) you and your children were not already immune due to previous symptomless infection which your partner did not catch (maybe you are one of the minority who had low infectiousness towards him at the time) (b) you and your children did catch it from your partner when he was ill with it recently, but like many younger people showed negligible symptoms, unlike him ?
Calm down. I’m sorry that what actually happened to her trashes an opportunity to get all self righteous. Oh, hang on, it didn’t.
The fact that nobody listens to you in real life is NOT because they are not serious enough. It is that you lack the imagination to imagine someone with less righteous certainty than yourself.
Calm down, stop hating the world, stop hating yourself.
Simply an observation, take from it what you will, as you most certainly have 🙂
It would be an interesting observation – if you could exclude possibilities (a) and (b) which I’ve listed.
But you can’t.
You forgot c) we just didn’t catch it lol….
I’ve heard stories like this before. It does seem pretty random who gets it and who doesn’t.
Sunk cost fallacy. Having invested so much going down one path (both in expenditure and the cost to the economy) it is too painful for them to admit other options were available.
That’s a fancy phrase for ‘evil sociopath’.
Actually I really do wonder why. No one stands to benefit from this current course of action. The only explanation that makes any sense to me is sunk costs fallacy.
I hope you are right. Which is worse: outright stupidity or outright malice?
It could be both just at different times. At the beginning when no one knew anything about the virus including who was most vulnerable, it might have made sense to isolate huge numbers of people. So let’s say ignorance rather than stupidity at that point. But now? There’s no excuse. Now it’s sheer bullheaded malice.
knowing full well that many many on this thread are ideologically adverse to all things science here is the latest development in scientific research on the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to breach the brain-blood barrier.
Nature Neuroscience
Published: 16 December 2020
The S1 protein of SARS-CoV-2 crosses the blood”“brain barrier in mice.
Mechanistic studies indicated that I-S1 crosses the blood”“brain barrier by adsorptive transcytosis and that murine angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 is involved in brain and lung uptake, but not in kidney, liver or spleen uptake.
The zombie apocalypse can’t be far behind.
Bad luck NY, looks like you’ve had it!
Sad really, because that was far more coherent than usual.
Could you please expand on your last sentence, as I know nothing of this?
Eh?
Could we have that again in plain English, please?
ad hominem is the hall mark in intellectual bankruptcy…no need for you to fear the zombie apocalypse as your brain has already been eaten away by your consertvative ideology…Happy Christmas!
The private sector has administrators and diversity tsars as well.
And CEOs paid millions or tens of millions.
And shareholders taking large amounts out of the system.
And corporate lawyers, and merchants banks, to advise the Board.
And fatter salaries than a nurse or a healthcare assistant.
And private healthcare systems may, and often do, pay doctors more highly than the NHS.
Just a few inconvenient facts.
I was rather astounded , as I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it , to learn that a lot of our Council Tax is also spent on fat salaries( one Council chief apparently get £550,000 a year) and of course on council pensions. i suppose same in NHS, but what proportion of Council Tax and what proportion of National insurance is spent on staff salaries and pensions? does anyone know?
Almost all of it, in both cases.
Yes, but you sometimes get your bins emptied and when your house is burgled or your car broken into, you can get a crime reference number conveniently over the phone – without further charge.
Or a policeman like Andrew Harper leaves behind his wife of 4 weeks and goes out in the dark to tackle an unknown threat from low-life youths, and ends up being dragged along the road by a strap tangled round his leg and loses his life.
Just one of those public sector people with bloated pay who are sitting on their backsides, while the brave and productive people on this thread are sitting at their computers and putting the world to rights with their reflex cynicism and their conspiracy theories?
Chris C – you shock me sometimes, in a good way 😉
The public sector does need a kick up the arse frankly, and too many people do think that whining about things on the internet will fix a problem. That said, your local council is like a shadow-state, or a swamp. You can’t just get rid of it or those wallowing below the surface.
So for your purposes, a policeman is ‘public sector good’, not ‘oppressor of black people bad’? So hard to keep track with you lefties.
Yes, a policeman is ‘public sector good’. And a Tory Government cut their numbers by 23,000. It’s so hard to reconcile the conflicting narratives of you right-wingers.
I was being a little cynical about the police. They attend your crime scene with great alacrity, provided you let them know that you believe the crime you have suffered was motivated by hate.
Slightly off topic, but same applies to the BBC and how your TV licence poll tax (assuming you still pay it) funds the inflated remuneration of hundreds of on and off-screen corporate apparatchiks.
It’s a market (you know, the thing you rightwingers revere). If the BBC doesn’t pay people enough to retain them, they will go elsewhere. But maybe destroying the BBC is the real objective?
The same is true of physicians. Healthcare is a market. Don’t pay doctors enough to retain them and guess what they do? Viola, physician shortage. But hey, you’re keeping costs down, right?
And in the private sector the Chief Executive would get twice as much.
No, he would not. How on earth do they actually derive these figures for
salaries – do they just pick the biggest number they can think of on the
spot… and then double it? I say to these piggies fattening at the trough, go forth, and show us your ‘talents’ in other spheres….
Check out the bios/CVs of some of these people, absolute parasites.
Broadly agree, except your third point. Shareholders own “the system” (company, in fact) and are therefore entitled to enjoy the profits produced from their capital. If this were not the case, they wouldn’t put up the cash and the system would disappear.
…along with the corporate and income taxes that pay for all public services.
When they don’t evade tax by routing the profits via the Cayman Islands.
Oh, but so many of them do, don’t they? And David Cameron’s family shopped around between the Cayman Islands and the Virgin Islands to pay negligible tax on their investments.
Where they just might find “the Guardian” Scott Trust based as well.
The cash is mostly invested in speculative hege funds and other financial instruments gambling on outcomes. The days of the genteel capitalist investing in real things are long gone.
Tulips, South Sea trading, Mississippi Company. The good old days
In many companies, the original shareholder investment has long ago been replaced many times over by the profits created by the workers and management over the decades. Yes, the shareholders have a legal right to the profits, but the reality is that the shares in those companies are just chips in a casino.
So shareholders can also lose it all. That’s your point, right?
Ever occur to you that one of the largest groups “taking large amounts out of the system” are thd pension funds who use said funds to pay the pensions of private and even many public sector retirees?
Actually they do not-only ~20% of the LSE is “owned” by pension funds (2.6%), insurance funds (4.1%), and privately (11%)=less than 20% of the LSE. The majority is overseas owners (55%), so the mythology that companies need pay dividends so pensioners will not starve is simply NOT true. Suprising I know as I was shocked to see how little is owned by private or pension funds.
Further inconvenient facts for you:
The private sector is Wealth Creating, the NHS is not.
Private Healthcare is not paid for from taxation (exception when NHS sub contracts to private sector) but by corporations or individuals often from post tax earnings.
“The private sector has administrators and diversity tsars as well.”
And in spite of this (perhaps even because of this) companies manage to thrive in highly competitive markets.
The managerial problem in the NHS is that managers do not have the capability to manage. They are outgunned by powerful professional interests.
I suspect you right – the managers are outgunned by powerful professional interests. Consultants seem to call the shots in hospitals. I never understood why there are cosy private wards attached to NHS hospitals until someone told me that it is so that consultants private work is nice and handy for them (as if NHS work isn’t sufficiently lucrative) – and is arrangement that dates back to when the NHS was founded and was their price for playing ball with the NHS.
” In 1948 Bevan boasted that he was able to accomplish his goal “by stuffing the doctors’ mouths with gold.” What he meant by his famous and oft quoted statement is that he allowed some British doctors or consultants as they were called, to continue seeing private paying patients if they accepted NHS patients.”
A more concerning aspect to this is that Consultants draw their private patients either from the waiting lists, or from those who have taken out private insurance in order to avoid the waiting list.
It is therefore in their interests to maintain the waiting lists. No waiting lists, no lucrative private work.
Mind…blown. That’s dark man, really dark.
NHS doctors are poorly paid actually, relative to physicians in other countries. Waiting lists exist because there are doctor shortages in the NHS and there is also not enough hospital or operating room capacity. Doctors don’t maintain waiting lists, the system maintains them. If you paid doctors better and hired more doctors, your shortage would disappear. But that would take significant additional expenditure.
I know, the world is such a simple place isn’t it.
Only if you believe it’s never about money, Dave.
“But that would take significant additional expenditure.”
So no chance of that under Boris and his tax-evading chums, then.
Or anyone else apparently. It’s hardly a new problem that the NHS has been starved for funds for decades, is it?
It was well-funded under Labour, which increased National Insurance contributions (effectively, a form of income tax) by 1% of income in order to spend the money on the NHS.
Under Labour, targets for speed of being seen in A+E, and speed of being treated after cancer was detected, were introduced and kept.
In 2019, both of those targets started to be missed, as the afterglow of Labour spending was faded out by years of Conservative underspending. Another effect of Tory rule was to reduce the value of the NHS stockpile of PPE by 40% between 2014 and 2019. When the pandemic came along, the cost of buying those items was 15x as high as their pre-pandemic level. That’s the Tory version of “efficiency”.
Even under labor, there were waiting lines, physician shortages and every year the flu strained capacity. The very fact that you had to have targets to get people seen adequately is proof that there were issues.
Cancer has been a particular problem in the NHS with detection as well as treatment. Late detection leads to worse outcomes as does waiting months for care. UK cancer survival stats are not good.
One of the reasons, I believe, for a shortage of physicians in the UK is the gatekeeping that accompanies access to medical schools. It is, after all, only undergrad level life sciences with a large vocational element. The gatekeeping behaviour is necessary to preserve the elitism of professional medicine and perpetuate this state-funded cartel, which is no better illustrated than in the case of general practitioners.
Maybe but not all UK doctors go to medical school in the UK. Quite a few are foreign trained.
That is true: why are they then induced to uproot from their own countries and practice in the UK? Surely this would seldom happen if UK GPs are relatively poorly paid.
Not everyone can get to the US.
A recent Cambridge University study showed the NHS managerial expenditure (1.6%) was lower than most other European health care systems.
Diversity is usually just window dressing to evade parastic and puritanical journalists. My employer has outsmarted them though; we made 20%(!) of our staff female and BAME… the cleaning and office staff have never looked so vibrant and feminine. There is no dedcated on-site HR department – thank merciful Christ.
Because we have to actually make money and don’t have a cash pump from HM Treasury, all the actual decision-makers, technicians, IT staff, R&D and Management remain firmly in the hands of the competent and meritorious. Race, sex and perversion do not factor into hiring in these areas – no prizes for guessing how these departments look.
> they’d have a little bit more cash to spend on treating people with illnesses instead of treating people with well paid jobs for life.
There are queues of ambulances in Northern Ireland under the NHS, there are queues in Los Angeles under the American system. Rapid exponential growth will overwhelm any system. Unless you can make hospitals, nurses and doctors which reproduce like viruses, you can’t keep up, so you have slow down the virus. Otherwise, those cancer patients and car crash victims won’t be getting treated either.
The “Protect the NHS” slogan in this country does use the public’s affection for the NHS to motivate people to behave sensibly, but why not?
Agreed BUT it should spend money on Operational managers. Medics can’t manage at this mass level. NHS is a mass production service enterprise and needs to be managed well.
Or we could keep our money and chose our healthcare………
The NHS costing £2000 per person (£8000 for the average family) per year buys a lot of healthcare. Or indeed, other things like better food, gym membership, more time with the kids, a bigger house….
Choice. Such a scary thought, if you are a liberal elite.
And when someone needs a £30,000 operation, once in their life?
How does that work? We need more details.
Choice does seem to be the sticking point. Yet something like 16% of Brits carry private health insurance. Which should not be necessary if the NHS is sufficient.
“if the hallowed NHS spent lass cash on administrators”
This is always the gut reaction, as if the only people needed in an organisation are the frontline staff. The real problem (or one of them) is that the NHS is not effectively managed, that some of those working within the NHS are highly resistant to being managed, and relative power is such that managers are not actually able to manage them.
The NHS is not an organisation that is over managed, it is one that is ineffectively managed. Arguably it is impossible to manage, and more fundamental structural change is needed.
Maybe the NHS could be properly funded rather than quietly dismantled by this government?
It actually needs to be dismantled, rebuilt and better funded. No other country is trying to operate a system from 1948, basically without update or change. And there are very good reasons that is the case. Medical care is nothing at all today like it was in 1948.
That’s not the problem. The structure of the NHS as a huge state bureaucracy means that reform is a pipe dream. Not even worth bothering with. Take off and nuke it from space. Take the pieces, put them on the market and let capitalism do its thing.
Would you like the US capitalist system?
This is the top rated comment. A generic moan about NHS bureaucracy. No insights, nothing new, nothing added to the conversation. Just “blah blah…down with this sort of thing”. I’m not having a go at Andrew, but as for the rest of you… Give me strength.
This sums up a worry I have had for a while now – almost since we all first started applauding the NHS like trained sea lions in the spring.
The NHS is the closest we have in this country to an ultimate moral authority – and in the name of an ultimate moral authority, you can justify the ultimate inhumanity. To regulate human contact and human activity in such a manner as has been done during this event is an inhumanity, and has been engaged in with virtue signalling glee by the masses in the belief they are ‘protecting our NHS.’
What should be happening (in normal times you would have expected it to happen by now), would be that people would instead start to question whether a free-at-the-point-of service health system is worth it if it allows your ruling classes to violate your liberties; encourage you to think of yourself and your fellow man as contaminated (in violation of normal social mammalian needs) and possibly even violate your bodily autonomy.
It seems that it only takes a bit of cheap manipulation (constantly referring to ‘our’ NHS, for instance; and the daily reporting of non-contextualised death statistics) to undo all that we have learned.
I think the answer lies in teaching people to separate what is admirable about the NHS (the nurses, doctors, orderlies etc. and their sense of service), from what is contemptible (the bureaucracy, the mismanagement). There were conceivably better ways of easing the burden on NHS staff – especially given the amount it has cost us to close the economy and the army of volunteers we had from the public at the beginning – surely, a convergence of those two things could have produced a practical solution.
We need to restore some critical thinking – so people realise there are better ways of helping the NHS rather than this pitiful sacrificing of basic liberties, then hopefully they will be a bit more critical of those who continually demand our dehumanisation to ‘protect our NHS’.
‘We need to restore some critical thinking…’
No chance of that. The West is now entirely incapable of critical thinking, as has been obvious for many years now.
Sadly, you’re right. We can always hope though.
There are exceptions though, surely. Yourself. for example.
The people never could think critically, but thought Nationally, Patriotically, which meant they voted for the good of the nation. Liberalism with its divide and conquer has taught the unthinking to vote selfishly and cliquishly as they killed patriotism, so not putting country first, but dispirit groupings first, is the modern voter priority.
We just need to be sensible.
We need to be rid of a socialistic centralised NHS. It’s perfectly possible to have a system that is not monolithic, offers choice, yet is free at the point of need. Look around Europe and there are plenty of examples, Germany for example.
However, this elevation of the NHS to godlike status thats happened in UK prevents any discussion about alternatives. I never expected Labour to welcome such a discussion, but now we get Boris referring to ‘our fantastic NHS’ and its clear the tories won’t go there either.
So the bottomless money sink will continue until it bankrupts us.
I don’t think we’ll get a cheaper health service with restructuring – but we could get a better one.
I do not care about the structure of the organisation that provides healthcare when I need it, only that it works well. We could experiment, same with schools – private vs public, same money in – compare the outcomes. It seems cold, but it’s better than just presuming one works. Of course to some degree this is what a genuine free market does for you anyway..
Agree Luke, except that the howling, screaming socialist mob within the NHS and Education would rather destroy the entire set up than allow us to experiment with any private provision of services.
Every few years we get a campaign whipped up by the Labour party and education unions to abolish private education in the UK. ‘It’s unfair’ they cry, ‘strip private schools of tax relief’ they scream. Why? Because private education produces hugely better results than state education and cannot be controlled by the unions.
“Every few years we get a campaign whipped up by the Labour party and education unions to abolish private education in the UK. ‘It’s unfair’ they cry, ‘strip private schools of tax relief’ they scream. Why?”
Cost of VAT exemption on Eton’s £43,000 fees = £8600 per year.
Average cost of state education: £5000 at primary level, £6200 at secondary level.
So the VAT exemption alone costs more than giving Old Etonians a free state education. Is there a good reason for subsidising the ultra-rich?
“private education produces hugely better results than state education”
Private education overwhelmingly takes the kids of higher-paid parents, and spends much more on them per capita (school fees are several times the £6200 spent on secondary school pupils in the state sector). Of course they will get better examination results. But it also produces people like David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Go figure.
The IEA have produced a very good analysis of the various ways, other than a pure taxation basis, in which other countries deliver universal health care https://iea.org.uk/publicat…
The “bottomless money sink” which consumes 9.5% of GDP, compared with 11% of (larger per capita) GDP spent on healthcare in Germany, and 19.5% of (even larger per capita) GDP spent on healthcare in the US.
If you want to see a country whose economy is strained by the runaway cost of its healthcare, it’s not the UK, it’s the US. The capitalist US healthcare system is a massive burden on individuals, the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy, AND a major economic strain on US employers who pay for employees’ health plans.
Well said – except we didn’t “all” applaud the NHS earlier this year… Quite a few of us didn’t.
I certainly didn’t!
It was all key workers we were applauding – that included the police, the firefighters, the bin men, the people teaching the children of the key workers, transport workers, cleaners etc etc. All those who risked their health to keep society going.
Mark, I guess some people would rather applaud CEOs who give themselves 50% pay rises while cutting staff pay, or bankers, or corporate lawyers charging £1000 an hour. It’s all about values.
The martyr generator – thank you for your service but I am not going to bang pots in the streets or support laws that give privilege to key workers above the average citizen.
For critical thinking read Commonsense and Logic
You call the nurses, doctors… admirable, and management contemptible, you are one of the Sheep baaaing out the correct conditioned response. NHS is first a Social Engineering organization, second a health provider, just as BBC is first a Social Engineering organization, and entertainment and information second.
The NHS was the tool the system plan used, which to alter UK for ever by making the British not want to work in the Health industry, shut the school places, reduced health care worker status and pay till the best will not do it, and the others have not enough slots in schools to train to do it; and thereby open the borders to hero foreigners by the millions. NHS is something like the third largest employer in the world! And it hires the world ahead of the British.
NHS is not what it seems, it is Orwellian in its actual purpose. I left London in the 1970s and moved to USA, I return regularly to visit family, London is a foreign land in my old parts. The place has been social engineered till it is something entirely different, and not for the better. NHS has been the main tool in this. NO ONE can explain why this change was done, and if it was pure demographic shortfall, then WHY the ones who were brought in and not others? Preti is going to bring up to 2 million Hong Kong successful people to leaven out the other millions.
So your right-wing hostility to the NHS is based on a mixture of paranoia, and hostility to ethnic minorities.
Currently what really is the burden on the NHS ? In March and April we had as low as 60% bed occupancy in our hospitals which is virtually unheard of. The winter months normally have every hospital on black alert. Not this year . And it would have been even better if 17-25% of Covid infections had not been hospital acquired due to managerial incompetence. In most primary care surgeries business is largely conducted over the phone rather than face to face even if it is offering substandard care.
So after working for the last 35 years in the NHS i can safely say that it is the ‘contemptible’ part of the NHS which feels it needs protection. Are we overwhelmed? If anything less than in previous winters as this year we seem to have suitably scared our ‘clients’ to such an extent that they have preferred to sit at home with cancers growing and heart disease progressing!
Currently what really is the burden on the NHS ? In March and April we had as low as 60% bed occupancy in our hospitals which is virtually unheard of. The winter months normally have every hospital on black alert. Not this year . And it would have been even better if 17-25% of Covid infections had not been hospital acquired due to managerial incompetence. In most primary care surgeries business is largely conducted over the phone rather than face to face even if it is offering substandard care.
So after working for the last 35 years in the NHS i can safely say that it is the ‘contemptible’ part of the NHS which feels it needs protection. Are we overwhelmed? If anything less than in previous winters as this year we seem to have suitably scared our ‘clients’ to such an extent that they have preferred to sit at home with cancers growing and heart disease progressing!
That’s a bit out of date, Shalal. Area of London I’m in has over 95% bed occupancy, is cancelling electives due to increased pressure on beds, ITU and staff due to Covid-19 and has got cancer activity and referrals up to pre-Covid levels.
‘Masks aren’t that big a deal.’ Yes they are. They are the ultimate sign of compliance with government diktat, and they also serve the purpose of keeping firmly in people’s minds, the fear they are supposed to be feeling at the very thought of the mighty, intelligent, all-powerful virus.
I agree – wearing a mask is no small thing; especially given the lack of evidence for its efficacy in addressing the one ill it’s being mandated for.
The masks are dehumanising; demoralising and – frankly – disgusting (a bacteria soaked rag covering your natural air passages – and this is something being advised by ‘doctors’?).
As objects that obstruct your access to the air you breath (surely the only thing that all living creatures can universally claim as a ‘birth-right), they are no small imposition and all mask mandates should be instantly rescinded.
In the context of the article, however, I think the author was merely trying to state that they are not opposed to making sacrifices – I just think those sacrifices would be fairer (and more useful) if they were just the same ones we make every flu season (don’t visit elderly relatives if your ill, cover your mouth when you cough, sanitise your hands etc).
Do you include the mandates on surgeons wearing masks while carrying out operations (to offer a degree of protection to themselves and patients)? Or the masks that might offer some protection to health care workers treating known infected patients?
There’s nothing more disgusting about masks than there is about underpants or swimming trunks.
I’m not in the habit of wearing my underpants over my mouth amd nose.
I know of a secret club where it is de rigeur. I have not been there myself, I hasten to add.
Those are some pretty apparent false equivalencies, if you don’t mind me saying.
If the surgeon had been walking around town all day doing his shopping and then turned up to do a heart operation using the same mask, would you think that was appropriate?
Surgeons wear masks for two reasons: so they don’t accidentally inhale or otherwise consume bodily fluids from the patient, and so that they don’t accidentally drip saliva on the patient. It has nothing to do with prevention of virus transmission.
Exactly, they don’t typically walk around wearing masks.
To an airborne virus the typical ‘mask’ is off less consequence than a chain link fence is to a mosquito – So many new studies are concluding the pointlessness of the ‘mask’ – Countries like Spain with stringent mask mandates have the same deaths as everybody else – For months our own government said masks are pointless – They are by far the most iconic symbol of authoritarianism and massage the ego of authoritarians imposing them to such an extent that hose wielding the power or influence will never want to lose the thrill of something so literally in the face of those they command.
Deaths are a useless metric to use when looking at an intervention which is designed to reduce transmission (along with washing your hands more frequently and not meeting anyone) because whether you die or not depends on a huge number of other confounders – age; co-morbidities; social circumstances; the nurse / patient ratio in the hospital you ended up in; the weather; what your immune sytem was like the day you breathed in your bolus of virions; the competency of the care you received; the availability of suitable treatments and the timing of those treatments etc. etc.
This is epidemiology 101.
You want to reduce your risk of ending up in hospital or transmitting to someone else who could end up in hospital ? Then don’t let the buggers up your nose or in your eyes in the first place.
I could list 8 systematic reviews and 20 + other studies showing that masks of various types do have the capacity to reduce transmission of droplets carrying viable virions but UnHinged doesn’t allow links.
Do masks prevent transmission totally ? No of course they don’t but they don’t need to. Every bit helps. Masks provide some protection, social distancing provides some protection, washing your hands provides some protection and a vaccine that mitigates disease and maybe reduces viral load provides some protection. Together as a group they provide more protection than any single method (or none at all).
Wearing aviator goggles would protect the eyes from being a place of transmission, and as we know “If IT Saves One Life’.
And I could list you 8 systemic reviews and 20+ other studies that show precisely the opposite.
Problem is, no-one is wearing masks. They are wearing ‘face-coverings’. And if you read the papers on mask effectiveness they headline “masks work” and bury “but face coverings may worsen the situation” deep in the middle where no-one looks. I know, I’ve looked.
This isn’t a conspiracy, merely sanity. Why be pilloried by the scientifically illiterate mob?
If you are wondering how that works imagine virus floating around on a loose cotton fibre.
Do you wear a condom when out shopping? They protect in the right situation, like the surgeons mask, but are not really helpful outside those situations.
Yes, fair enough re. the context of the author’s remark. I physically cringe when a I see the dirty bits of rag being dragged out of bags and pockets, time after time, and slapped onto faces. The ones who fiddle with the front of their masks then touch items in shops, items which I may need to buy, are the real argument against the mask mandate. One shelf stacker in my local supermarket did a massive sneeze into his mask, pulled it away from his face to make it comfortable then carried on stacking the shelf with his germy, damp hand. Lovely.
This is, sadly, how we have been reduced to regard our fellow man. With disgust. Actually, I find the shelf stackers and delivery boys far more admirable at this time than those who are paid to work from home and still faint with fright at the thought of some virus that kills a small percentage, but leaves most people “unsymptomatic” i.e. they don’t get sick from it.
BBC News at six o’clock today showed an interesting study being done with the help of volunteers from religious faiths to investigate the effect of singing on aerosol droplet generation (relevant to Christmas services, at least for Christians). They sing in a laboratory in darkness, with laser imaging of the emitted droplets.
Singing without mask: large cloud of droplets, moving fast.
SInging with a mask: virtually no droplets, and those few which are formed are much slower moving and thus less likely to hit the next person.
That’s incorrect. The study, by Laurence Lovat has released no results. The BBC story does say though that current research indicates that singing does not produce substantially more respiratory particles than speaking at a similar volume. That study was done by the Univ of Bristol.
Coming from NZ and now living in the UK I’ve been amazed at how the NHS is treated as some sort of sacred cow. In NZ it is just another govt. institution. Right from the start of ‘Covid’ I thought the adulation piled on the NHS, outside of the ICU staff was way over done. As a cop of 22 years I faced real risk everyday, we even went looking for it as we sought to combat gang crime. None of us thought we should shelter away when things got sticky. We just took extra precautions and manged the risk as best we could.
“Our NHS” is in essence a socialist project which the British Left are desperate to hang on to ““ like shipwreck survivors clinging to a lifeboat. Your socialist credentials can be measured by how much devotion you show to the NHS and its angelic staff.
The only criticism NHS devotees will accept is that of its administrative sector (those pesky overpaid managers!). Comparison with more successful healthcare systems in other countries is not encouraged. As any diehard socialist will tell you ““ Our NHS is the envy of the world.
I’ve now lived and worked in 8 different countries. All of them have dedicated hard-working caring doctors and nurses. My wife and I have received good treatment in all of them – but nowhere have they said they envied the UK for the NHS. When we were in Canada we did not have to pay privately for some high-tech treatments which are not available on the NHS.- they were covered by the Provincial Health Authority from the mandatory government health premiums from salary.
“I’ve now lived and worked in 8 different countries. All of them have dedicated hard-working caring doctors and nurses. My wife and I have received good treatment in all of them – but nowhere have they said they envied the UK for the NHS.”
And equally, the British don’t say they envy the healthcare in other countries.
“When we were in Canada we did not have to pay privately for some high-tech treatments which are not available on the NHS- they were covered by the Provincial Health Authority from the mandatory government health premiums from salary.”
In other words, they were provided by a Government body and paid for through taxation.
Actually some British do say they envy the healthcare systems of other countries. In fact, some say so on this site.
About 30% of Canadian healthcare is privately funded so it’s not all provided by the government or funded through taxes.
“Actually some British do say they envy the healthcare systems of other countries. In fact, some say so on this site.”
Few British people do. This site is run as clickbait for the kind of people who believe that Trump is a good thing, so of course there’s disproportionate criticism. I’ve met Americans who envy us the NHS, and I didn’t have to go onto a fringe website to do it.
And since you’ve popped up again to comment about our health system from 3000+ miles away, let me ask for the ***FIFTH*** time – how much does your own healthcare insurance cost you each month? You know, the one you were so keen to tell us about on another Unherd NHS thread, and to tell us that you had both your knees replaced the week you decided you wanted that done, and how much better that is than anything we British get under the NHS, but resolutely refuse to tell us the cost of – because of course it would give the game away about how much the bloated profit-making US private medicine charges its victims, sorry, patients. Come on, you can tell us if you are brave.
Just looking at the comments on here much less in liberal publications such as the Guardian, there seems to be more unhappiness with the NHS than you recognize.
I don’t give out personal financial information on internet sites and would hope you’d be smart enough not to as well. You’ve also badgered other posters in addition to me (asking five times does constitute badgering, it also makes you appear to be slightly unable to catch on) to provide personal financial information.
But you are correct, I didn’t wait 18 months for knee replacements. Once I decided, it was 8 days. That seems to bother you tremendously but I cannot think why it should. I’ve said repeatedly that healthcare is a quality of life issue, at least for me, and that I wouldn’t be happy with every expense being spared on it. I’ve also said that if others don’t mind waiting, that’s their business.
You seem to think you can persuade people who are clearly willing to pay a greater price for better access to care that they shouldn’t be willing to do so. But you’d have a tough time making that case even with many Brits who are willing to pay for better access, much less Americans.
Annette, you attempted to suggest that the ultra-capitalist US health system which fails so many of your fellow citizens (but from your various postings, you don’t care about them, you only care about yourself) is superior to our NHS because you got your knees replaced 8 days after you took the decision, and the NHS would not do that for us.
It’s therefore highly-relevant how much it costs you per month for that level of healthcare, because if you quoted the amount, it would show that it’s fantasy to imagine that that level of healthcare could be offered on the basis of need. And that’s why you refuse to disclose the amount, not some specious excuse about “personal financial information”.
You gloss the denial of a good (NHS type) level of healthcare to a significant proportion of US citizens as “healthcare is a quality of life issue, at least for me, and that I wouldn’t be happy with every expense being spared on it. I’ve also said that if others don’t mind waiting, that’s their business“. [emphasis added by myself] Annette, US citizens on low incomes (but above the Medicaid limit in their State – a limit which I understand is kept particularly low in most Republican-governed States) are not waiting in pain and disablement for THEIR knees to be replaced because they “don’t mind waiting“. They are waiting because they don’t have the money, and never will. You know that’s true, but you don’t want to admit it. In the UK they would wait too long, especially when the Conservatives are in power and have run down NHS spending, but they would eventually get the operation because the NHS operates on the basis of need.
Wow, my knees are a real problem for you aren’t they? You could just say that you’re happy I didn’t have to wait in pain. I’d be happy if someone in the UK didn’t have to wait months, sometimes as long as 18 months, for the same surgery because I know exactly how damaging to quality of life it is. If you need surgery, 18 months of agony is not reasonable, in my view. As I’ve said, some people may not mind waiting, yourself for example. You seem to have some unpublished information as to waiting times for surgery in the US. Care to share the stats? Then we could compare waiting times in the UK vs the US.
“This site is run as clickbait for the kind of people who believe that Trump is a good thing…”
I take exception to that comment. This site is run as a forum on which people interested in current affairs can have a civilized discussion. Some commentators, including myself, think that some of Trump’s policies were good, including his efforts to get drug pricing under control. Some of us also believe that the NHS is no longer fit for purpose and that discussing alternative models is worthwhile. How is any of that “clickbait”?
Of course it’s clickbait. Despite Unherd’s centrist claim, 80pc plus of the commenters here are right wing. They respond well to any articles involving immigrants, race, Islam, Brexit and Trump. The headlines are often changed during the day, usually to ‘bait’ them with trigger words such as liberal, BLM or elites. I’m surprised that you can’t see that and bemused that it’s something you’d take exception to.
I my country, South Africa, we’ve always had a system of private medicine for the rich and free health care for the poor. The poor got exactly the same service, ironically, actually better – at university hospitals, but they can’t book an appointment and have long waiting times in the waiting room. Always. Since I can remember. I was born in 1955. My mother was a nurse. All nurses were trained at government expense at government colleges and government hospitals. And they received the best of training, so they got head-hunted by the NHS, and other European countries. Since the 1990s hospital administration has deteriorated, I’m told, but still, I’m told, pretty world class medicine. I made a recent comment somewhere else that if I were American I would vote democrat because I think it is dreadful for hospitals and doctors to refuse to care for someone who can’t pay. An American immediately set me to rights and said there is provision for indigent care.
;… if I were American I would vote democrat because I think it is dreadful for hospitals and doctors to refuse to care for someone who can’t pay.’
The corporate Democrat establishment – Clintons, Biden’s, Pelosis – is implacably opposed to Medicare for All. Trump has actually been to the left of them on some issues of healthcare. particularly in terms of reducing the cost of drugs.
Now, since 1988, back in the country of my birth and youth, and missing the medical aid care we received in South Africa. Husband’s % of salary payment to the SA medical aid far less than whatever the NIC part went to the NHS, and treatment WAS better. Surgery I had with a world class specialist doctor in Johannesburg impossible in the UK. .
But I hear things are not so good now.
But (a) the quality of the “indigent care” isn’t clear and (b) to keep the cost of indigent care down, the income threshold for receiving it is kept low (particularly in Republican-controlled States) and you can be pretty poor and yet ineligible for it. So since you are pretty poor, you may die without proper healthcare. When I was working in the US, I was told by a storekeeper of a young man he knew personally who had an untreated tumour the size of a grapefruit on his hip. He eventually died of it. In the UK NHS, he would have been treated and probably survived. That’s US medicine for you.
Indigent care has no income threshold. It’s care for people with no money and no insurance. It provides payment to hospitals for such care. You’re confusing indigent care with Medicaid.
There is also uncompensated care which is sometimes confused with indigent care but differs in that there is no compensation at all for it.
Yes indigent care addresses care for those with no insurance and no money. There is also uncompensated care which is simply care provided by hospitals with no compensation from the patient or any insurer. Uncompensated care is a budget line item in any US hospital.
A mandatory govt health premium from salary…..you mean some kind of national insurance premium , paying for a national health service?
Some of the idiots stood out in the rain clapping thin air ,I didn,t I stood on one leg in the living room and kept dry I,M NOT STUPID
No, you’re just ungrateful.
And you are sanctimonious
Spot on, and well done and thank you for those people and their property that you protected.
As a cop and thus a public sector worker, you should be aware that many people on this site would regard you as a parasite with a bloated salary and a ridiculous pension. But if the police were privatised and replaced by private sector guards from an agency charging the taxpayer silly amounts per hour, you would instantly become part of the wealth-creating private sector! – such is the confusion created by dogma
You should be aware that some of those people may be rather more discriminating in their judgment of the value of different types of public sector worker. I should add that I use the word ‘discriminating’ in a positive context here: I know that this word can trigger a certain type of individual.
I left the police by taking early retirement because I was disenchanted with police practice. I don’t get a pension. Instead of a silly ad hominem you could have engaged with my comment. I’m not sure if you are serious about privatisation but it has not worked well with regard to prison reform and I’m not sure the profit motive is a great way to maintain the rule of law. Mind you the legal profession are living off the pigs back, having gained monopoly control of justice….
This speaks to the question of, when does this end? No one knows. On occasion, you get mumbling about “when it’s safe,” but no one can define that, and at this point, that looks more intentional than not. Masks have become a totem and officials continue to regard this virus as a threat to the entirety of society rather than one that is worst on specific populations.
Two thirds of Britons surveyed in November 2020 said they’d support a third national lockdown after Christmas if cases remained high.
How many would support a lockdown if it meant consequences for themselves? Because it seems people support a great many things so long as they are not impacted by those things. The people issuing the decrees and mandates haven’t missed a paycheck. They’re not worried about business loss, foreclosure, depression, and the other fallout.
It seems about half British work for government with paychecks coming, they live in another reality from someone like me which is a self employed tradesman (although lockdowns did not effect me at all as me and my helper work at construction sites alone and never paid any attention to any of it. I have not worn a mask but twice to get into locked down buildings.)
“It seems about half British work for government with paychecks coming”
No, it’s much less.
I know, maybe 30%, but lines blur now days.
Or maybe it’s just that grasp on reality is replaced by urban myth
People have a habit of approving things that have no impact on themselves. I doubt the poll includes many business owners who favored shutting down their operations.
You are right. People who ‘work’ for the govt, and one can only use the word ‘work’ very loosely here, live in an entirely different reality devoid of all consequences or accountability.
Wonder how many of the lockdown lovers are on furlough or work in the public/civil service sectors. The pollsters should ask those questions but, they won’t.
Yes, someone is going to have to make the decision that we can get back to normal. The problem is that the government have scared everyone so that is harder to do. Also it is now longer politically possible to tolerate any risk it seems. This means that we have to wait until the public give the government the ok, or the government take some leadership and stop paying attention to case numbers in people who are asymptomatic.
We will never beat it unless we can identify the symptomless spreaders.
No evidence for them, to my knowledge. Part of the let’s keep people scared movement
We will never “beat” it. It’s not a war. The virus is with us, like it or not. We can’t control its spread, any more than the common cold. We shall just have to learn to live with it, protect the most vulnerable as best we can, and hope the vaccines will allow herd immunity to develop. And for goodness sake get back to normal human life.
Muscleguy referred to the symptomless spreaders. i.e. people who have the virus but don’t know it. They are immune. That is herd immunity already acquired. The more these symptomless spreaders spread the virus to other symptomless spreaders, the more herd immunity develops. Vaccination does not cause herd immunity to develop, it can merely contribute.
how are those people to be identified and what then? Will they be put under house arrest? Perhaps some symbol that can be affixed to their clothing would work.
Ironically, symptomless spreaders are the bearers of herd immunity. They are the ones protecting the vulnerable. Already. While we wait for the vaccine to roll out.
They are infecting people who, particularly if vulnerable, may die.
Herd immunity via uncontrolled transmission of a disease is far less desirable than herd immunity from vaccination.
They are easily identifiable fortunately -they are the massive majority of the population who suffer discomfort from a virus in manageable and treatable ways, or very little, or not at all.
That is just about everyone.
Now we’ve identified them I wonder what the best solution is for this massive majority of largely unaffected individuals for the rest of their lives?
The only way to defeat it is through herd immunity, achieved either way. , Once the vulnerable are vacinated (those who choose to be) and healthcare workers there is no justification for continued restrictions.
Now we know we have multiple good vaccines it’s arguable that we tell vulnerable people to self isolate until vaccinated and let everyone else slowly get back to reality pretty soon. Indeed that we’ve restricted the liberties of so many of the young for so long is shocking.
So we’re going to spend eternity hunting down sick people who are not sick, so that they do not cause more people to get sick, without being sick. No, we will never beat this formless phantom on our own. We need the little boy who shouted: “but the emperor is naked!” Only that can beat it. A figurative wake-up slap in the face of society to come back to their senses.
no leadership ,no guts
“we have to wait until the public give the government the ok, or the government take some leadership and stop paying attention to case numbers in people who are asymptomatic.”
Perhaps they are also influenced by the 66,000 who have died within 28 days of being diagnosed with the virus, a small proportion of whom may die for a reason unconnected with it but most of whom are dying as a result of it. And by the even greater number admitted to hospital because they are struggling to breathe, many of whom would die without treatment, but who are therefore taking beds and medical staff away from heart and cancer (etc etc) treatment.
No, masks are both useless and evil. I deeply object to people being told to wear them, and especially children. Dehumanising wickedness, with no medical purpose. Zero. Check any independent study.
I refuse to wear a mask and finally have pretty much stopped going to the grocer as every one there is always masked and one feels oppressed by the scene when all seem so afraid. It would be much easier to mask, but I refuse. At the building supply places where actual tradespeople shop almost no one wears a mask. It is a very clear show of how cowardly and sheep like the indoor working person has become. (or as I would say, the pu** ie s as people have become so soft and frightened by super risk adverse modern childhood and youth, us gnarly people who do not give a F are becoming a very small minority.)
I have stopped going to bookshops and other small shops, to the extent that they are open, due to the masks thing. (And books and wine are just about the only thing I buy apart from food). Thus I might even have to resort to Amazon, something that I have always resisted as I hate them.
Some of us have been saying for years that the NHS will, ultimately, destroy us all in order to protect its own privileges and powers. Well, we have been proven correct, and a few others are now waking up to the fact.
Apart from that, this is a silly, school girlish article. For instance, this:
‘Vaccines don’t work till people are vaccinated with them.’
The Pfizer vaccine does not even work even when people are ‘vaccinated’ with it. This is because the vaccine does not prevent infection or the spread of infection. It merely reduces the severity of the symptoms. Thus this so-called vaccine might actually exacerbate the spread of Covid because people might be less aware that they have contracted it! Only in the West in 2020…
Meanwhile, one vaccination programme in Australia has been abandoned, and a billion dollars worth of vaccines dumped, because some OF those vaccinated were testing positive for HIV. Now, these are false positives, but it makes one wonder what the hell these insanely rushed vaccines will be doing to people. And don’t forget that the drug companies have legal indemnity with regard to all these vaccines i.e. you cannot sue them for the side effects that will surely be visited up some of those who are injected.
This is ridiculously untrue. Below are the results of the trial with the Pfizer vaccine (http://www.gov.uk)
At the time of the analysis of Study 2, information presented is based
on participants 16 years and older. Participants had been followed for
symptomatic COVID-19 disease for at least 2,214 person-years for the
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine and at least 2,222 person-years in the placebo
group. There were 8 confirmed COVID-19 cases identified in the COVID-19
mRNA Vaccine group and 162 cases in the placebo group, respectively. In
this analysis, compared to placebo, efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine
BNT162b2 from first COVID-19 occurrence from 7 days after Dose 2 in
participants without evidence of prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 was
95.0% (95% credible interval of 90.3% to 97.6%).
Agree! I can’t see how everyone taking a vaccine that simply reduces symptoms is in any way going to help us move forward from this.
And, as someone who works in natural healthcare, I can attest that there are a handful of natural substances that do an excellent job of reducing symptoms – without any risky side effects [and all thoroughly researched]
How about giving everyone a vitamin D shot? This is based on proven science re: Covid and numerous other health conditions.
That would be inexpensive, have virtually zero risk, and would save the NHS billions in terms of reduced need for services from everything from osteoporosis to depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer and more.
I am not holding my breath waiting for that to happen though………….despite there being more evidence for Vit D helping people than there is with the one [rather badly designed] trial from Pfizer
Many people – including Joe Rogan – have been making the point about vitamin D since March. And I have been out walking and playing football every day for many years in order to get as much vitamin D as possible. A study in Spain demonstrated that those older people who had sufficient levels of vitamin D were far more likely to survived Covid.
The thing is that giving everyone vitamin D shots is not very profitable for Big Pharma and their mates in and around government, so it won’t happen. Also, it would the rational thing to to, and Western governments gave up on reason many years ago.
The NHS is already offering free Vitamin D supplements to all extremely clinically vulnerable people. They aren’t especially expensive. The cost of administering them for the wider population would be much more than the cost of the supplements. No reason why they shouldn’t be encouraged along with a vaccine – they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
Zinc and quercetin perhaps?
My GP recommends Tesco’s own brand of Vitamin D. Costs 95p for 60 tablets.
There is no money to be made by pharma for Vitamins (D, C, Zinc), that’s why they keep pushing vaccines with zero accountability. Disgusting.
The vested financial interests in these vaccine programs are certainly a cause for concern, as are the truncated clinical trials. However it’s not currently known whether any of the approved vaccines will or will not produce sterilising immunity. The early trials indicated a lower likelihood of achieving this with ChAdOx1 and a higher likelihood with BNT162b2. But we simply don’t know yet!
However, even a reduction in symptoms may be enough to limit the spread, by reducing the viral load in those infected.
Just worth considering, that’s all…
We don’t know yet if the vaccine reduces the risks of transmission or reinfection although it it reduces the severity of symptoms it is likely to reduce the likelihood of transmission through coughing.
I agree in a normal world, you have to have a mechanism like a disease-provoked cough to release lots of virus. Reduction of symptom severity might help in this old world, but in our funny new 2020 world. This is old science. Now we are all asymptomatic walking clouds of infection, unwitting superspreaders out to kill en masse. Nothing but mass vaccination will do. How long it will do or what the downstream effects will be both in terms of safety, but also in terms of supporting healthy immune systems have yet to be determined
… And any treatment, whether vaccine or natural remedy, that reduces the severity of symptoms should eliminate the need for compulsory mask-wearing and other major restrictions. We are not going to be able to eliminate this virus or stop it being transmitted, but if we can ensure that far fewer people are badly affected by it, surely that’s enough to get society back to normal again.
This I do believe is correct.
Initially all the vaccine companies were asked to focus on safety and efficacy which is what, given the time limits, they focused on. They left out transmission from their studies and testing. However AstraZeneca has said there is evidence that their vaccine does lower transmissions and in time they will conduct the necessary studies to show this. I’m sure the others will do so as well.
In general vaccines do lower transmission rates so at the moment there is no reason to think this will not apply to covid vaccines.
After all absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ( as a very learned health scientist I know once said to me).
Worse still, if it is indeed true, I read somewhere that they have been given immunity – not indemnity. The difference being that usually with indemnity the government (taxpayer) picks up the tab. However, the article I read stated the government had also given itself immunity! If true, what does this suggest as to the confidence in the vaccine? Just wish I could remember where I read it in order to revisit. I have no idea how to find out if this is true though.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the principles of the NHS, in particular free at the point of use. This leads to the risk of moral hazard where some may engage in risky behaviour at no extra cost to themselves. I believe in everyone’s right to judge their own risk/safety balance so it follows that I should support some sort of personal health insurance and/or tax on risky products and services. This is already achieved with smoking. Smokers pay a lot of tax, covering their future health care and there are restrictions on exposing others to smoke risk. Beyond that I don’t believe the state should have anything more to say.
The general principles here should be the classical liberal ones of individual freedom and the state only intervening to prevent harm to others.
By ‘risky behaviours’ do you mean poor housing, poverty, manual working and surviving to an old age? Or playing contact sports? I accept more can be done around diet, alcohol and smoking. But I don’t think there is any evidence that people drink, smoke and eat badly because they feel reassured that the NHS will look after them.
No I think he means taking drugs and getting drunk. Lots of that in A and E.
Mark, as an example how some people abuse a free system, GP non attendances are quantifiable. On the NHS England website this cost is estimated at £216m.
Agreed it would be hard to demonstrate excess drinking etc as they feel the NHS will look after them. I guess the study could compare countries but there would be many confounding factors.
Abuse of a medical system is even worse when it is paid for. I’m retired now, but while working, we were forced to join the company’s medical aid scheme. The insurance companies make sure every business writes that into their conditions of employ. It nauseated me to see the thousands coming off my salary each month for “medical aid” because I never, ever used it. Once I had a pterygium removed from my eye and had to pay hospital, surgeon, anaesthetist all out of my pocket – because it was deemed to be “elective” or “cosmetic” surgery. So I just puked at the monthly deduction. Others – colleagues – made full use of it. At the doctors several times each month. The doctors are happy, because they’re making money hand over fist, treating basically healthy people, and the members are satisfied that they are getting full value each month for the deduction. For that I would not judge them. However, it is all that over-subscription, medicalisation of every sneeze and off to get the doctor to prescribe some antibiotics. Then they proudly display boxes of medication on their desks. That is not good. Not good from the point of view of antibiotic resistance, not good for your own health. My mother was a nurse, but you did not need any medical intervention unless you were fast bleeding from an opened artery, or you’re weak from fever and feel hot to the touch. When you were really sick the doctor turned up and said: “Let nature take its course. Call me if….” (certain conditions) I’m sure my good health can be ascribed to that hands-off minimal interference policy.
It’s a nice idea in principle but it gets too complex quickly.
Ok smokers, easy – it’s a massive health risk.
Alcohol and ‘unhealthy’ food, much more complex as the correlation with death isn’t anything like smokings.
Riding a motorbike, dangerous.
Riding a bicycle, dangerous, yet encouraged.
Driving a car – far safer than both of the above, yet discouraged.
Sports – keeps you fit, but injuries – some sports more dangerous than others.
Lawn Bowls – one of the most dangerous sports.
‘Poverty’ based illness – you can moralise over the reasons, but there’s correlation.
This would soon turn into an administrators dream, acres and acres of forms and complex IT systems to track your danger factors and huge cost. And like current health policy would be more driven by morality than stats – Drinking bad, Cycling good. I enjoy both but apart from the odd bad hangover I’ve not got any serious injuries from drinking. Cycling I’ve broken bones, got a bad back and numerous other injuries. My cycling has cost the state thousands probably, my drinking has just paid lots of tax.
Luke, you are right about the admistrative cost for this and the danger of moralising. So insurance and taxation are the preferable mechanisms. Your drinking has paid tax that has helped to treat the health harms if drinking ditto ciggie taxes. I am comfortable with taking out insurance when I head off to the Alps for a spot of dangerous sporting.
But the taxation certainly will always be bent to the moral views of public health officials.
It does remind me of something I figured out about sin taxes.
We tax alcohol to discourage drinking
We tax tobacco to discrourage smoking.
Do we tax income to discourage work?
Taxing income may discourage work, or it may encourage work, on the grounds that you need to do more in order to achieve a certain material standard of living. Try this thought experiment: the Government abolishes income tax (somehow). Everyone can suddenly afford their current material standard of living from only 3-4 days of work a week. Will everyone still work 5 days a week? No.
But in any case, even if you decided that income tax was discouraging work, how would you fund the State’s activities without it?
Were you drinking during those cycle accidents? Or on the cell phone texting with one hand? Or hit by a car driver who was drinking as they texted with one hand?
This has always been the case with covid-19. Excess deaths are not abnormal this year. Indeed weirdly enough the deaths from flu are dramatically down this year…
Still if someone from the BBC is finally getting close to the truth then that has got to be a positive sign, its a shame it took them so long and they still have a way to go.
“Excess deaths are not abnormal this year.”
They are abnormal, not over 20 years they’re not, but they are over 5 years.
“Indeed weirdly enough the deaths from flu are dramatically down this year”
Not weird really, it is difficult to die of ‘flu, if you are already dead from Covid.
Can you get ‘both’ together?
Good question.
Interestingly, I ran a regression on % flu vaccine uptake in Europe vs Covid cases at one point. And they seemed to correlate.
There could be multiple causes if the correlation is valid.
Viruses tend to ‘push each other out’ essentially by waking up your immune system, such that a new infection struggels to take hold.
Of course there are other explanations. ‘Flu vaccinations keep people alive, meaning there are more people around to die.
Also if people aren’t suffering from ‘flu (better health? better weather?) they are less likely to queue for a ‘flu jab.
Many thanks.
Surely excess deaths by definition are outside the norm.
Good question – I suspect excess deaths (i.e. over average) and excess winter deaths (increase over summer) are being confused here
“the NHS has been short of beds for each of the last five winters”.
It’s like when i am told that we have to conserve water, as we don’t have enough. That’s erroneous. We have plenty of water. What we have a lack of is water storage capacity, not least because all the reservoirs have been built on and we’ve imported millions of people over the last 20 years.
Similarly, the NHS wouldn’t have been short of beds if it hadn’t got rid of them (and we hadn’t imported millions of people over the last 20 years).
Some of those imported millions…work in the NHS.
True – but most of them don’t.
We are being slowly, but carefully, groomed and gaslit into an acceptance that we do not have enough resources to support a democratic state nor to justify real individual sovereignty and freedom. Note the distance that is being incrementally inserted between taxation revenue (money which comes from us, the people) and what we get in return for our taxes -we are being repeatedly told that it is not and will never be enough to pay for what we so desperately need and must have to avert our demise. This current profligate, unnecessary and reckless pandemic spending (furlough etc…) will be a final ‘proof’ -because it will bankrupt us. But this will be enhanced by the ‘need’ to spend in crazy amounts on ‘the environment’ (Green New Deals for everyone) and a plethora of other ‘social justice’ measures -including likely reparations. When we really do run out of money, which will happen, and when states and peoples own nothing any more, we will finally become entirely dependent on the global super rich for their ‘benign’ rationing. This will of course come at a massive cost because we will have no say, or entitlement, over any expenditure. Democracy will be an irrelevance because it will have been ‘proven’ that it cannot provide for ‘all the people’. It is a dismal conclusion to reach but in my view the West is nearly entirely demoralised and broken. The centuries long worthwhile undertaking which pushed for more and more individual sovereignty and freedom, and a devolution of power from the top to all, is now under attack like never before in history. As ‘The Great Reset’ promises -“in the future you will own nothing… and you will be happy” -except we won’t; we will either be brainwashed, on psychotropic medication, or miserable.
Yes, you have described the scenario very accurately. As you say, the West is ‘demoralised and broken’, probably beyond recovery, yet it is just 30 years since we defeated the USSR and its hideous lack of freedoms. Much of what you outline has been obvious for some years, but Covid has massively and terrifyingly accelerated the collapse of reason and freedom.
thank you Fraser -and I’m not going down without a fight!
I have actually reached the conclusion that we are probably better off under the Chinese. For a start, China is preferable to Islam, which is the other option for Europe. And, I would argue, the Chinese state is at least quite effective and demands some competence and accountability from those who work for it. For instance, if you are a useless or corrupt official in China you will be removed, jailed, or worse. In the UK you will be knighted. In the EU you will be promoted.
Most of the West is now utterly devoid of reason, morality or competence. The endless printing of fake money rewards all the wrong people and all the wrong behaviours. Nobody responsible for disasters or historic proportions – from Iraq to HS2 – is ever punished. Criminals and terrorists walk free while the truthful (Assange, Snowden) are destroyed. One could go and on, but a ‘civilisation’ built on such rotten structures can only collapse.
Thought provoking and not to be dismissed out of hand
Islam is 100 times better than China and its Social Credit Score mentality coupled with tyrannical laws and enforcement. Islam is a moral religion ‘Of The Book’. I do not like Islam growing in Europe as it is, but it is maybe better than the Secular Humanism Nihilism which has replaced Christianity in Europe and UK as the main religion.
I do wonder though if the rottenness in the West hasn’t been artificially manufactured in order for us to be willing to adopt a China-like system of moral and physical surveillance. Create chaos and then create a ‘solution’ to the chaos.
I’d be for any government that advocates for personal responsibility and small-scale enterprises. Here in the US, the concept of ‘personal responsibility’ is much-maligned as racist.
in one!
Excellent points. There appears to be a concerted effort by medical, scientific and assorted other hangers on to “cancel Christmas” so we can worship at the feet of Protecting the NHS! I heard someone demanding that we “postpone” Christmas until the summer and Sadiq Khan telling us we have to do it for “granny”.
What I want to know is: Who asked Granny? From what I can see these people have decided that if granny dies of Covid it’s bad but if she dies of loneliness or something not related to Covid 19, then that is fine by them.
We have totally lost the plot over Covid, yes it kills people, but it appears a large majority of them were going to die soon anyway. The policy of lockdown is killing people as well, but like the insane uncle in an Agatha Christie novel, that statement must be put in the roof space and must never ever be talked about!
I would also like to know since when our schools ceased to be an important centre for learning that it was illegal not to go to and turned into massive petri dish’s that only spread Covid 19 and should be closed down!
We have got to learn to live with Covid. That means a large vaccination program but also proper risk assessment.
Telling it like it is!
“we may have been celebrating the fact that the vaccine had arrived, faster than anyone had dared to hope, more effective than we’d expected, and was now being put into the arms of vulnerable people” Do you realise how creepy that sounds, Timandra? How blind is your faith that you could write it? Also the following is factually inaccurate “not just hundreds of thousands of volunteers on clinical trials.” Many fewer than hundreds of thousands have been tested with the Pfizer vaccine and of those who have, the ones who only received the placebo will not be followed up in the usual way. ‘Faster than anyone expected’ should make your scientific blood run cold.
“We have a new drug for morning sickness, after millennia of women throwing up in the first trimester of pregnancy, here in the space age, the miracle of science has produced a cure and pregnant women everywhere can say goodbye to that morning meeting with the lavatory bowl!” That’s you.
44,000
The published trial protocols for Pfizer, Astra Zeneca and Moderna all have formal 2 year follow ups for both immunised and placebo arm participants. This is a regulatory requirement.
The propaganda machine has done its job, well, very well, we were all led ( like sheep), me included to believe the NHS was our saviour, and lockdowns and muzzles would be the answer to all save us from the mutation we call COVID(a flu virus) bullshit !!. 50+ million people in this country are being FORCED ! to accept the LIES we are being told. The average age of someone dying of the virus is 80+, what are we looking for ?, Immortality. There are now more people committing suicide, wives being beaten, cancer and heart patients dying, terminally ill people, who will not get another Christmas to see the family and friends they love, because next Xmas they won’t be here, all because of the FLU, a virus which they have never succeeded in eradicating, and never will. We do NOT, have a health crisis, we have a health CARE crisis, something which was here long before COVID arrived, yes it is novel, I don’t disagree, but it is only a flu virus, which even with a vaccine, will be here with us for years. The powers that be will have you believe that the NHS is under so much strain, what a load of cod’s wallop, they have been under immense pressure for years, and yet, according to statistics, are still no where near to what they have been in years pre COVID.
From the onset of the virus, until now, the government has been led, whether by choice or stupidity, probably a bit of both, have dug a hole so large they haven’t got a clue which way to turn, what next ?, the 12 tiers of Xmas.
We will all die some day, it’s inevitable, but at least die with some dignity, and with ALL your friends and ALL your family with you, not this way, the COVID way.
The simple medical reality is that highly qualified medical members of staff are both in short supply and a proportion of them are off sick at any one time. ITU nursing is highly specialised and requires many months of training on top of nursing qualifications. There is no ITU nurse tap to be turned on. That is a fundamental boundary in the system. Fail to protect the NHS and you cross such fundamental boundaries and end up with a medical system overwhelmed by numbers. The consequences are dreadful. It behooves everyone to think a little more clearly and broadly. There are no simple answers.
Best piece I have read in a long time. Being French I didn’t know how bad 2014/15 was in the UK. In France it was 2018. No one battered an eyelid and today they’re all pulling their hair.
Exactly……what next time ???
in France, doctors clearly have taken over power. Politicians have relented it only worrying that they will be….and are …..being sued before a court of law.
It is not COVID I fear……but the next one and I do all my best not to sneeze for fear we might be locked down……again.
The NHS needs root & branch reform. It is massively ineffectual and over-regulated.
A few years ago, I was asked to apply to become an NED of a hospital trust. I then spent several weeks boning up on the subject. All I can say is that it is a nightmare of byzantine and incomprehensible complexity.
The Senior Leadership Team were at best mediocre and trapped in the complexities of the system but paid like rock-stars. They reported to a Trust board and then a bunch of local busy bodies and ex-councillors that was the “Trust”.
The local technical college had been absorbed into one of the new universities and so “University” had been added to the title of what was a regional General Hospital: delusional aggrandisement.
One minute the SLT thought they were free market capitalist and produced one of the most risible set of accounts imaginable where the money from HMG was regarded as Turnover. The next minute they were bureaucratic pen-pushers in craven thrall to the Regional Health Authority.
They had to report to over 50 different regulatory and supervisory bodies each of which imposed their own compliance and reporting requirements. The reporting output was ridiculous. The board pack, thankfully not printed off, was about 1500 pages. And this is a problem: the NHS spews out this data but who has time to absorb 1500 pages of waffle?
I asked what would happen if these reports did not go out; I was told that the RHA could shut the hospital. I started to laugh, and asked if they were serious that a large regional hospital that served a population of c.350,000 was going to be closed because they had not submitted a return saying how many disposable bedpans had been used?
Suffice to say I did not get the gig. I do not think I showed sufficient deference to the iconic and unimpeachable secular god-substitute that the NHS has become.
The NHS needs reform but I have no idea when it will begin
I recognise much of that, and in my experience that kind of byzantine complexity, bureaucracy, and aggrandisement among senior officers (paid like rock stars but often incompetent) is common across much of the public sector.
And much of the private sector. I worked in it for 33 years.
Now understanding your zeal for lockdown…. Man mind thyself and all that
And how hard is it to fire anyone in the public sector compared to the private sector?
Senior Leadership Teams have a habit of being mediocre.
I despise that ‘angel’ mural with a passion. It is the ugliest blend of saccharine, smugness and toxicity. Ghastly.
it’s rainbows and unicorns for me -eurgh!
We really have to get rid of this attitude of snivelling gratitude for the NHS, as if we have it through the largesse of the Queen!
1. We are a wealthy advanced country – we should expect to have universal health care.
2. We pay for it.
And we need to drop this idea that it’s the NHS or people dying in the street “like America”. Lots of countries run their health services differently to ours and do so very effectively. We need to learn from them.
I’m glad the author doesn’t mind wearing a mask (a.k.a. muzzle) all that much. I HATE it. It makes it hard to breathe. It makes it unpleasant to live. It is a propaganda device more than anything, and it sends the message that we should all fear each other. The world has gone mad.
It’s weird isn’t it how up until very recently the West was wrestling with the competing human rights ‘freedom from, freedom to’ questions thrown up by the wearing of the burqua?
It seemingly and bizarrely puts some feminists into a very difficult position in terms of where they sit in relation to defending their natural and largely righteous territory of individual women’s rights vs respecting the rights of another apparently oppressed group, albeit an unashamedly archaic patriarchal one to, er, continue to oppress them.
The act of deliberately and mandatorily covering one’s face is and will always be an affront to liberal (in the non-pejorative sense of the word) free and democratic values so the recent, genuine calls from various so-called liberals on mainstream media in the UK that this practice should become the norm for us all in future to protect us from our perpetually unhygienic selves are, quite frankly, alarming.
intresting article, it was my understanding tht we the public pay via taxes to fund the “free” nhs.
without going into over avenues of fears about vaccines, why aren’t suicdies or cancer etc being tslked about…
we stuck with the demigod that is the nhs ruling this obsession – almsot fueling it.
I work for the NHS – we talk about suicide and cancer all the time. Currently, we’re spending a lot of time working out how to continue with cancer treatments and diagnoses with the limited resources available due to increased numbers of patients and staff with Covid.
There is a lot of time also being spent on how Mental Health services can be configured to cope with a) restrictions on face to face treatment due to Covid and b) how to cope with the impact of Covid on those who recover and c) how to cope with the impact of Covid/restrictions on mental health across the population.
There is no evidence (from Samaritans, academic studies or available inquest data) to suggest an increase in suicides in 2020 compared to previous years.
Mark from this post it sounds like you work for the Covid Health Service… One stop shop
Oh, don’t worry about having enough vaccines. Most intelligent people are going to refuse it.
That’s great news. Darwinism in action. I’m going to miss the “most intelligent” a little bit though.
Fill your boots, you’re welcome to mine. Enjoy.
Worship of the NHS is now the national religion.
Making sense will get you nowhere.
So Einstein said insanity was doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.
How many years now have we increased NHS funding and expected it to be more efficient?
72 years by my calculation.
Funding was increased in the 2000s with fairly tangible improvements (‘efficiency’ is not an easy thing to measure in healthcare). Funding has declined since 2010 with increasingly unhappy outcomes. That’s not proof of course, but it does bring your cynicism into question.
As well as evaluating our obligations to the NHS (or lack thereof), we also need to make a more realistic assessment of our obligations to other members of society from the point of view of disease transmission. Most people will have gone about their business with a cold, or even a mild flu, without worrying about whether they might have inadvertently, indirectly killed someone’s granny. There must be a balance between acting responsibly towards others and accepting the risk that others pose to our own health. The response to Covid has skewed that balance hopelessly, perpetuating the idea that creating any extra risk to others through our own actions is completely immoral. We are being wrapped in cotton wool, and we seem to be accepting it willingly.
OK, so who let their child write this article?
Vaccines don’t work till people are vaccinated with them.
Brilliant insight there…that’s got to be up there with water doesn’t quench your thirst until you drink it
Silly nitpicking pedantry
And yet…you replied…why?
So you would think twice about doing it again?
Doing what again? Pointing out pointless replies to observations?
What I find surprising is just how little scientific investigation there appears to have been in the past as to the effect of face masks on the spread of airborne and other infectious diseases.
One would have thought that the ubiquitous use of masks in the medical profession, and their common use by people in Asia and elsewhere, would have prompted numerous detailed scientific studies and practical experiments over the years. Odd.
There are plenty if you search the internet. They are useless, often making things worse, unless they are proper medical grade, and deployed in situations of true high medical risk. The unmasked human breathing system can deal with most things and especially infections, except where dust or germs are unusually concentrated and/or the system weak. Which is why surgeons and nurses wear them in theatre – because the patient is at risk, not because the staff are.
I am trying to find a mask with a design that gives you the face of a sheep. I believe it would be appropriate.
Try finding an ex NATO mask. They used to be called NBC masks (Nuclear, Bacteriological, Chemical). They make one look like Quatermas!
I wear one on my very infrequent visits to my GP. I am invariably asked to take it off as it ” scares other patients”. I always refuse .
There have numerous studies. Most of them concluded that masks do more harm than good, outside of exceptional medical/surgical situations. This is why the WHO advised against masks for 40 years, advice that has been wantonly ignored by governments everywhere. It is no coincidence that Corona cases have shot up wherever masks have been widely worn, especially in the West. The excellent Ivor Cummins has pointed this out in some of his videos, I think, and in the Netherlands infections/cases shot up a day or two after masks became compulsory in shops and other public interior spaces.
Any evidence for the statement “Most of them concluded that masks do more harm than good, outside of exceptional medical/surgical situations.”?
I’d also question your statement that “It is no coincidence that Corona cases have shot up wherever masks have been widely worn, especially in the West.” They clearly have not shot up in countries like Japan, where mask-wearing has been the norm for many years. To suggest that masks are actually helping to spread the virus generally seems to be applying causation when there is, at best, only correlation.
For what it’s worth, what I’ve seen suggests that masks are likely to reduce the wearer’s chances of passing on the virus to others by a bit and give them some slightly increased protection. But the impacts are small in both cases, especially the latter.
I do get very annoyed, though, when I see people not wearing masks where they are required to do so. Not so much because of the increased risk to me, but because they are really saying that they are superior and the rules that others are following do not apply to them.
Yes masks are good at suppressing the distance one can exhale virus droplets. It’s not much but it’s better than nothing.
We are far too lax on non mask wearers. in France where I have recently been, you are not allowed in a shop without one. No exceptions. If the shopkeeper can’t stop you, the other customers will.
What a sad statement – “If the shopkeeper can’t stop you, the other customers will”. Maybe a noose would make you feel better. 🙁
How do you think this virus is transmitting ? By what physical mechanism, exactly ?
Here’s one :
https://www.cebm.net/covid-…
There are more but you have to use a non Google search to find them . Which is supicious in itself isn’t it ?!?!? I use Duck Duck Go.
Forgot to add. Pro maskers seem to be using masks as a defence against droplet spread…….pre covid we used an effing handkerchief or tissue !
Droplets and aerosols come out of your nose and mouth when you breathe, speak, laugh, sing, shout, exercise. I have never seen anyone with a handkerchief permanently fixed over their nose and mouth.
Incidentally, how do you think this virus is transmitting ? By what physical mechanism ?
It is more that the people not wearing masks know the truth and are willing to step out of the narrative to show it. Others have extreme difficulty wearing masks. They are disgusting pieces of rags not meant for this length of time to be worn.
All over Europe they have health services. But none of them are a state run centralised monopoly. The state sticks to what it is good at – paperwork . It insures the patients (like BUPA) . The patients then choose which private providers to go to with their insurance money.
Result more doctors per capita, More hospital beds per capita. Few waiting lists. More local diagnostic kit. And , crucially, Doctors see patients as an income and want to see them (here we are a cost) .
What do they pay for this in Europe ? around 11% of GDP. What do we pay for an NHS -around 9.5% of GDP.
The idea of starting with a state run monopoly service provider as the preferred model is crackers. And the argument that its virtuous because it is free- is nonsense. It is not free at all. No one in Europe goes without heath services, and they get a far better service. None of them from a state run monopoly.
Lots of generalisations driven by political hostility to the NHS. But at least you admitted that we spend a smaller proportion of GDP on the NHS than ‘Europe’ (though that is debated elsewhere here).
What would I sacrifice for the NHS? – It appears that the NHS and the state have answered on my behalf (and that of many others).
You will sacrifice your life because reasons…
Excellent article. Agree with every word.
I’m not as chipper about this vaccine as this author is.
It’s new and untested in the mass population.
I do hope it works but would say cautiously optimistic.
Once all this mess is looking like it’s behind us we need to have a proper unemotional debate about the NHS.
I’d like to see it remoulded for how we live our life now. UnPoliticised but Still free at the point of access, with the myth that it’s free healthcare abolished from people’s thinking and the fact thst it’s paid by tax collections more celebrated, less of a gift and more a collective contribution which is what it’s always been.
As one of the old people the government was so unconcerned about I and my friends knew back in March that we had been written off. Not to our faces but in effect. That has had a corrosive effect .
I think some of the NHS doctors now feel a bit guilty and are trying to make up for it. They did shut their surgeries and that was not a good PR move. Recently I have been almost begged to go for tests i do not need but also have been given really quick attention for eye problems. So quick I was quite taken aback. The NHS is paying for me to have private treatment .
Maybe it is my postcode or something but it is a bit odd.
Lockdowns have wrecked our lives. Say it openly and few seem to agree but it is true and ignoring truth is always futile. Quality of life matters and much more so when time is. short. My hobbies have been all but destroyed and those of us involved will not get the time back. Masks are hateful. Then to comply i have to just not enter any building where they are mandated other than for medical reasons and that under protest.
Effectively I comply by abstaining from society., No shops, cafes or pubs. Furthermore the sight of masked people in bulk is soul destroying and so I just avoid crowds.
This government rules by fear and threats. No doubt the vaccine will be made compulsory in fact but not in law. That is how duplicitous they are.
The only reason that Johnson is prepared to defy the MSM and the Guardian /BBC over Christmas is that he knows he will be defied. Lacking courage in anything that is too much for even him .
This whole lockdown , mask wearing, distancing etc etc etc is to protect the elderly. Almost nobody else dies. The global economy has been crippled to prevent elderly deaths. I’m not saying it’s the wrong thing, but I think you’ve got a nerve complaining about your hobbies, especially when you go on to say how great your treatment was.
Edit: actually I am saying it is the wrong thing to do. The elderly and vulnerable should be in hard lockdown until we have a vaccine, so that the rest of society can get on as best it can.
these folks have no self awareness and even less shame.
Perhaps a number of similar campaigns could be launched in the same spirit, such as “Save the railways – travel by bus”.
That gave me a good giggle, thank you.
Or “save road transport by not travelling at 150mph with faulty brakes, having refused to have your car MOT’d* because the MOT is an attack on liberty, and there’s “no evidence” that faulty brakes cause accidents, and denying people the right to use their own car how they like is socialist enslavement…… etc etc etc”
But that would be as absurd as allowing NHS hospitals to be swamped with Covid cases because we refuse to control the spread of the virus.
* for non-UK contributors, the MOT is an annual safety check on private vehicles
What you describe are all good measures for keeping you, your family and other people safe while driving. The message is not to avoid wearing the roads out. And “save road transport” is not analogous. It’s all embracing. There is no nationalised system covering all of road transport analogous to the NHS.
The authors point is that the NHS was already struggling to deal with the flu season, and her fear is that instead of improving the NHS we just put further (unreasonable) restrictions on people just as a normal part of life (rather than as an emergency measure).
This is more like telling people not to drive because the roads aren’t good enough, than telling them not to drive at 150mph.
The purpose of the NHS is to provide an adequate health service. It is not up to us to curb perfectly normal behaviour in order to “save” it.
With the NHS it’s a permanent campaign though, always in need of saving.
The twin British obsessions are:
1. How great the NHS is
2. How do we save/fix it
We seem unable to start from the assumption that any advanced country should have universal health care, and most do. We are in a state of constant moral debt for having the NHS at all, as if we are sinners who don’t really deserve it.
But in debt to whom?
The problem is that the NHS is a 1948 response to a 2020 issue. Healthcare was nothing in 1948 like it is today and trying to make a 1948 system stretch to cover what’s actually possible in medical care today for people who live much longer than was envisioned in the late 40s, simply doesn’t work. No one could have foreseen advances in medicine to what we have today either. And there’s much more expensive medicine coming, more diagnostics, more treatment, etc, which will only compound the problem.
Then you have the resistance to change based on clinging to the past as well as what some clearly see as the potential admission that the NHS doesn’t work in far too many cases. People tend to take that personally although they didn’t design the NHS themselves, so it isn’t personal.
We have the same problem in the US with social security, an even older system from 1935. People died in their 60s for the most part in 1935, and didn’t collect SS for decades, there weren’t many 80 and 90 year olds. And then there’s the baby boomers, who saw that coming in 1935? More people, living longer, recipe for disaster for an antiquated system. All sorts of solutions haven’t worked to make it solvent, borrowing from other funds, moving back age eligibility. It’s a 1935 system.
Annette – we find ourselves agreeing on something at last.
At the time of its founding, nationalisation (not just of health) made a great deal of sense to many people. Removing the profit motive and replacing the chaos of business with central planning all seemed to make sense. It would lead to services better suited to people’s needs and greater efficiency.
Many believed that healthier lifestyles, and even eugenics, would lead to a healthier population.
It didn’t turn out like that, but the NHS is now so firmly embedded that it’s hard to see where real change will come from. Any attempt to move to a Bismarckian model, for example, will be portrayed as privatisation.
In my view it is a weakness of the left that it does two things:
1. It struggles to separate ends from the different ways of achieving those ends (as if there were only one true way)
2. It confuses the interests of the recipients of a service with those of the providers of that service – as if their interests are always aligned.
You can see both of these at work in relation to the NHS, with many conservatives now committed to something similar.
I agree. Particularly with #1. The means have now overtaken the end as the goal. It’s fine if the care is subpar as long as everyone gets the same subpar care.
It seems that more people will wind up paying for private insurance to be able to access care when they need it, i.e. to skip the waiting line but that doesn’t address the expensive care that is increasingly not covered under NICE guidelines. Healthcare is only going one way, more expensive not less. And it’s nothing to cut corners on. Right now, something like 12% carry private insurance. With the aging population, waiting for care and or diagnostics will become untenable.
It probably won’t be long before the “assisted dying” lobby get their way. Give it a few years, and we’ll be pressured to kill ourselves to “save the NHS”.
As the picture at the head of this article demonstrates, all proper discussion about the NHS is plagued by a nauseating sentimentality which makes it impossible to assess what is good and what is bad about it.
NHS employs 1.2M staff of which only 120,000 or 10% are dedicated medics controlled by HR bureaucrats. It is a truly dreadfully managed organization. Ask any doctor or nurse-off the record of course-lest HR find out! NHS needs urgent reform.
This is everything I’ve thought but daren’t say! Very interesting opinion.
Look at the response in Europe, same restrictions but no NHS – only the same pressures on healthcare. I do not hear front line healthcare workers anywhere arguing for fewer restrictions at this time.
I do support change in the NHS or rather in the political interference that every change in Government brings.
What will I give up for the NHS? About 13% of GDP is the answer.
9.5%, according to opponents of the NHS posting here.
But the US spends 19.5% of GDP, which is larger per person anyway in real terms (maybe 1.5x as much?), so in absolute terms they spend about three times as much per capita. If you want a truly capitalist system.
The NHS revealed its true colours went it started to identify that patients are the cause of most of its problems. As soon as the organisation realised that our congenitly weak UK governments would just swallow any of its lines of garbage the path to where we are today was laid down. This situation will only be corrected by a massive increase in non NHS medical provision as the present service and moral monopoly the NHS hold means there is no organisational or staff accountability. Their “partner in crime” the BMA, which is just the doctors union, must be broken up to seperate its licencing and regulation roles from its collective representation activities. I was surprised to hear that the BMA control the number of medical doctor training places available each year and some UK candidates were going overseas to train. Sounds like a closed shop system from the 1960’s.
There are other controlling institutions like the BMA that shouldn’t have the powers they currently enjoy.
Medical professionals should have a choice of union, but with the BMA having so much control it’d be a brave individual to go against the grain.
We hear constantly about lack of places for doctors and government being blamed when the BMA should be being held to task.
Good article but not much new. SAGE, PHE, NHS Providers, NHS England, DHSC, Civil Service have failed very badly to assist the government. There should be mass dismissal and reorganisation to reduce these groups to appropriate size, this would provide an excess of funding for frontline healthcare. Additionally NHS frontline should have its priorities clarified stop gender reassignment and trans nonsense on whimsical basis and let children grow up, Stop many other services that really are optional and elective if individuals want these interventions they can pay themselves.
All of this should not only allow for full funding but an excess to be returned.
The NHS is not fit for purpose in the 21st century. The arrogant culture of medics prevents a culture of innovation and excellence from growing. The pathetic like of operational (in the production sense!) leaves it wasting money like a major hemorrhage. And yet we can do nothing because it is a sacred cow and a political football.
The only chance we have is for an agreement that we should provide a certain level of “free at the point of use” and that the culture needs to be one of excellence and effectiveness. Labour will NEVER buy this as the NHS is their ONLY U.S.P. at elections and the only way to get the NHS effective is for it to become apolitical.
So your article is correct…the way that the NHS can appear to be GOOD is for it to become the Public Health Nanny overriding freedom and democracy.
Whatever the arguments about NHS funding the wider and in many ways more worrying point of the article is the transfer of responsibililty for services which should righlty lie with the government to you and me. What will we be protecting next ? Will curfews be introduced to help a struggling police force cope with out of control knife and drug crime? Where does it end ?
Maybe Greater Manchester Police should try that.
The NHS is like a bucket with a hole in it. It’s too resistant to change to fix the waste, more funding might be needed but that alone won’t fix the issues. The poor service levels and care scandals point to culture, training/skills and governance problems – these need leadership (from the top) before we start pouring in yet more good money after bad.
The article is conflating two different issues. 1. Is the NHS fit for purpose under normal conditions ? 2. Is it fit to deal with Covid? They’re not the same thing and she’s confusing the debate.
Maybe the NHS is underfunded normally and/or badly run. Maybe the population should not be told to reduce demand on it’s services by their lifestyle choices. That’s a separate conversation.
Whether the public globally should be doing it’s best to not overwhelm health services right now, is a different question. We’re in a crisis that hasn’t been seen since the Spanish Flu. No country has a health service with enough slack to pick up the demand that leaving the virus to move freely will impose on ICU beds. (It wouldn’t make sense to run all that spare capacity). Without question we should all be doing our best to keep the hospitals functioning. Who knows which of us will need an ICU bed next.
I’m not in favour in unqualified lockdowns. The life of the economy is under threat too. But until we have widely available vaccines, the ‘flatten the curve’ choice is the only viable option. The ‘personal freedom’ argument can go hang.
confusing the debate is a favored tactic of conservative ideology.
her argument is essentially the individual liberty of a subset of the poputlation has higher priority over the liberty to simply live of a different subset…the right to get sloshed at the local pub takes precendence over the right of those 65 and older to simply live.
Conservative ideologues aquire power and hold on to it by creating division within a population in the sevice of their corporate and filthy rich patrons seeking to improve and maintain their economic advantage.
The rest of us have the liberty to fight over the scraps with cudgels of race, nationality and religion.
‘Personal freedom can go hang’? That is possibly the most ignorant statement I have ever heard and the rallying cry of tyrants and sadists throughout history.
But at least the NHS will be ok…..
We are living through extraordinary times. Freedoms we took for granted last year are being controlled for the good of society as a whole.
You do not have the personal freedom to infect me and mine with your disease. Insisting that you do is the behaviour of a sadistic tyrant.
This is not complicated stuff. It’s the behaviour of a child to stamp your feet and say ‘but I don’t like it’.
We are not living with an extraordinary threat – it is within the envelope of those faced in living memory. What is unprecedented is the extraordinary response – done with no harm/benefits analysis or indication of how far it’s advocates are prepared to go. The harms done by this response amount to a humanitarian crisis, for which the perpetrators are unapologetic. It is not petulance or irresponsible to call it out, rather history shows us it’s necessary.
The word perpetrators carries a loaded implication, as if ‘someone’ is doing this as opposed to ‘something’.
I don’t disagree about the economic harm being done. It seems to me that there is a price in lives worth paying to keep business and livelihoods going. But it’s impossible for politicians to say that.
What I have zero time for, are the people marching and protesting about their civil liberties. I don’t care about their civil liberties in the short term. I want my income back and the ability to see my friends and family. It’s one thing to accept a level of disease spread by opening business, it’s another to accept it because they don’t ‘like’ wearing masks.
What history shows us that societal controls aren’t necessary? Where do we put the hundreds of thousands of ICU patients if we don’t control the spread?
People are protesting because they have lost their livelihoods and because the response to the virus has been dehumanising and out of place in the 21st century. In other words, the same things your concerned about. They may point out face masks are performative ritual rather than evidenced base measure, but that’s not what they are primarily concerned with.
I think, once you start othering people as being responsible for disease, the dark road you are on is fairly self explanatory, and the reason why parliament needed to reassure people that others won’t be forced to be vaccinated. I have no problems with a vaccine, but I do with enforced medical intervention.
As for the ICU beds, I’m not sure that’s a realistic scenario -but if it was deemed plausible, resources and populations should have been mobilised proactively to relieve the pressure. The default should not have been the mitigation with the maximum collateral damage.
I hope you get the return to normality you want soon.
Kevin, after three days there has been no answer to your question “Where do we put the hundreds of thousands of ICU patients if we don’t control the spread?“. That’s because the BS-merchants on this site don’t have an answer.
Clearly the NHS seriously lacks ICU beds. But this has always been a problem for the NHS, every year the flu becomes unmanageable due to a shortage of ICU beds. I bet you could think of some way to address that. After all, not all countries have serious ICU bed shortages, not to mention nurse and physician shortages.
Personal freedom aside, (although only someone who lives comfortably, with no worry about how to pay the rent, feed the kids, would hold such a view, but hey lucky you) what about the cost-benefit question? The opportunity costs of lockdown to save the 0.2% of the population at risk. Having read elsewhere on here, many of those who sadly died this year of COVID (or with covid) would have died anyway because of their age and other co-morbitities. Is the number of years of life lost worth it.
Also as my friend Mark Corby mentioned above, whatever happened to the much fan- fared nightingales and Louisa Jordan hospitals?
Personal freedom is the argument used by the selfish to not wear masks, socially distance or observe lockdown rules because they believe their individual rights trump those of society’s wellbeing.
That is a separate issue from the closure of shops, businesses and workplaces (which for the record is hitting me too).
As I said above, I’m not in favour of unqualified lockdowns. I think the economy is being sacrificed at the altar of ‘a single life lost is too much’. Imo the eldery and vulnerable should be locked down while the rest of society gets back to normal as best it can (while still taking precautions).
However Lombardy is the lesson that all the anti-lockdowners keep forgetting. It’s takes a tiny percentage of the population to fall ill to collapse the medical infrastructure. There are no easy solutions here. Flattening the curve seems to be the only option.
Sorry Kevin you are just plain wrong. Personal freedom is having the right to go out to work to provide for your family. There is a ligitimate question to ask about what the role of government is and what the social contract between it and it’s civilian population is. It’s all too easy to boil it down to masks and distancing to suit your point of view. But speak to the father who has been furloughed yet again on 60% pay and is relying on food banks. This is not make believe. People are really suffering.
Harkness’s argument is essentially the individual liberty of a subset of the poputlation has higher priority over the liberty to simply live of a different subset…the right to get sloshed at the local pub takes precendence over the right of those 65 and older to simply live.
Conservative ideologues aquire power and hold on to it by creating division within a population in the sevice of their corporate and filthy rich patrons seeking to improve and maintain their economic advantage.
The rest of us have the liberty to fight over the scraps with cudgels of race, nationality and religion.
Confusing the debate is a major tenet of conservative ideology.
The Nightingale Hospitals debacle is just another sorry example of this government’s (and a complicit political ‘opposition’s) myopic mishandling of this largely manufactured crisis.
Despite the reported alarming rising hospitalisations we’re now told that what, on the face of it, would have been the ideal ‘covid specific’ effectively isolated places to put covid patients into and enable established hospitals to carry on with their business as usual, that there was never really any appropriately trained staff to man them in the first place.
Ergo what was the point of them other than an extremely expensive PR exercise?
Further to this, in order to make the established hospitals ‘#covidsecure’, with older hospitals with single entrances apparently presenting the greatest problem, and hive off covid patients from non-covid ones, up to 20% of their normal capacity has had to be sacrificed, inevitably resulting in less patients being treated.
Throw in the following of tortuous, costly, time-consuming new universal covid protocols and account for the resulting significant staff absences required in order to satisfy self-isolation requirements in the event of a ‘positive test’ or maybe just close contact with someone else who has, then it’s not exactly difficult to see why this is turning out to be a complete and utter Horlicks that is difficult to see an easy way back from anytime soon.
One wonders whether the same level of adulation for health services and its workers is being exhibited across much of rest of the world or whether it is just something peculiar to the UK?
Remembering the opening ceremony of the London Olympics and how so much was made of the NHS and the sense of national pride it was obviously designed to invoke, one can only look back now and think that the rest of the world must have been looking on in utter bemusement or mockingly circling their index fingers next to their ears.
It is the same in the USA. A favorite slur to shame people is “If you don’t follow/believe in the rules go spend time in a covid ward and help treat patients”. I would gladly do it as long as I don’t have to wear a mask. Lol.
Yep. Agreed.
I’m not in the slightest bit scared of covid, but freely admit to being sh*t scared about its potential economic and social fallout.
Frankly, covid’s been an absolute boon for the congenitally more officious members of our societies and made all the more pleasing for them if they can afford to be like that.
‘Saving lives’ never seemed so easy!
I’m not afraid of it either and neither are my adult offspring. My parents OTOH are in the 90s, safe in assisted living. This is what we all did so poorly, protect the vulnerable but let life go on for the young and healthy.
Then you’d get infected very quickly. Like so many Trump Administration idiots who have paraded their refusal to take precautions and have become infected, from Trump himself downwards.
Trump is in his 70s and not in the greatest shape. He did just fine. The younger in his administration had to be tested to know they had the less severe form of “positive PCR test” disease. If I got a bit sick in recovered I would have immunity at that point and should be looked on as a great resource for treating patients. I could actually socialize normally with them and care for them properly. I honestly wonder about the quality of care the sick are getting. Especially in nursing homes. Seems like a lot of the healthcare workers are more interested in protecting themselves than helping the sick.
Part is a bit different in the US. No one has been encouraged to save Medicare or Medicaid as an emergency measure. They are there to save patients not the other way around.
But the part that’s the same is on the adulation for healthcare workers yes that’s been the same and should be actually. I say this not just because one of my daughters is an ICU nurse with covid patients and contracted it herself. Ten days at home, she is fine and back at work. Many of the nurses on her floor also contracted covid yet they still run into rooms to care for patients. They also work long hours.
You’re lucky you don’t live in Scotland! Not only does the government demand protection of the NHS at the expense of the hospitality and retail sectors, the decimation of our mental health and the cancellation of most other tratment and screening, but just to rub salt into the wounds, we have also shelled out 500 quid for each current and retired member of NHS staff as an SNP election bri…..I mean Christmas present. What the actual….?
It’s not our job, but there’s no excuse for making the NHS job harder.
“I CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS”: Doctor pleads for review of data during COVID-19 Senate hearing
youtube watch?v=Tq8SXOBy-4w
Melbourne GP says Ivermectin treatment is ‘very effective’
youtube com/watch?v=fBoElcSpkyk
Yes, I saw that video yesterday, when you or someone else linked to it. Very moving and compelling. Big Pharma is, presumably, against the use of Ivermectin because it not a new drug from which they can make massive profits, and because it might eliminate the need for a vaccine.
Furlough and supporting business creates an environment with scant reason to want to free up the economy. That might be a good idea for a few months but it cannot go on long. And those majority calling for lockdowns might take a different view it cost them their incomes.
I’d just like to say “thank you” to the writer here for this rare piece of common sense amid the hysteria, paranoia and threats that are currently force-fed to us through the mainstream media. The same health professionals whose every word we are now meant to hang on are the same people whose control freakery botched campaigns to combat AIDS, CJD, Foot and Mouth etc; who are responsible for arbitrary limits on alcohol consumption and the random demand that we eat ‘five a day’; who told us that cornflakes and toast cause cancer; and whose track record on Covid back in the spring leaves so much to be regretted . I’m sure they have a part to play, especially at this weird time; but directing our daily lives in the way they are positioning themselves to do? No thanks.
No one seems to mention the huge percentage of people who already possess immunity having had the virus or just not susceptible. So why the need to vaccinate anyone, unless they are certain they have not already had Covid, or suspect they might be particularly vulnerable.
No one asks these kinds of questions or any discussion of any kind in the media. It’s just the vaccine is going to save us, all hail the vaccine. I smell more than a rat and I’m not going to say more than that as I know we are all being monitored.
I would go so far as to say that the current trashing of freedoms is almost entirely down to the elevation of the NHS to a new secular religion.
As the author beautifully points out once you accept the premise then you are sunk and I think I made a big mistake when I joined in the Stanlinesque doorstep clapping for the HNS earlier in the year.
It is the job of the NHS management to use the resources provided to them effectively and in many cases they simply d o not do that. The deification of the NHS as a body gives them massive cover for the inefficiencies.
Most of the front line worker do a terrific job but believe me there are stores of malingerers as well in all areas. I fear the NHS may now be moving into an area where it CANNOT be reformed.
Good article. We panicked in our response to a new coronavirus that is not unprecedented, not particularly deadly and does not affect all equally (average age of those that have sadly died – 82, 90% with existing medical problems). We have allowed ourselves to be cajoled into an entirely new relationship with health, the NHS and infectious disease. In the new relationship medicine does not serve us but we serve it. We do not lead our lives to the full but limit our lives to reduce the risk of ill health to others and to save our health services. Infectious disease is no longer something that we have to adapt to and live with but something we must all take action to avoid, whilst signalling to others that we are being good and obeying the rules.
Johnson, Hancock and the rest of Parliament are guilty of mass murder, by sacrificing the young to benefit the old… and your precious BBC are almost equally as culpable (and similarly, BBC execs should be jailed).
“BBC execs should be jailed”
Well, this debate really brings out the Fascists among us.
Guess you’d also support Trump’s plan to impose martial law on US states which voted for Biden, so that he could re-run the election? Plans which stalled at an early stage because even his clique of extremists baulked at that. But he would have done it if he could.
As a general principle, Timandra’s argument is incontrovertible to anyone who values personal freedom and a rational approach to life. In particular, her argument against allowing penny pinching (aka Tory) governments from using restrictions in personal freedom to try to depress demand for health services is very well made. And some of those poll results are both startling and deeply depressing. That such a large number of those polled thought that ‘… 65% of people think face coverings should be made compulsory in busy outdoor areas’ is a startling example of how this virus emergency has caused so many people apparently to take leave of their senses.
Not finished reading yet, but I would like to point out that mortality is “comparable to seasonal influenza” right now, and not because I, who know nothing about these things, say so, but all the statistics point in this direction. It will be higher than influenza, but the order of magnitude is the same.
simply not true…better get busy an burn down that 5G cell tower before it turns you into a zombie…oh wait…its too late for that.
As this terrible year continues to unfold into the next there will be hopefully a reckoning and accountability delivered on how the NHS infrastructure in the UK has responded. It will be hard to avoid the reality that are the failures it has presided over and a lot of this will come down to the terrible mantra of “saving the NHS”. One has to ask why is that the focus for anyone far less a Government?
The management of the global pandemic has been a national disaster in the UK with costs in lives ruined (and not just those who had the illness as is pointed out above) and so so many lost in disgraceful circumstances to die alone. The country brought to its knees by a combined set of circumstances that were of course unforeseeable, no matter how many proffer their entirely retrospective wisdom that they had “modelled” it last year. Sadly we now live in an age where commentators devoid of personal responsibility or any experience in managing viral illness in humans (who can be gravely unwell and destined to die regardless) are free to promote opinions no matter how simplistic or informed. Yet we see pointless striving within the NHS, with no challenge, to the human or other resources squandered therein. Those responsible are more likely to be interviewed on breakfast television than called to account. Heroes they most certainly are not. In contrast they are seen as valued and broadcast in a variety of media. We have seen the media industry anoint a cadre of such individuals (particularly the more photogenic or more fluent regardless of true experience, insight or skill), and witnessed them grow into their media careers from the most innane of academic or non academic backgrounds. Should we really be hearing from the CEO of NHS providers? I am sure a competent person but someone whose views on a colossal and failed healthcare institution being asked for his opinion on what the public response to rising levels of RNS polymerase tests should be. I would suggest not.
The NHS is now truly vast, boasts its role as a global employer and yet has become a shadow of its original structure designed to avert unnecessary death from truly treatable illness. Now it is shown to be wholly inadequate through mind boggling complexity and failure to be held accountable for that failure, its lack of realistic goals and hopelessly unrealistic scope. It now works as a business earning nothing but loss in almost every sphere of its operation. Yet after all this country as witnessed, we were asked to clap in unison and above all to save it from being overwhelmed?
Accountability should start with those who advised Government, the quality of their work and those in the NHS who colluded to place their paid occupations over the welfare of our dying citizens. Lessons will need to be learned to prevent recurrence. The institution may need to be reverse engineered. Whichever Government appears from the catastrophic coalition of COVID and Brexit might start by not just eliminating the NHS deficit but removing the NHS structure and self interests decades have built into the national character.
The whole article reminded me of the BP CEO ‘wanting his life back’ at the time of the massive BP oils spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly, Timandra also wants her life
back, wants to be able to be able to go to concerts and have guests. Nothing wrong with that, I also want the same. But it was the whining about the NHS that done it all that got me.
COVID-19 is just another seasonal flu, it is the NHS being underfunded that is to blame,
Timandra says. Yet the key word is another. This is another pandemic, on top of the seasonal flu that has not gone away, and which is still causing excess deaths. The drunken-fuelled fights have also not gone away, nor have the heart attacks, strokes, cancers, car accidents”¦ On top of these, the NHS has now to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, must spend money on 300 million doses of vaccine, must spend money on the resources for the vaccines’ administration. Yes, the NHS is underfunded. Yet when an increase of the national insurance contributions for the self-employed was proposed by the government in 2017, there was an outcry by the Timandras, who did not want the government to take their hard-earned cash to prop the NHS. Now it is the same Timandras who blame the underfunded NHS for them not being able to hug people. In a situation of ever increasing demand for healthcare resources there must be a corresponding increase in societal readiness to fund those, if we want our lives back.
Dear TIMANDRA YOU TUBE /watch?v=CI9WAV-kIHo
From RUPLY : “Entertainment industry employees are gathering in Paris to protest against COVID-19 restrictions on Tuesday, December 15.
Cultural venues were due to reopen on December 14, but in accordance with the latest regulations would be required to stay closed at least until the beginning of 2021.
As part of new measures coming into force on the same day, a curfew will replace the current restrictions on people’s movement, as the curve of new cases has showed the signs of flattening.”
Oh great, actors taking to the streets.
Well for once they are at least doing so for a good reason.
How dare people want the ability to make a living.
asdf
What if what was passing for “normal” was actually kind of crappy? Couldn’t we do better than that neoliberal mess?
For starters, how about investing in MORE NHS capacity?
The People that worship the NHS model also worship increasing the population through immigration. According to the ONS gross immigration into the UK in the year to March 2020 was 700,000 . That is the population of Sheffield. In the last thirty years the population has gone from 58m to 68, – in a mere 30 years. And obviously GDP has risen too- but GDP per capita relative to other economies has worsened. So they may be a bigger economy but we are not richer- and schools hospitals roads etc cannot cope. This has nothing to do with race and everything to do with numbers.
I support the NHS but do not want more barely controlled immigration. The two don’t automatically go together.
Hear hear.
Why use the gross immigration number, it’s meaningless?
Do immigrants not work, pay taxes, pay national insurance?
The largest part of individual healthcare cost is in the last decade of life. Immigrants are young, working age people. The heaviest drain on the health service are the indigent elderly. The NHS is heavily dependent upon immigrant employees. You should be careful what you wish for.
So sorry to hear how this pandemic is interfering with your day to day activities, Timandra. Thank goodness you’re not experiencing even greater difficulties. I do hope you keep well and don’t expect the NHS to sort you out in the event you develop serious illness.
For the avoidance of doubt, the 15,000 deaths in one week in January 2015 wasn’t the figure for excess mortality, but the total number of deaths in that week.
Great… congratulations, another person waking up to what is really going on, forgive me my sarcasm.
I can’t see all this moralising ending when the guinea pigs are vaccinated. Bloody depressing.
Articles written by dollar half-millionaires for dollar half millionaires and their readers,about how easy it is for bedroom-tax avoiders to take personal care of vulnerable kin in the name of personal choice rather than accept – out of personal choice – their own personally chosen responsibility for the current state of NHS management might just convince them that they know what they are talking about, but they didn’t get where they are today by believing them. If they didn’t want it to be like this, why did they vote for it?
Whatever the status of the seasonal flu (as distinct from Covid), there’s bound to be a lot less of it this year. All the measures taken to reduce the spread of Covid will be just as effective against flu. So there should be fewer NHS beds taken up by flu patients than we would normally expect.
8% of the NHS is spent on dealing with Type 2 Diabetes. An instant solution to funding.
The elderly and the co morbid have held the 98.8% (.06 deaths and long haulers a piece) who are unaffected by this virus for far to long. its time fro them to self isolate and let the rest of us get on without lives.
All of us now at last know someone who has had the virus I have had one death, many light touch and many no symptoms.
If the fit and healthy who do not want the risk of being a long hauler (most of whom got better after Sars Cov) i respect that well lets have it the other way round, respect those that are fit and healthy and allow them the chance to be poorly for a couple of days (during which they will stay indoors fro 10 days). Nearly 74 million are registered as having had this virus (its huge amounts more) and deaths are not at 2 million but we know precisely who they are and so do the people who are at risk. .
They can stick there 18 months once we have substantial numbers of the vulnerable either dead or vaccinated and as for ICU capacity its not even got beyond 30% capacity of the March numbers of ICU beds.
the who says this virus will always be around so seems to me that this goverment is using this as a ploy to get people to take some vaccine when its rushed in it gives them power to take freedom away that they will not lift anything freedom has gone people besides say protect Nhs we dont get paid their wages they should look after us i just say protect old people and let people use there own trust not do as told like children lockdowns and mask dont work says WHO
Hark
Ontario counts suicide victims as COVID-19 fatalities
tnc news /2020/12/13/ontario-counts-suicide-victims-as-covid-19-fatalities/
Well said!
Great article
Lets do the maths.
Lowballing it… Say 50% of UK get Covid 35m and 5% of the victims are hospitalized, that is 1.75m people
and 1 in 5 of these folk die (1% mortality) 350k people.
This would happen over, say, 6 mths. Each month 360k in hospital with 60k deaths per month.
It makes no sense to design a service for 100 year peaks, it makes sense to actively manage the situation to mimimise the exceptional peaks.
A service running at 90% capacity in normal times is efficient.
1,75m people need hospital. One third of them need intensive care. That’s 600,000 people. The UK has 6,000 ICU beds.
oh no…now you’ve done it…numbers that prove them to be flat earthers.
It would be more like 100k needing ICU beds but the point is valid, that is V 6k ICU beds available.
If we x2 the NHS capacity to 12k and run at 50% in a normal winter peak, we are still 90k ICU beds short in an unmanaged pandemic.
Why is the NHS about to collapse, yet again?
Does anyone know what happened to all those Nightingale Hospitals that were built at such huge public expense?
Surely they are not full to capacity already? Or do they even exist?
My thoughts exactly, and is it just coincidence that there’s a new strain of super spreading covid that we all must hide away from…
Yes indeed, it’s far too convenient, and as this rate by June we will be
Covid IV or even Black Death II.
Not enough physicians and nurses. Not enough medical facilities, ICU beds, etc. Same reason it’s always on the verge of collapse.
So building the Nightingales was a pointless propaganda exercise, as they cannot be adequately staffed and equipped.
However no doubt ‘someone’ made a decent profit?
Well, every year the NHS struggles to accommodate even flu patients much less covid, so yes it’s a constant problem, not enough facilities and physicians. It’s also a big reason that people often wait a long time for care. This seems to be recognized, there’s a lot written on it every year, but somehow never addressed. It appears to me that it has become tradition and therefor accepted that the NHS will always come up short on these measures.
Thank you.
How very depressing. Andrew Thompson (below) seems to have annunciated the problem brilliantly. 126 votes must mean something.
Some US States have also had problems with healthcare system capacity. Take for example South Dakota, where a hardline Republican Governor snubbed all suggestions that she implement restrictions, and healthcare professionals were consequently at their wits’ end to treat the surge in Covid cases.
Which US states have capacity issues with flu every year like the NHS? And yet the NHS never addresses capacity issues even though the flu comes every year.
HARK
Matt Hancock Supports the Great Reset | Weekend Podcast #8
you tube watch?v=Wekfstd5hXY
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
Stuff and nonsense. It is the NHS’s job to protect us, not the other way around. If it is not up to the task despite soaking up an absurd amount of the national income then it should be euthanized and something better and cheaper put in its place.
“an absurd amount of the national income”
UK: 9.5% of GDP
Germany: 11% of GDP
US: 19.5% of GDP
Who is paying “an absurd amount of the national income” ?
“the NHS…..soaking up an absurd amount of the national income”
NHS: 9.5% of UK GDP
Germany: private and public healthcare systems consume 11% of GDP (which is higher, in absolute terms, than in Britain)
US: 19.5% of GDP (which is much higher, in absolute terms than in Britain). Healthcare insurance for employees is a major expense for companies and contributes to US lack of competitiveness, as witness for example their trade deficit with China. Healthcare costs are the #1 cause of personal bankruptcy.
Which country has a healthcare system which is “soaking up an absurd amount” either as percentage of GDP, or in absolute terms?
There are lots of good reasons to privatize the NHS, but this may be the top one. If the government and its bureaucracies start to treat us like a herd of cows, and put us on diets and take away our booze and fun, then we can’t even pretend to be free people. We are not free people as it is, in most important ways. But at least we can pretend.
Sir Charles Walker Calls Out Matt Hancock On The BBC As The Host Does His Best To Run Damage Control
you tube /watch?v=D-ZHpaGiIBc
There is no immediate incentive to look after your health. What you pay for the NHS is based on your income not your lifestyle. There is no incentive to provide good healthcare. Even if you withdrew your custom the funding is still provided. This is why socialism always ends up with walls to keep people in. You need either the market or the state to regulate. I know which one I prefer.
Canada has the same propaganda. Stay home to stop the spread because public (there are no private) hospitals are running out of beds. They ran out of beds over a decade ago & we’ve always had “hallway medicine”. This bizarre, hubristic, impossible of goal of stopping a virus, instead of focussing on treatment of the few people seriously affected by it began with the idiotic Imperial College report. By the way, forcing a vaccine on people is NOT the answer – a subject for another day.
“Compared with our continental neighbours, the NHS is both inadequately funded and ineffective.”
According to Eurostats this statement is untrue. The UK is second only to Denmark and about equal to Norway and iceland on expenditure on hospital services and the 5th or so highest overall in the EU for all medical services. Where the UK falls down is a lower level of expenditure on outpatients which is only slightly higher than Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Estonia and one third of that in Sweden and a half that in Norway.
NHS underfunded ? understaffed ?
In October Local nurse gave me flu jab , and logged it on laptop all on her tod.
First dose of AZ needed nurse, trainee, data imputter , receptionists, plus loads of well meaning old duffers in hi importance hi viz
must have been some managers hiding somewhere.
Over /Mismanaged as before, only worse.
‘…why not accept similar measures to take the strain of drunkenness off A&E departments every weekend?’
One very simple answer – exponential growth in cases, and thus deaths, from Covid-19. Even flu is a known quantity, and a sensible trade-off can be made.
The other point to be made is that the ‘Save the NHS’ shorthand is not, as somewhat obtusely claimed by some, about the institution but about its capacity to treat ill people – whether they have Covid or other life-threatening conditions. Of course the NHS is inadequately funded – some of us have been arguing this for a decade – but in the short-run we owe it both to NHS staff and ourselves to reduce the preventable burden.
Given the utter nonsense on here I cant help wondering if some respondents have even the faintest idea how the NHS works. I’m reminded of a saying, that there is informed opinion, ill-informed opinion and uninformed opinion. Only one of these is worth reading. The other two are dangerous.
I suspect that is to be read “There is my opinion, which is of course correct; yours, which is ill-informed and flawed and you need re-education; and those I really don’t like which are highly dangerous and must be closed down”
Most of them live in a right-wing echo chamber.
The NHS could concentrate on health a little more, instead of funding IVF treatment for people not biologically fit to reproduce, sex change operations, other not remotely health related activities, and health care for those who have not contributed and don’t carry their own health insurance.
Then it could stop the bull about poor pay; it is one of the highest paying, most employee cossetting organisations in Britain.
From her photo, Timandra is young enough to not be one of those who would be choking out their lives in a hospital car park because the hospital is full of other Covid cases and can’t admit her. So it doesn’t matter.
Thank goodness she and her ilk were not around in 1940. They’d have been protesting about the limitation of their fundamental liberty to turn their lights on at night with the curtains open, so that enemy aircraft could navigate, on the grounds that “it isn’t our job to do the RAF or the ARP Warden’s jobs for them”.
The risks from COVID-19 will never become” comparable to flu” because it is a different, more serious disease that requires longer periods of hospitalisation.
It will, it’s already mutating to spread more easily. It will have sacrificed virulence to do so. 40% of our cold viruses are coronaviruses. When they first crossed the species barrier to us they would have been like Covid except in much smaller populations as mobility was much less and slower.
When Europeans met the natives of Tierra del Fuego they swam in the cold waters without effect. But they died of the common cold, because they were naive to those viruses.
I’d be more than happy to work from home and I know many who want to continue working from home to avoid long commutes and office time wasters.
I think abusing your health and then expecting the tax payer to pick up the bill is a bit bloody selfish – unless you have mental health issues like severe depression or addiction.
Working from home is great. Should we now cancel the London rating for all those people who were paid extra for commuting into central London?
If you can work from home what is stopping your job being done in India? Perhaps you could move to India to do it!
Finally please define “abusing your health”. Was I abusing my health when I tore my ACL skiing? What about people being injured while playing Rugby? Everyone knows it has a lot of risk! What would you do with runners who need knee or hip replacements after years of road running? Those risks are well known! What happens to someone who falls of a motor bike, or a push bike or a horse? This is an endless list!
Sounds to me like you’d be using your home as an office which should mean business rates instead of council tax. Hope you won’t be ‘flouting’ that long established law? I think that would be a bit bloody selfish.
I just might write to our MP suggesting this to help make up the shortfall in local tax instead of expecting the rest of the taxpayers to pick up the bill.
What a selfish and self-centered point of view. Whimpering about your “liberties” while people on whose “altar you sacrifice your liberties” are doing a real job to save others. I am proud of NHS, and ashamed to be a compatriot of people who have no respect and care for others. If we had fewer egoist and rule-breakers, we would have fared so much better! Lucklily, the majority of Britain are still good and caring people!
Funny how it’s always the person wishing to live a normal life who is termed ‘selfish,’ never the one who is insisting that others live as he/she would have them live. It’s never selfish apparently, to support lockdowns that put people out of work. Or to perpetually require masks despite their dubious efficacy. Respect for others cuts both ways, and ‘good and caring’ people don’t resort to hectoring others in demanding to have their way.
Nothing selfish about demanding that others live as you would dictate? It’s fascinating how ‘respect’ has suddenly become a one-way street. It’s a bit like those who think lockdowns are a grand idea, largely because it’s not their livelihoods being harmed.
Or their grandparents?
What about their grandparents? If one is at risk, then take the appropriate steps. Demanding that others do your bidding is not among those steps.
If the majority of the population decides they would rather, collectively, take precautions are they still the selfish ones? Or is those who decide, against the wishes of the majority, to put others at risk or call for the abolition of those collective precautions?
If the majority wishes to take precautions, no one is stopping them. It would be nice if people took more responsibility in managing their own risk.
When exactly did those in the minority forfeit agency? Hectoring people is a poor means of persuasion, much like calling them selfish for not bowing to your demands.
In general I lead an almost entirely risk free life. No smoking, no dangerous sports, healthy diet, lots of exercise and vitamin D, no driving, no trips to dangerous countries. I am happy to take the risk with regard to Covid because I believe I have a strong immune system. I have not had so much as a cold for three years and I have not seen a doctor since 1980. I believe I should be allowed to live my life normally and take that risk.
And on the same basis, people should be allowed to drive at 150mph if they want to, even when they run into the people driving at 70mph?
As Mark Bridgeford points out here, what one person does affects others. The classic definition of freedom (“Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”) applies here – someone who decides they don’t care whether they get the virus or not may infect someone else. That, after all, is the whole point of the R value – each infected person infecting several more unless everyone (the infected and the uninfected alike) alter their behaviour.
You insist on treating Covid as if it were a random meteorite strike from the heavens, and whether we wear steel helmets or not is entirely our choice on the risk we run, and has no implications for anyone else. Anyone can see that that’s utterly different from an infectious disease.
You insist on treating Covid as if it were a random meteorite strike from the heavens,
No, I insist on treating it for what it is – a virus that can have very harsh consequences on specific populations. Instead, it’s being viewed as an existential threat, which it isn’t.
Those specific populations can’t practically protect themselves from infection by others. It’s been considered as a less disruptive option and rejected because it doesn’t work. The 70 year old heart patient has a 60 year old wife who works in a supermarket or an office. Their 30 year son lives with them because of high property prices and a “gig economy” job.
So what do we do? Let the 70 year old guy die?
I love how outlier examples are presented as the norm. There is no 100% risk-free environment; we all manage risk as best we can. And there are alternatives to dying. Or to being infected at all.
How ‘disruptive’ would it be for the 30- year and his mom to be forced out of work over a shutdown rule? There are consequences from that, too, and they’re already manifesting in various countries.
It’s very easy to demand what others do when those demands have no impact on your own life.
Nope. Have the 60 year old wife stay home. Viola three people staying home to protect the vulnerable. Meanwhile their 35 year old neighbors get up and go to work.
No. They are not doing ‘a real job to save others’. Only some are -in fact a very, very small percentage of the NHS are working in this way -and yes, these people are doing extraordinary work and full credit to them. The rest of the NHS is doing a great deal less -to name but a few -physiotherapists, GPs, mental health workers, radiographers, oncologists, ophthalmologists etc… -it is not that these people do not want to continue to work; they cannot on account of the crazy restrictions in place -at the very least their productivity is being seriously impeded. So just stop for a moment with your half baked moralising and your shaming of people -it’s precisely this ‘good and caring’ fallacy which is killing off people in their millions -killing their livelihoods, their education, their relationships, their prospects and their futures. We cannot afford to hide under the ‘good and caring’ duvet for the rest of our lives -we need applied thought, and action which has a focus on preserving worthwhile, sustaining and life affirming goals. You cannot just hide indoors, or behind a mask, or in your tiers forever. This is a challenge which needs to be faced from a position of knowing what is truly valuable and worth saving in our species -not more of the moral cowardice which has got us to where we currently sit.
“You cannot just hide indoors, or behind a mask, or in your tiers forever.”
How about just waiting until the Spring, when everyone who wants to be vaccinated will have been? And they haven’t died of Covid in the meantime, because society has taken sensible precautions to control the spread of the virus.
Of course… it will all be over by Spring won’t it? And do you really think we will just pick up from where we left off? The damage caused by this virus is not in the virus itself but in the mindset it has spawned. that will not disappear by Spring.
I’m not sure what “mindset” you are referring to, but yes the pandemic has certainly shone a light on the way that – for example – hedge fund managers and the other ‘Masters of the Universe’ who are worshipped by the wealth-worshippers are less important, and the people who actually keep the country going are more important, than some had slipped into imagining.
Slight correction – radiographers are working directly with Covid patients as an X-Ray is the quickest and most reliable method of determining the extent of lung damage from the disease.
Being “proud” of an organisation is illogical. You can be proud of the actions of some of its people. But to be proud of an “organisation’ makes no sense.
I want. I want. I want. Me. Me. Me.
That seems to be the spirit of this article and it is made explicit in the conclusion. This narrowly selfish attitude seems endemic in the media class and a large minority of the population. And where did the obsession with ‘hugging’ come from? It’s icky and in a strange way not very British.
What happened to restraint, personal responsibility and consideration for others? And where is the ‘stiff upper lip’ when the country needs it?
Seriously, all that is being asked is a bit of physical restraint and wearing a face covering … for a few weeks as a vaccine is within reach. Doing this prevents needless illness and death. These sacrifices are not great when compared with the experiences of refugees and millions of people in impoverished or war-torn countries – or previous generations in this country for that matter.
Surely a sense of proportion is needed and just a small amount of self-sacrifice.
Exactly.
“all that is being asked is a bit of physical restraint and wearing a face covering”
Are you actually serious?
The infringements on our civil liberties, wether you agree with them or not, have been vast and over reaching… On a par with North Korea?
As historian Oliver Neil said have we been living with the illusion that we have democracy and freedom in this country.
What terrible lack of empathy you have for people suffering from true oppression, including the North Koreans.
How on earth would we have defeated real Fascism with attitudes like this?
Unbelievable.
Wow, you can handle people having a different point of view!
Where is my covidiot t- shirt? Think I better get a “I lack empathy” badge to pin on there!!
“On a par with North Korea?”
You clearly know nothing about North Korea.
And you clearly take yourself far too seriously :0