I tested positive for COVID 19- let's celebrate

I tested positive for COVID-19 yesterday.

There is nothing exceptional about that of course. The day that I sat in my car on a grey and desolate airfield in Kent (right), carefully sticking a swab into my nose and throat, there were 16,840 new COVID-19 cases reported in the UK.

There have been in excess of 7.8 million confirmed cases in the UK to date and 1,449 people in Britain died of COVID-19 just on the same day I was tested.

One of them, was the national hero, Captain Sir Tom Moore. That was his reward for raising more than £32 million for the NHS and offering a heart-warming news story during bleak times.  In a political gesture so cynical, it made me wince; the Prime Minister initiated a public clap last night in Captain Moore’s honour, when a public apology might have been more appropriate. I assume the Prime Minister calculated that the more we stand, slapping our hands together like well-trained performing seals, the less we might notice the catastrophic scale of the death toll, including so many of the frail and elderly, like Captain Moore.  

The Prime Minister stated, without irony, this was a suitable way to honour Captain Moore and the NHS staff, he raised money for.  Surely, containing the disease which killed the Captain would have been a more fitting and lasing tribute. As usual, Mr Johnson omitted to mention the many thousands of other UK victims of COVID-19, who have all lost their lives on his watch.

Mr Johnson is not fit to lace the boots of men like Captain Moore but by perfidiously associating himself with a nationally admired figure, Mr Johnson neatly deflected attention from his own bungling incompetence. ‘You can fool most of the people most of the time,' seems to be the Prime Minister’s sole political mantra.

My COVID-19 case hardly merits a mention. Fortunately, my symptoms are minor but my more pressing concern is that I made a routine care visit to my 86-year-old mother, the day before my symptoms kicked in. Mum’s Alzheimer’s is acute now and apart from her dedicated carers, the visits from me, or my brother, are the only human contact she has. I wore a surgical mask as I always do, but Mum told me she was feeling cold, so I wrapped her in a cardigan and a blanket. In doing so, I may have inadvertently killed her but we won’t know for sure for another six days. Ironically, she received her first vaccination the day after my drop in.

Not that it makes much difference now, but my wife and I have been very cautious throughout the pandemic and complied with the so-called lockdown rules. Having witnessed the impressive public response to the coronavirus in Hong Kong, we remain avid mask wearers and meticulous hand-washers. The only person to enter our home since October last year, was the man who replaced our boiler and that was several weeks ago. We have no idea where we might have caught it. The location of our local infection hot spots remains a mystery. A year after this all started, it’s like stumbling around a minefield, wearing a blindfold.

So, forgive me if I don’t embrace the febrile celebration of the great British vaccination roll out or any government-inspired bouts of mass applause. Somehow, the experience at the Manston Covid-19 Test Centre, followed by a rushed explanatory email to Mum's carers on receiving the result, while feeling like a victim of a violent mugging, did not quite put me in the party mood.

There is zero justification for celebratory rhetoric or triumphant bombast. It’s not only inappropriate, it’s disrespectful to those who have lost family members due to the Prime Minister’s abject mishandling of this crisis. A recent You Gov poll reported that one in eight Britons know a friend or family member who has died of COVID-19.  Another indicates that as of today, only 34% of people believe the government has handled the pandemic ‘very well’ or ‘somewhat well’.

More than 108,000 people have died in the UK within twelve months from a single cause. It’s the third largest per capita death rate in the world.  When I told the NHS track and trace representative who called me today about the one person, I had spoken to on the day I became symptomatic, he advised me that unless I could confirm that the contact had definitely come within 1 metre of me, or within two metres for a 15-minute duration, he would not include it.

“We don’t want to ask people to self-isolate unnecessarily,” he assured me.  How many more deaths before it will be necessary to tell someone who has been in direct indoor contact with a confirmed COVID-19 case, to isolate for ten days?  

No surprise that the UK has a worse record than the USA, Brazil, France or Italy. And it’s much, much worse than Hong Kong, Australia, Taiwan, Korea or Vietnam, which have largely contained the pandemic with proven measures like strict border controls and rigorous track/trace/quarantine protocols. The UK government refuses to adopt these measures even after 108,000 deaths.  

This failure is possibly grounds for a public enquiry or even a series of private criminal prosecutions but it is certainly not a reason for celebration or applause.

 

 

Lest we forget

 

Remembrance Day was observed in the UK last week with a dignified two minute’s silence but there was no commemoration for the tens of thousands of families mourning the victims of COVID-19.

There were no crowds at the Cenotaph in London this year, or ranks of marching veterans of course, because the nation is in lockdown. Yet the unprecedented combination of Remembrance Day and a lockdown to combat a deadly pandemic, did not prompt any sort of memorial event for those lost to the disease. 

Of course, these grannies, grandads, uncles and aunts, were not in uniform; they did not die in battle or while defending freedom; though surely their families deserve a whisper of comfort. An ounce of common compassion.

The official total is 56,698 COVID-19 deaths registered in England and Wales, up to 30 October 2020 (31,339 men and 25,359 women) but there have been no two minute's silence, no floral tributes, no doorstep applause and no high-profile services of remembrance.

The number of deaths from COVID-19 in England and Wales is greater than the Luftwaffe caused during the Blitz of London in World War Two. It’s now a greater loss of life than the Black Death and the Great Plague. It’s more lives than the Royal Navy lost in the whole of World War One and that took four years, not eight months.

Yet even on Remembrance Day, it seems these dead are already forgotten and their families apparently abandoned to grieve alone.

Just imagine, if 56,698 people had all died in a terrible fire in a sports stadium, or in a brutal terrorist attack or in a natural disaster- a tsunami or an earthquake say. It’s hard to imagine everyone would just carry on. No black armbands, no services of remembrance, no tragic personal anecdotes of grief and loss, inundating TV and social media.

The British are sometimes accused of being over enthusiastic to embrace an orgy of grief  but when 56,698 all die of COVID-19, most just look the other way. It’s a mass denial. A taboo.

Officially, one in 85 people in England and Wales are currently infected with COVID-19 but many people I speak to think the pandemic has been “over blown”. A few think it doesn’t really exist at all. Others point out that lots of people die in winter anyway or suggest it only seriously affects ethnic minorities in the north of England.

There is an online petition to establish a UK national holiday in remembrance of the victims of COVID-19; as of today, it has 56 signatures.

 According to the Office of National Statistics There were 1,379 deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) in England and Wales in the week ending 30 October 2020 but we are not told who they were, or where they were, or how they may have contracted the disease. It feels like a conspiracy of silence.

These are dangerous levels of delusion and denial about a deadly disease on a grand scale and my suspicion is that it is no accident.

Because if more attention is drawn to the epic scale of this public health disaster and the mass aggregate of personal family tragedies that it consists of, some people might want to ask the forbidden question which those in authority must fear most: why are so many people in Britain people dying?

According to John Hopkins University, the UK’s per capita death rate from COVID-19 is the fifth worst in the world.  Only Belgium, Spain, Argentina and Brazil fare worse than the UK in terms of deaths per 100,000 of population.

More people might also wonder why a rich nation like the UK, with a well-established public health organization and a comprehensive state- funded national health service, staffed by dedicated professionals, is doing quite so badly ?

Britain may have talent and it may have a great bake off too but, lest we forget, compared to most nations in the world its government has proven to be abject at preventing tens of thousands of its own people dying from an infectious disease. 

The least they might do is acknowledge the scale of the tragic loss and offer a dignified commemoration for the dead and a crumb of comfort to the grieving.