<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/covid-deaths-rise-scrap-mask-wearing-hospitals>
"For some people, going to hospital may now be more dangerous than staying at
home untreated. Many clinically vulnerable people fear, sometimes with good
reason, that a visit to hospital or the doctors’ surgery could be the end of
them. Of course, there have always been dangers where sick people gather. But,
until now, health services have sought to minimise them. Astonishingly, this is
often no longer the case.
Across the UK, over the past two years, the NHS has been standing down even the
most basic precautions against Covid-19. For example, staff in many surgeries
and hospitals are no longer required to wear face masks in most clinical
settings. Reassuring posters have appeared even in cancer wards, where patients
might be severely immunocompromised. A notice, photographed and posted on
social media last week, tells people that while they are “no longer required to
wear a mask in this area”, they should use hand sanitiser “to protect our
vulnerable patients, visitors and our staff”. Sanitising is good practice. But
Covid-19 is an airborne virus, which spreads further and faster by exhalation
than by touch.
The story this policy tells, which the government would have us believe, is
that Covid-19 is all but over. It’s not true. Despite a collapse in testing,
which means the figures will be grossly understated, the number of death
certificates giving Covid-19 as a cause has been climbing steadily as autumn
approaches, rising from 80 per week in early August to 306 in late September.
Who knows what the real number may be?
Forget it, be happy, keep shopping: if you don’t live and work as though the
virus has vanished, you’re holding the country back. There could scarcely be a
more powerful symbol of the all-clear than doctors and nurses greeting their
patients without masks.
When we forget the virus, we forget the clinically vulnerable people – an
estimated 2.2 million in the UK – trapped by our insouciance. Some can scarcely
leave their homes, as the danger to them of infection is so great. They are the
shadow that falls across the sunny story the government tells, a shadow that
must be ignored and denied.
Clinical staff, long after the clapping died away, have continued to carry the
weight of this disease. A recent British Medical Association (BMA) survey of
hundreds of doctors with long Covid revealed its ruinous impact on their lives.
From junior doctors to consultants, they’ve been abandoned by the system,
unable to get appointments or referrals, left alone to face the loss of their
careers and almost every other aspect of their lives."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: October 19, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-91266658
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
