Thread by @danielgoyal

The Week In Covid

A look at what's happened with Covid this week. Excuse the abundance of sarcasm - it's been a tough week for truth and logic!

#TheWeekInCovid

1. Hancock (the UK’s former Health Secretary) made the news again this week, in what I initially thought was a psychology experiment testing ‘just how much BS will the public take’.

2. He claimed the UK pandemic strategy of ‘suppressing the virus until vaccines and treatments were available’ was the right one, he’s glad they followed it, and they have beaten Covid.

3. It transpired he was being serious. Or at least he was serious he wanted the public to believe it. When folk pointed out his government didn’t suppress the virus until they had to and their delays led to some of the longest national lockdowns in the world, 10s of thousands...

...dying, 100’s of thousands left moribund, the biggest fall in GDP of all OCED countries, thousands of businesses going bankrupt, the BBC swiftly took him to task for trying to re-write history and reported widely on it. Sorry, they didn’t really.

4. The symptom profile in the UK was expanded this week. It now includes the commonest symptoms of Covid, two years after we knew the commonest symptoms of Covid, and about eighteen months after acknowledging the actual symptoms of Covid could have helped suppress the virus...

...until vaccines were available.

5. But the expanded symptom profile is just in time - the same week - as shops start to sell Covid tests. Maybe Johnson and Hancock’s mates have taken enough of the taxpayers money and it’s time for someone else to make some bucks off...

a pandemic that is robbing people of their freedoms and loved-ones.

6. The public now have to pay to test for a disease the government are wilfully permitting to spread (a lesson in supply and demand economics), only to be allowed to spread it freely anyway…

7 ...They have now officially moved from shafting the public discretely to shafting the public at every opportunity and in plain sight.

8. The ‘Covid is like the Flu’ crowd were served another blow as Covid hospital admissions peaked higher than they did in January,...

..a mere three months ago. Either climate change is really playing havoc - it is - and we are having several winters a year - we’re not -, or Covid isn’t the fecking Flu!

9. But apparently, according to experts (I mean, armchair pundits)...

...it’s OK the hospitals are filling up, because only half are in ‘primarily’ for Covid…Apparently if you go to hospital for a reason that isn’t Covid, Covid can’t harm you…no, that can’t be right. Oh yeah, its the endless stream of BS from the denialists.

10. Estimates put hospital acquired Covid at 22% of all inpatient Covid cases. Meanwhile, staff are still expected to wear plastic bibs and paper masks to protect themselves and their patients. It’s not like they are dealing with high risk patients, or...

we can’t afford staff going off sick. Oh wait, they are and we can’t.

11.The Govs HSE are now refusing to pursue the allegation that their guidelines on PPE for staff are stupid and likely led to avoidable HCW deaths, as alleged by one of their senior advisers (the death bit).

12. And if the allure of working on the NHS frontline wasn’t great enough, on top of the ‘we don’t give a sh!t about you PPE guidelines’ and the ‘why don’t you have a real world pay cut’ incentives, staff must now join patients in England in paying for parking. But Johnson...

...loves the NHS, honest!

13. Just to prove Johnson has won the fight against Covid, the public in a number of areas were told not to go to hospital unless problems were life-threatening due to ‘high levels of Covid cases’.

14. Other A&E departments had to turn ambulances away because they were too full because of “high levels of Covid cases”.

15. Elective operations also had to be cancelled due to…yes…you’ve guessed it…’high levels of Covid cases’.

15. But don’t worry Javid and his mates have a solution that will reverse the decade of underfunding and neglect his government have pursued, the refusal to strengthen the NHS during the pandemic, and their inability to appreciate the need to actually care for those who get Covid

16. Their Covid Recovery Plan (no not a rehab service for those recovering from Covid. Wouldn’t that be nice.) will take more of the public’s money for the NHS and invest it in the…private sector. Wait, let me check my notes again…yes,...

they will strengthen the NHS by investing more of the NHS’s money in the private sector. Maybe we didn’t pay them enough to do near f’all during the initial stages of the pandemic.

And apparently paying a private hospital to do knee operations will free up some ambulances, GPs, and A&E staff to treat strokes, heart attacks and cancer. No, makes perfect sense, when you don’t have an utter scoobie about how healthcare actually works.

17. But seriously, what could go wrong putting a bunch of out-of-touch accountants in charge of the public’s health?

18.Speaking of out of touch unqualified Ministers, this week the Education Minister said it was fine not to wear a mask because he washed his hands a lot.

19. In other news, WHO declare that Covid is airborne.

20. And in other news, Long Covid rates in children climb even higher, as yet more evidence emerged of physical consequences of repeated exposure to a SARS virus - who could have guessed?

21. The Government responded to a number of business sectors request to limit the impact of Covid on their businesses. To which the Government duly tried to limit the impact of a rapidly spreading virus by stopping anything that would stop it spreading.

22. In other news, the economic recovery falters and businesses struggle as staff members contract some sort of mysterious viral illness. They think it may be a viral infection called ‘Like-the-flu honestus' derived from the Latin word ‘Fuk’um’. Oh wait, no, it’s Covid!

23. A number of business leaders ask the Government to bring back free testing. Not the businesses making money from the tests, other businesses losing money because there are no free test. It all gets a bit confusing.

There are some more below, but had to delete a couple - too much sarcasm isn’t good for you!

Thanks for listening. And stay safe guys…get vaxed, wear a mask, ventilate spaces, and don’t spread it if you get it (odd to have to actually say that).

Science will win!