I keep getting messages and hearing snippets from people who sit in various cross-department government working groups.
Over the last couple of years there’s been a steady drumbeat of concern, but recent ones have felt a bit more like panic:
Things like mortality rising higher than births in some parts of the country, antibiotic resistance creeping up, disability claims rising, sickness absence climbing...
You'll have heard a lot of these in the news, but behind the scenes, some of the conversations are quite desperate apparently.
I quite like the bold insanity of the people who claim that the reason that there wasn't officially much flu, noro, adeno, rsv etc around in 2020/21 is because *they were all around but governments pretended they were covid*.
But It accidentally points to something profound.
That year those things (flu, norovirus, adenovirus, rsv, para influenza) *weren't around to cause death*.
So covid infections actually caused *a lot more excess than people have realised*.
Think about it.
In a normal winter, flu, rsv, other infections are the straws that break the camel's back for a lot of people.
I had an interesting conversation last week that I've been trying to process.
It was with a therapist who I'm supporting, and they said it was ok to share this thread and its contents.
I'm going to call them Sam, because I tried writing this saying 'they' the whole time and I kept on getting confused. I have also changed a couple of minor details to preserve anonymity.
When we last met, Sam poured out a load of heartache about their health, their family's health, and their friends' health.
We have a group of lovely birthing groups and parenting groups that use some of our building regularly, and I get to chat to them - women who are pregnant and women who have young babies.
They are *in a bad way*.
In one of the expectant mothers groups, two of the nine had to stop work early due to complications in their pregnancies.
I sometimes hear things like that and wonder to myself if it is actually something that is becoming more common, or whether it's my imagination.