A couple of weeks ago, I had a tricky meeting with a family in preparation for a funeral.
I knew in advance that one of the family is fiercely against mitigations like masks, so I was braced for trouble.
When I got to the meeting, he wasn't there, so he missed my prepared speech.
Covid infections make every single part of your body vulnerable to new problems.
Whatever age you are.
But let's pick *one* part of your body, the skin.
You'd be surprised how much harm Covid is doing.
I'm just going to throw a few charts up here of 'hospital episodes' for individual skin conditions that show the last 12 years of data.
(Hospital episodes are not *cases*, they are the number of times someone interacts with a hospital for treatment)
Here's a few different conditions across a few ages.
From top left: Herpes in 18-45s
Viral warts 18-65s
Dermatophytosis 18-45s
Bacterial infections of skin Under 10s
Other mycobacterial infections of skin 18-65s
Mycetoma Under 18s.
Denial - pretending to yourself that we're still living in 2019, that endless repeat covid infections don't make you more sick, and that washing your hands makes you well
Bargaining - inviting the virus to infect you now, hoping it will be kind to you when you're older
It's hard to know exactly where to start because there are just *so many things wrong with it*, even in just that one tiny sentence... but let's go for it...
Let's just start with this overall weird premise that getting repeat infections with covid now will keep you from getting severely ill when you are older...
A lot of people have been really hard on the ukhsa, but I don't think it's always fair.
They're still a relatively new agency, so I think it's worth taking a moment to highlight some of the considerable achievements of their brief history.
❤️🙌
1
Encouraged everyone to repeatedly and endlessly catch Covid, a virus that has killed upwards of 30 million people and caused lasting ill health for 400 million so far.
2
Pushed handwashing as the solution for the aforementioned airborne virus, proving that they want you to catch it.