Coronavirus, the scare of the century?

“Private hospitals are empty and up to 40,000 NHS beds lie unused amid mounting fury over the handling of non coronavirus treatment as thousands of operations are cancelled and cancers go undetected.

Figures suggest that up to four times the number of beds are free than normal for this time of year after a huge slowdown in non Covid-19 admissions as health bosses aim their focus at the pandemic response.

Hospitals have cancelled ‘thousands’ of their non-urgent surgeries – like hip and knee operations and IVF treatment – to free up space for infected patients, and operating theatres, equipped with oxygen supplies, have been turned into coronavirus wards.

Nightingale hospitals, built for the expected surge in coronavirus victims, are also largely empty, and private hospitals taken over by the NHS at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds are also barely being used.” [Daily Mail]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8249241/Nearly-40-000-hospital-beds-lie-operations-treatments-cancelled.html

“Medics say up to 2,700 cancers are being missed every week as the numbers being referred by doctors for urgent hospital appointments or checks had dropped by 75 per cent.  Professor Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist, has warned that the impact of the coronavirus outbreak could result in 50,000 cancer deaths. 

Meanwhile NHS staff have been accused of making a ‘mockery’ of the health service as they faced a barrage of criticism for posting ‘tone deaf’ and ‘disrespectful’ videos of dance routines on coronavirus wards while seriously ill patients have their medical treatment delayed.” [Daily Mail]

[above: “NHS staff at the Tavistock Day Case Theatre in West Devon were forced to apologise after they filmed themselves performing a traditional Maori chant“—Daily Mail]

“Clap for the NHS”? Nein danke. The NHS is a very good thing, in principle, but the fact is that maladministration is a major problem, as well as underfunding. I have no time for virtue-signalling, nor for de facto enforced “community-ism”.

“NIGHTINGALES COULD BE RE-PURPOSED

It emerged today that NHS Nightingale hospitals could be ‘re-purposed’ to treat non-coronavirus patients to clear a mounting backlog of cancelled operations and other treatments.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace yesterday said empty beds at the seven Nightingales around the country may be used for cases including cancer sufferers or ‘stepdown’ patients on the road to recovery.

It came as the Nightingales remain largely empty despite having the capacity for up to 11,000 patients.  

The first of the seven major sites in England to open at the ExCel Centre in East London has so far treated just 41 patients despite already having a capacity of 500.

And the transfer of more than 30 patients to the hospital which opened on April 3 was allegedly ‘cancelled due to staffing shortages’, according to NHS documents.

Of the 41 patients treated in London, four have died, seven have been discharged to a less critical level of care and the other 30 are still having treatment there. 

There have since been three more Nightingales open – in Birmingham on April 16, in Manchester the following day and in Harrogate in North Yorkshire on Tuesday. 

The NHS has not yet provided data on how many people have been treated by any of these three, although the figure is believed to be dozens at best. This means the total number of patients treated at the four sites could be under 100.” [Daily Mail]

So, after all the hullabaloo around the huge instant “Nightingale” hospitals, at least one (on Tyneside) never opened for patients at all, and the others outside London have had few if any patients. The London one, capacity 500, which was supposed to be treating “thousands” of critically-ill patients has in fact received only 41!

Of those 41, 7 have been discharged, 30 are still there, and 4 have died. So, with known infection rates in London falling quite fast now, it looks as though the London Nightingale will soon be redundant unless repurposed, but it is a “hospital” good for only one thing— keeping patients alive who need ventilation or oxygen. It has no operating theatres or other usual hospital facilities, so it looks as if Ben Wallace is talking out of his ****.

Sweden, Britain, washing hands and other questions

It has been obvious to the non-brainwashed since the beginning of the Coronavirus situation that the only known way to stop its spread is widespread washing of hands, thoroughly, with soap and water. As I blogged almost two months ago, the survey of 2015, showing the levels of personal hygiene across Europe, exposed the fact that Italy, Spain and France were the least hygienic, the very countries where the pro rata infection rates have been highest.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8248719/Swedens-coronavirus-cases-grow-slowly-Britains-despite-lack-lockdown.html

Likewise, the only other really useful measures to help stop the infection on a mass basis are closure of or avoidance of crowded, hot, places where many excited people gather: popular concerts and dances, nightclubs, underground and other trains. Preventing people from walking, sunbathing, sitting on beaches or park benches are useless wastes of time.

Interesting news…

Is Coronavirus sparing white Northern Europeans?

It seems a strange idea at first blush. After all, we are brought up to believe that diseases generally attack people on an equal-opportunity basis. Whites, blacks, whatever. However, that is, like much of what people are told to believe, not actually true.

It is well known that some diseases attack, or conditions affect, only blacks: sickle-cell anaemia is one (showing that blacks do not belong in Northern climes). Likewise, though NHS and other propaganda concealed it or tried to conceal it, HIV/AIDS was much more easily contracted by blacks, half-caste blacks etc than by Europeans, especially those from North-West Europe or with family origins there.

Now we see Coronavirus affecting, in the UK for example, people of all racial origins, yes, but so called BAME people (including Jews) far worse than those of what might be called “Aryan” or more accurately “post-Aryan” origins.

Age is obviously the most important demographic factor in Coronavirus infection, symptomatics and mortality, but after that the racial aspect is obviously significant, though the importance is blurred by social factors such as modes of life, ways of life and living, housing etc.

I was struck by the Boris Johnson case. Here you have someone aged 55, of not only European but also Turkish and Jewish origins. He gets the virus and, it seems, was lucky not to die from it. His fiancee, Carrie Symonds, apparently European, and only 32 years old, showed symptoms and tested positive but suffered no more than slight discomfort before swiftly recovering. Makes you think…

Recent tweets

Street impressions

I had to go out in late afternoon (Friday afternoon) on an errand even the new UK bully police would certify as “essential”, so was able to observe how many people were out and about in my corner of Southern England. In fact, quite a few.

I remember when the “lockdown” nonsense started, a few weeks ago (though it seems far longer). The roads were empty. Now, today, I should say that, though the traffic has not built up to the Friday or any weekday norm, there was rather a lot of traffic around. Private cars as well as delivery vehicles. Quite a few people on bicycles, too.

A police car saw me as I passed in the opposite direction. The police car had cars ahead of and behind it. It slowed. I wondered whether the driver wanted to check me out, but was unable to do so because of the road situation. In fact, he would have been wasting his time. My car has valid MOT, is properly registered, as well as fully insured and so on; my UK licence is up to date and without “points”. In short, and in those senses only, I am “kosher”!

As I blogged yesterday, there is a “yes, repeat no” thing going on. No-one in the UK is rioting about this nonsense of the whole population being placed under conditional house arrest; no-one is even protesting loudly in the streets. Yet, with the weather warm, people are just taking their chances of being hassled by the toytown police, in the knowledge that the relatively few police around cannot, despite being more in evidence than pre-Coronavirus, arrest, ticket, or even talk to every motorist, every walking couple, every sunbathing young lady…

It reminds me of what happened in 1989. In 1988, I crossed the “East German” (DDR) border by car from Poland, then the next day into the then West Germany (Bundesrepublik). The border was rather fearsome in a quiet way, despite the fact that I crossed at a little-used and rural crossing-point in the south of the DDR.

Yet, only a year later, triggered by an announcement from a government minister (seemingly unintended), thousands of DDR citizens built up at the Berlin Wall and just started to cross. The Grenzpolizei (border police, aka Grepos) did not know what to do…so did nothing. One illegal crosser— shoot him; a thousand? Ten thousand. Impossible.

That, in minor key, is the situation the UK police are in now. They can throw their weight around when only a small number of (harmless, law-abiding English) people are involved, but when a thousand or a million people decide that they have had enough of the misconceived (and in any case pointless) “lockdown” petty tyranny, the police are powerless to stop those people from doing things such as driving around, visiting beaches, walking in parks or even —what wickedness!— sunbathing…

Musical interlude

A few tweets

Many people evidently have taken the “lockdown” at face value. This was an attempt by the global self-styled “elite” power club to see how far they can go in turning notionally “free” people into obedient, compliant, and above all unaware and bamboozled, serfs, clapping their own house arrest, in effect. Look at Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police Commissioner and Common Purpose “alumna”, right there in the forefront. I was thinking that this was the result of stupidity [cf. the view of @ClarkeMicah/Peter Hitchens] but I veer now to conspiracy.

The plebs are easily manipulated…

“A woman says she was “named and shamed” by neighbours after she fell asleep and missed the weekly clap for carers tribute to NHS staff and key workers.

The mother said had been tired after “a rough night” with her son, and inadvertently failed to take part in the event despite having done so in previous weeks.” [Sky News]

“The woman went on to write: “I just feel like I’m a total outcast on my previously friendly street now even though only one person posted it and only two others agreed

“It’s really disturbing how quickly people are ready to turn on each other and ‘report’ each other.”” [Sky News]

What many of the unthinking plebs would love would be a kind of “Nuremberg Trial” or kangaroo court every month (or week), with dissidents suitably “named and shamed” and then put in virtual or actual stocks so that the mob can throw things at anyone not going along with the official line.

Some “dissident” tweets

Again, as Hitchens says, or implies, the little penpushers, the toytown police and poundland KGB are finding new ways to fill their time, new “rules” to “enforce”.

Like most barristers (in my case, “ex”, since late 2016) who have done criminal trials, I am thoroughly in favour of juries, not because they are educated, intelligent, logical, or have any knowledge of the law beyond what the judge chooses to share with them (direct them as to), for mostly those qualities do not apply. No, the value of the jury is in the “sense of justice” within that small conclave. That may go against “the law” as written, against the evidence in some cases. It is a mystery, a mystery which worries the neat and little minds of some.

I can think of a few cases from my pupillage and later my own Bar experience (though I stopped doing most criminal work after a year or two, around 1995); other cases I have in mind were far more serious trials where the State was obviously thought, by the jury, to have gone “too far”.

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprus_Seven_Trial

The problem that we now have is that juries are so brainwashed by State and/or politically-correct propaganda that the accused might often actually be better off being tried by a “Diplock Court” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplock_court].

My articles about, inter alia, Dominic Cummings:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/dominic-cummings-a-government-of-dystopia-and-lunacy-posing-as-genius/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/les-eminences-grises-of-dystopia/

Meanwhile, in other news…