Take a moment to listen to Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister who, unlike every other national leader at Easter, didn’t forget the little children who are also suffering from coronavirus lockdown.
How about if scientists everywhere got together and worked on how to create a couple of hundred clones of Jacinda to replace all the shitehawks presently occupying top national positions of power in the world.
I believe she could transform the planet for all of us.
Five million people live in New Zealand. So far, there have been sixteen deaths from Covid-19 and the figures are dropping.
Don’t you just hate that coronavirus? I mean, come on, three million of them will fit on a pinhead yet there’s seven and a half billion of us and even just one of my nose hairs is way too big to balance on a pinhead. And if I managed it the ends would hang over and droop down the sides like Mexican Pete’s moustache.
‘Lock-down’, what the hell sort of word is that? Presumably it’s the opposite of ‘lock-up’. Okay, but that means to make secure, to fasten the bolts, so if ‘lock-down’ is the opposite surely it’s a synonym for ‘unlock’ or ‘go free’, so why am I cooped up in this house and likely to be arrested if I step outside?
Of course, it’s politician-speak. Politicians never say what they mean, so instead of telling us, “Right, we’re going to lock you up in your houses and never let you out,” which could sound just a smidgeon authoritarian, they instead announce, “Now, all you super-duper people we’re going to jolly well have some fun and give you a lock-down for thirty days until we’ve sent this nasty old virus back where it came from.”
All of which seems almost to suggest we’re about to indulge in a month long sexual orgy and bags me that girl from number sixteen with the big knockers and botox lips.
Sadly, nothing is further from the truth. Here we are, stuck on our own with no company, no-one to talk to, and Zoom’s being hacked by pornos. Oh, well, one ray of sunshine, then!
I can go shopping once a week. It’s a nightmare. I wander around the supermarket with my trolley and I’m the only one in the store not wearing a mask. And nobody speaks. There’s not much point when your mouth and nose are grimly competing for the one cubic millimeter of air that’s getting through the ultra-heavy-grade canvas mask your grandmother made for you – “…and don’t you take it off. I sewed three layers to stop that germ getting through,” “Yes, but grandma, if it’ll stop a virus an oxygen molecule will have no chance.”
I can’t wait to get out. The checkout girl mumbles something but all I can see is the little bit of white mask over her mouth pumping in and out when she speaks, like a pregnant mother’s stomach when the baby’s due. I shake my head. She could have been asking if I’d meet up for sex, but no, just if I had a store card.
At least, in France, you’re free to come and go at the supermarket. There’s no queuing. I believe the British are only allowed in one at a time and have to queue for six hours just to buy a bog roll.
Oh, well, that’s Brexit for you. You gotta laugh. Six hours for a bog roll! Oh dear, the very thought of it almost makes the lock-down worthwhile.
Nurses having to improvise bin bags for protection
Sometimes the inadequacy, hypocrisy, and general sense of sheer childish irresponsibility displayed by politicians is too much to swallow without rushing for the vomit bowl.
Today I’m addressing the UK’s politicians, and more precisely the UK government and the person at their head who calls himself a man, but whom I would call a wimp and a coward.
He’s just spent a week in hospital after catching the coronavirus because he failed to take the most basic of precautions. While telling others they had to stay locked down, he was cavorting around parliament shaking hands, playing hail fellow well met, and generally putting himself and everyone else he met in serious jeopardy.
On returning from hospital, what does he do but praise the NHS staff for their wonderful work in saving his life.
“It could have gone either way,” was his comment, feeling a much bigger man now he’s been through a life or death experience and survived intact. Plenty of good stories there to relate, once the Commons Bar reopens.
Today the Guardian ran an article by a NHS junior doctor. I’m not going to mention her name here, even though she, and the Guardian, chose to do so. She may well find herself out of a job for daring to speak out on the conditions she, and other NHS workers, have to contend with due to the gross and unforgivable failures of Boris Johnson and his crew of worthless cronies.
I am a junior doctor. In the past few weeks I have seen dozens of people die from Covid-19. I am 25 years old. I’ve been working in the NHS for just over eight months at a major metropolitan hospital…
…I have cared for patients from admission until death and I have held their hands when they have been too breathless to speak. I have fought hard for a patient to be considered for ventilation despite knowing that they didn’t meet the criteria. I stayed with them after my shift had ended, gowned and gloved, and watched them take their last breaths, knowing that a few months ago they might have stood a chance. I ring families to tell them that their loved one who came into hospital for something totally unrelated now has coronavirus and will not survive…
…This week we have received constant emails from our trust about our lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and so we have little choice but to care for the patients at our own risk using just surgical masks and plastic aprons because we have now run out of gowns too…
…two of our own staff members have died from the virus. I have no doubt there will be more…
This doctor tells how she was eventually diagnosed with Covid-19, even though she had to perform her own self-test because her superiors decided she ‘didn’t meet the criteria’. They told her to stay in the hospital and carry on working. She made the wise and sensible decision to leave and isolate at home.
It’s not surprising that I am finding it difficult to relax at home in the knowledge that I am infected with the same virus that I have written down countless times as the “primary cause of death” on the death certificates of my patients. Many of them were young, many of them did not have underlying health conditions.
Did they give it to me? Or did I give it to them? I’ll never know, but I stay up at night wondering…
…I am lucky. My symptoms are mild and I can only hope that it stays that way. But while I sit at home in isolation, my mind is occupied by fear and guilt.
I replay images of breathless patients in my head and recall my telephone conversations with their families. I wonder if I had been just that tiny bit more careful, or washed my hands once more or not scratched my face with my gloves that maybe I could have prevented some of those deaths.
…It is hard to find words strong enough to describe the pride I feel to be a part of the relentlessly compassionate organisation that we call the NHS. To anyone who has thanked us or named us heroes … please know that to me it is both a privilege and an honour.
I wish the NHS received the funding or support that it so desperately deserves. Perhaps a global pandemic and the prime minister being admitted to ITU will be enough to make the government finally sit up and listen…
There is much more to this story than is copied here. It needs to be read in total. and I hope you will do that. A Guardian link is given at the end.
Dear God, how can they do this to people? How can Johnson have the nerve, the arrogance, to say how wonderful they are for saving his life, while his ineptitude has been responsible for the unnecessary deaths and suffering of thousands in the UK, including many of those he was so quick to praise for the care he received.
Even now, weeks into this horror, hospitals are still regularly running out of vital equipment needed to protect themselves while they do their dangerous work on our behalf, and save our lives while forced to jeopardise their own to do so.
They should have let him die. It would have been a fitting justice…
“NHS Unable To Save UK Prime Minister Due To Ten Years Of Tory Cuts To Service”
