Whack a Minister
More than half of Scotland’s coronavirus deaths have happened in care homes. To protect the NHS only the sickest were admitted for hospital treatment and non-acute patients were cleared out of hospital wards and back into care homes. As plans are being made to lift lockdown, Michael Gove told a coronavirus press briefing of the Government’s ‘whack-a-mole’ plan, where lockdown will be reintroduced in areas that see infections rise again.
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More or less every country so far that has lifted lockdown has experienced a second wave of the virus which has proved even more infectious and deadly than the first wave. Sooner or later, it will not just be expendable oldies and the poorest and most vulnerable who are affected. In some parts of India, apparently, it is the wealthiest, and younger people, who are being affected most, or so I read somewhere. In the end, the virologists don’t really know what the virus is going to do. One thing is certain, complacency is misplaced – as it always is, in any human endeavour. What must not be allowed to happen is that people come up in huge numbers to Scotland if the lockdown is lifted in England. It may mean that Police Scotland has to man the border areas and turn people back, and the English Police do the same the other way, as we know from recent events that people in Scotland are also travelling down to England. The other component of complacency – the shrugging off of these warning signs that viruses can spread very rapidly with lethal effect – cannot be allowed to hinder a proper and strict future pandemic response being put into operation everywhere. If this had been Ebola, for example, or a similar disease, with a 90%+ death rate, most of us would be rotting corpses, unable to be buried – and that includes our youth and the rich, both demographics who appear to believe they are invulnerable.
People who have spoken about the problems in having different lockdowns in England and Scotland (invariably folk who believe Nicola should simply do what the English do and if she doesn’t it’s simply out of awkwardness) should perhaps have a swatch at what’s happening in Ireland, since it’s highly likely that the Republic will also end lockdown and with different rules and guidance than the UK, including the Six Counties.
If someone has a serious illness, gets a bit better and goes back to work out of boredom or ennui, there’s good chance that s/he will have a relapse and finish up being in bed far longer than would have been so had s/he just had more patience. This frequently happens to athletes and footballers. The notion that because there is still an emergency but it’s not quite as deadly as before we can all go back to normal is daft, for the same reason. If lockdoon were lifted we would very probably be imposing it again in a few weeks time, and starting again with a second wave of deaths.
I wouldn’t go so far as to turn back English refugees at the border but in the event of England’s rate of infection dwarfing our own there will certainly have to be testing and provision for quarantine. It would be thoroughly unfair to take away the human rights of folk crossing the border but then again the most basic human right of all is the right not to be killed, so some compassionate inconvenience would be a reasonable price for the poor English folk to pay should they wish to flee. If I were in that position that’s what I would expect and hope for.