COVID: six years on

I read my daily blog posts from years gone by most mornings, and so I am currently reliving the first wave of COVID from March and April 2020.

Two weeks ago, I read an article on Substack by Christina Pagel summarising the COVID inquiry, which has been sitting and hearing evidence for some time now.

"However bad the first wave was in England - and it was awful - the second wave was worse. More than twice as many people were admitted to hospital with Covid in the second wave compared to the first wave."

Lessons were not learned. Lessons of the first wave for the second, as Johnson did not allow a Lessons Learned exercise take place.

Mistakes such as the delaying of lockdowns, the lack of PPE, moving elderly people from hospitals to care homes meant that tens of thousands of people died before their time. And meant that health carers had to risk their lives each and every day in trying to treat their patients.

“The healthcare systems coped with the pandemic, but only just. On a number of occasions, they teetered on the brink of collapse and only coped thanks to the almost superhuman efforts of healthcare workers and all the staff who support them.” - Baroness Hallet,

"Healthcare workers and support staff were obliged … to work under intolerable pressure for months on end. Some patients suffering from Covid-19 did not get the quality of treatment they needed and some non-Covid-19 patients had their diagnoses and treatments delayed to the point where their conditions became untreatable"

Family members died alone and unloved because of lockdown, causing untold grief on those who survived.

"There’s been about 6 or 7 instances where he texted us to say goodbye. We would try and phone or text back but, you know, his texts, because he couldn’t hold his phone very well, were often a little bit confusing to us. The other thing was he was so weak at times, he couldn’t pick up his phone…he’s bedridden, he can’t move…he can’t access any forms of communication and they [healthcare professionals] were so busy when often he would press the bell, and nobody would come."

Even worse was the second wave, which was avoidable and Sunak's "eat out to help out" created hundreds of thousands of mass tranmission events:

"Professor Edmunds, who served on the SAGE modelling subgroup Spi-M, testified that the failure to act to control the second wave “was not because of a lack of situational awareness or knowledge of how to control it. We let this second wave happen.”2 . Professor McLean, now the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor, described it as the worst period of pandemic, saying:

“We could see what was coming and could not understand why the government did not act upon the science advice by introducing effective interventions”"

The UK was the first country to introdice vaccinations against COVID, and had that second wave been delayed or made smaller, tens of thousands of people whould have survived instead of dying. But Johnson had to "save Christmas."

I cannot understand how it is tha Johnson and other Ministers and advisors are not being tried for manslaughter at least, if not murder, for the deriliction in their duties, who grifted rather than act in the interest of public health. Some, like Johnson, should be hanging from a gibbet on Ludgate Hill.

And yet the media are largly ignoring the inquiry and its findings, meaning the population, the public are unaware of the failings of those elected to protect us, to act on science, not jut the science they agreed with.

If we do not learn the lessons of the past, we will have to relive it. Over and over again.