Friday 24 April 2020

Counting the cost

Each day the Government makes an announcement on how many people died the previous 24 hours. As long as they died in hospital and had a positive test result for COVID-19.

But this is not the true total.

The National Audit Office has been keeping count, and although figures are a week behind, they have extrapolated the total for yesterday, officially under 20,000, to 41,000. That is a town bigger than Dover. All dead.

The Government hasn't been counting those who have died in care homes, their bodies just piled up.

Forty one thousand.

I can't remember if it was Stalin or someone said about him, that one death is a tragedy, thousands, millions of deaths is just a statistic.

Dyson, who the Government contracted to make those very famous ventilators announced today that whey are no longer needed and work has stopped.

The hundreds of thousands of pieces of PPE from Turkey numbered only in the thousands and were less than a day's supply for the NHS when the RAF plane carrying the pallets finally arrived three days late. This is because the announcement of the consignment and the request were made on the same day: it was never going to arrive on Sunday.

More shops and garden centres are now to open, more people out on the roads.

The Government might know what they're doing. Or might not.

Good luck.

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