Coronavirus UK: A Preventable Catastrophe is About to Strike
Under the shockingly inept and indifferent Boris Johnson regime, the SARS-CoV-2 or coronavirus pandemic in the UK already is a catastrophe in itself and it will only get far worse in the next few weeks. The fantastic NHS (National Health Service) staff would generally like to do their jobs:
Through hard to fathom mismanagement, however, the Johnson regime is making it very hard for them to do their jobs and for the UK population to stay healthy, also in an economic and financial sense.
“Herd immunity”: A code term for complete recklessness and irresponsibility
There are many health experts who have condemned the UK’s ‘herd-immunity’ non-response to the coronavirus in no uncertain terms:
After the Johnson regime’s criminally negligent herd immunity-fantasy got ripped to shreds by experts, the Johnson regime was busy trying to pretend that, actually, “herd immunity” was and is not government policy.
The evident problem for that fairy tale, however, is that the very same chief scientific advisor Sir Patrick Vallance who tried to lie about that is on record with having stated that “herd immunity” is the official regime policy only two days earlier:
Then there is also this:
Not nearly enough testing under the Tory regime
Testing is one of the keys to get a pandemic under control, but the UK is so ill-prepared that they do not even have the means to test the staff which treats COVID-19 patients(!):
On March 16, the NHS has not yet placed any orders with a UK company that produces coronavirus test kits:
Testing kits for the rich and powerful, however, are miraculously available (for ‘only’ £375 — the profit over health priorities are obvious):
One of those rich people who has obtained such a Coronavirus testing kit (and who is well within his rights to do so) is the actor Idris Elba who played the powerful character Heimdall in the Thor movies. Elba tested positive despite being without symptoms:
Ordinary people who do have clear COVID19 symptoms such as this young woman and (interestingly) dominatrix, however, are SENT AWAY FROM HOSPITAL WITHOUT EVEN BEING TESTED FOR THE VIRUS(!!), infecting we don’t know how many people on the way home where they are left to die, presumably:
“shortness of breath … I could not talk anymore, it was hurting too much … became increasingly harder to breathe … called 911 … had a chest x-ray … they basically just said ‘We don’t test anybody for COVID-19 now, not even the staff get tested for COVID-19'. Basically, we’re on our own. … Anybody could pass it on to anybody. They haven’t given me a mask. … Now I need to figure out how to get back to my house without infecting anybody. I have just been coughing all morning into a mask. … The UK is fucking this up royally, royally. … I don’t know if I have got the, the virus. It feels like I have got the fucking virus, like this pain in my chest. …struggling to breathe… basically all the advice is to self-quarantine… This is how the UK is handling this shit.”
Further criminal Tory negligence and ineptitude
It gets far far worse though. The ITU (intensive therapy unit) beds are already at or beyond capacity — but due to the Tory regime’s criminal negligence and ineptitude, people are still up and about instead of self-isolating as much as possible:
As already indicated by the above young black patient who got sent home despite being highly likely to have COVID-19 and contrary to popular belief, there are also plenty of young people who are suffering from COVID-19 and who even require intensive care:
On March 21, the situation is/was already so bad that “NHS doctors are given guidelines to help decide which coronavirus victims should live or die(!)” — and it is only going to get worse than that in the next few weeks:
NHS staff even go as far as to say that the NHS is “set up to fail” — presumably so that, in the sick dreams of Boris Johnson and other parasites like him, it can then be claimed that public health service is ineffective and that the NHS needs to be privatized/sold off to profit-seeking US-companies:
Regarding COVID-19, pretty much all that the criminal Tory regime and their state propaganda journalists such as Robert Peston do is lie, lie and lie some more to the public, such as about there allegedly being an “adequate supply” of “personal protective equipment” or #PPE:
The former Sectretary of State for Health and Social Care from 2012 to 2019 Jeremy Hunt also must not go unmentioned here since he is one of those people who are chiefly responsible for the catastrophic situation that Britons face today. Like Johnson, Hunt also received plenty of warnings that his actions would lead to deaths, and like Johnson, the criminally irresponsible and reckless Hunt also chose to ignore that. His apology from 2018 about the postponement of operations is essentially nothing but lip service. As pointed out by Twitter user @celticmaid4 whose account got locked recently:
Madness — this is not a credible apology or reminiscence. He was told OFTEN by campaigners what he was doing was killing people and the government would have known that a pandemic was coming — those in the field knew this back in 2010 or earlier. #ToriesOut #toriesfault https://t.co/Kn7nC5jmHd
Starting on March 16, the Johnson regime likewise began to give lip service to the widely-known fact that the herd immunity-‘strategy’ can only amount to a catastrophic failure and that actual measures need to be taken to deal with the Coronavirus. But this is, at best, “too little too late” and Britain will most certainly “become like Italy” or even worse as a result of the Johnson regime’s criminal negligence:
There are also plenty of criminally reckless people in the private sector such as Wetherspoons pub owner Tim Martin who, due to putting profits over people, has decided to keep his pubs open in the middle of a pandemic that is highly likely to kill hundreds of thousands of people in the UK due to actions such as his (I sincerely hope that Martin goes to jail for this or that he will be the target of a collective action lawsuit):
The Catastrophe in Numbers
When we look at numbers like these from March 17, the situation in the UK may not look so bad: 1950 tested positive. Out of 1827 active cases, (allegedly) 1807 had only mild symptoms and (allegedly) only 20 cases required intensive care treatment (what is missing here is the statistics for those patients who do not land in intensive care but who do require stationary hospital treatment; the category of “mild” improperly conflates that).
More importantly though, when we take a look at the then 123 closed cases, we see that more people die (71) than recover (52)(!!) from COVID19 in the UK according to official numbers and at least for the time being. The following is a tweet from a user who would prefer to remain anonymous in this article:
And that trend not only continues, but the ratio gets even worse: According to the current (March 23, 8am GMT+1) numbers from the Johns Hopkins University online map that many and also myself have been using for months despite repeated warnings of the site being targetted by hackers, the UK currently stands at 5067 tested positive, with 237 deaths vs. only 67 recovered! In other words: The deaths-to-cured ratio has worsened from 1.37-to-1 to a whopping 3.54-to-1!
The official death rate (“case fatality rate” or CFR) of “deaths / infected” currently stands at an impressive 4.68% and is already higher than in China (about 4%). There is, however, a second or closed case death rate of “deaths / (deaths + recovered)” that only concerns closed cases, and that second death rate is currently at a hard to believe 237 / (237 + 67) = 0.7996 or at 79.96%! Other European countries (especially France and the Netherlands) are even worse off though, at least according to the official numbers (it has been suggested to me that, for some weird reasons, the numbers for recoveries are not updated even though the recoveries happen).
Concerning the second death rate, the situation in the UK is worse than in Italy (53.578 cases, 4825 deaths, 6072 recoveries) which currently has a higher official death rate of 9% but a lower closed case death rate of ‘only’ 44.28%. Also note that the closed case death rate goes down over time but that this is happening only slowly in Italy where that second death rate has been in the high forties about one week ago. I expect something similar for the UK.
Additionally, we already heard that not nearly enough testing is being done in the UK. As such, we can expect the actual number of infections to be much higher than the current official number of 5067. Higher by how much? According to this calculation the number of infected in the UK on March 21 may already be at ~1.5 million, i.e. higher by a factor of about 300.
Applying the official death rate of 4.68% to those 1.500.000 people, we would already arrive at an estimated 70200 deaths in the UK due to SARS-CoV-2. The UK human population stands at close to 67 and 3/4 of a million people though and 1.5 million infected only translates into 2.21% of the UK population. So if more than 2.21% of the UK population should catch the virus in the coming months — and that seems rather likely, given the Johnson regime’s criminal negligence — , then hundreds of thousands will die. Do the calculation with the significantly higher second death rate, and the numbers are in the seven figure range.
[I may write a part 2 about the economic and other aspects of the pandemic in the UK. For the time being I only covered the public health aspect as a warning to all people in the UK and across the globe. I have written five published articles about the Coronavirus in German before that (https://www.unsere-zeitung.at/2020/03/21/coronavirus-es-bahnt-sich-ein-kontrollverlust-an-teil-3/), this is my sixth. Please consider sharing this article in order to help raise awareness and to help prevent COVID-19-related diseases and deaths.]
