The front page of my daily paper is full of the faces of (mostly) cheerful looking celebs all holding up placards bearing a hashtag (the runic symbol of modern day mass communications) and a heartfelt message of thanks to the NHS and "our NHS people". Its true that "Macca" looks as if he's just sat on a traffic cone and 007 as if he's spotted the last bog-roll in the shop, but otherwise it's a happy image of morale boosting. We have all been out (with due care for "social distancing") to give the "front line" workers a (second) big round of applause. There has been a mass mobilisation of public support and gratitude on a scale that would have made even Dr Josef Goebbels blush with pride.
Behind all this out-pouring is a fervent, almost quasi-religious belief, that the doctors and nurses (plus Matt Hancock's new "5 Pillar " testing regime) are going to get us out of here. Foul ups and bottlenecks are being addressed, but where this is happening, it is as much the result of private initiative and enterprise as of planning by officials. In response to the nightly whinge on the BBC by the British Medical Association (BMA) and quarantined practitioners, can- do manufacturers are spontaneously churning out protective kit. Soon the UK is going to look like a warehouse full of pyjamas. Private laboratories and testing stations that have been ignored for the last month are at last having their calls returned by the men from the ministry.
Needless to say, idiocies still abound. The BMA is reported to have quibbled over the terms and conditions of trainee doctors being thrown into battle - apparently it is concerned about pay and rations being diverted away from the fully qualified. Volunteers are having their applications rejected because of tiny errors in submitting the right paperwork (bank statements, utility bills, passports, NI numbers, last years tax return, your last school report, 2019's dry cleaning bill etc. etc.). Some medical staff have been turned away from drive - through testing hubs because they couldn't show a "confirmatory" e-mail. Bed space is still being occupied by non Covid or other "non urgent" cases because patients cannot be moved. There is plenty of transport, but other parties have to be informed and that's being held up by the Data Protection Act, another load of EU tomfoolery in the shape of a hammer to crack a nut. Petty officialdom is in its element and the computer says "No".
Meanwhile the economy is in absolute free fall and some sensible commentators think that another month of this and the damage will be irreversible. The government says it is being "guided by the science" but it now seems pretty clear that the wonks are speaking with forked tongue. "Test, test, test" says the WHO, but Dr Calderwood the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland demurs. Testing is, she avers, "a distraction". The Scottish government has gone all-in on the mass quarantine strategy and Dr Calderwood is on night after night positively ordering us to stop pestering the NHS. Once you have invested so whole-heartedly in a strategy, it's hard to change course. But she's not alone - one of England's top medical advisers insists we are going to have to remain holed up for at least a year.
The disconnect between the experts in the driving seat and what is happening in the real world is absolutely terrifying. The government's policy is driven, dare one say it, by an absolutely irrational desire to save each and every life and by a statistician (Dr Ferguson of Imperial College) who admits that his forecasts and "scenarios" contain very wide margins of error. People who have questioned the strategy have however been denounced. Further, to be sceptical about "our NHS" and its halting preparations is not just heresy but blasphemy. But there is world of difference between saying people should die (and who on earth is saying that?) and saying that people will die. The NHS was "playing God" long before this crisis erupted because biological death is an unavoidable feature of our existence.
Meanwhile, the BBC has been mobilised to focus the public exclusively on the immediate health care threat. No hyperbole is too much. We are faced by a "tsunami" etc. etc. We are being terrified, but the stupendous economic damage is a foot note. Dare one say it, but its hard to be truly objective when you have no skin in the game. Clive Myrie, sighing briefly and regretfully over 1m newly unemployed (in a week!), and Sir Simon Stevens striding resolutely around the new Nightingale facility may yet get the lurgy, but they get to keep their pay packets. For everyone else...
It's time to get back to work.
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