Fear Is A Virus

First of all, don’t give in to fear. It causes stress which plays havoc with your immune system for starters. I’ll begin with some actual verifiable science.

According to PHE (Public Health England), “The average number of influenza deaths in England for the last five seasons, 2014/15 to 2018/19, was 17,000 deaths annually. This ranged from 1,692 deaths last season, 2018/19, to 28,330 deaths in 2014/15.” ( There were 26,408 deaths in 2018/2019. The flu season is six months long – September to March. That makes an average of 1000 deaths a week).

Total number of deaths in the UK for 2019? Approximately 500,000 (daily average 1,369). The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales (not UK, note) in January 2020 was 56,706; this represents an increase of 9,237 deaths in comparison with the previous month and an increase of 2,796 deaths in comparison with the same month in 2019 (source: ons.gov.uk – Office of National Statistics.) Those figures are pre-Covid-19.

The 1968 pandemic was caused by an influenza A (H3N2) virus; The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States. (source: CDC)

In the spring of 2009, a novel influenza A (H1N1) virus emerged. From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases, 12,469 deaths (range: 8868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus. Additionally, CDC estimated that 151,700-575,400 people worldwide died from (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated. (source: CDC)

What was missing during all these viral outbreaks? A worldwide lockdown where the general public are treated exactly like prisoners: 23 hours lockdown with one hour of ‘yard exercise’. Only difference? You pay for your own imprisonment – you pay the rent, buy the food, police your own lockdown, and pay for your own Sky/Netflix. How bonkers is all this?

Another week of confusion and hysterical media coverage of Covid-19. We’ve had the police ordering people indoors from their own gardens, hospitals are still empty waiting for the mass influx of C-19 patients, no one seems to have a protocol for how to treat the disease – on one hand we need a million ventilators, on the other hand using ventilators may be killing patients as it turns out that if this indeed presents as pneumonia, it’s atypical. Oxygen failure is not the same as oxygen saturation loss; giving oxygen at the wrong pressure may actually be damaging lungs and killing patients. Meanwhile, if you can tell me who is running the country, I’d be grateful. MPs have been given a nice little earner of £10000 to stay home and keep quiet (we’re all in this together 🙂 ), the prime minister is in intensive care, the chancellor of the exchequer and minister for health have been in their jobs for 3 minutes. This scares me more than any virus, I can tell you.

While everyone is patting themselves on the back for ‘staying in and saving lives’, perhaps we should consider the effects of all those cancelled scans, operations, and hospital appointments. All hospital cancer treatments have been cancelled, all dental appointments have been cancelled (sucks to be you if you have any kind of fledgling oral/oesophageal cancer that a dentist might have picked up), maternity and antenatal services have been ‘condensed’ (that means cancelled to you and me). How many cases of heart failure (major symptom – breathlessness), liver failure, kidney failure, diabetes, cancers of all types, are not being diagnosed as the GPs barricade themselves in their surgeries and referrals are unavailable anyway? How many people will die as a direct result of this lockdown? I guess we’ll worry about all that in September by which time the world will be miraculously disease-free. To put this madness into perspective, Nigeria has 305 cases and 7 deaths to date, population 206,000,000. (source: WHO) The country is in lockdown. There are an estimated 100 million malaria cases with over 300,000 deaths per year in Nigeria. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so tragic.

In other news, the Archbishop of Canterbury will be celebrating Easter live from his kitchen. This is so ludicrous I can only suppose it’s fake news. Presumably he thinks this makes him seem humble and down with the kids, speaking to his fast-dwindling flock via Zoom. If only we had some big buildings where social distancing would not be an issue. We could call them cathedrals and churches.

Absolute muppet. I can’t do justice to their incompetence so I will quote God instead: “Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror, declares the Lord. My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” The CofE says they have closed the churches on ‘medical advice.’ Thank God that Jesus didn’t heed medical advice when he went about healing lepers. Apparently that ‘medical advice’ does not apply to hospital and community pharmacy staff who work closely with the public without PPE, not to mention supermarket and petrol station employees. God does indeed move in mysterious ways.

I don’t know how the lockdown can be safely removed; it’s not my job, that’s why I don’t get the big bucks. I do fear for the mental health of the entire nation if it is not removed, not to mention the devastation of the economy and the unemployment crisis that will follow. And if you believe the government can afford to pay people 80% of their salary to stay at home for the next few months, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. What will happen is that a lot of jobs will be ‘consolidated’ and people will be made redundant en masse. £94 a week is a lot less attractive than £2500 a month, I think we can all agree. My aim for today, get some sun and top up my depleted Vitamin D, eat some more fruit and top up my Vitamin C, watch something completely anodyne and uplifting preferably recorded before 2000. It’s a toss-up between Blackadder and Monarch of The Glen. I recommend both highly. Death has been swallowed up in victory. Christ is risen. Happy Easter.