Not a happy bunny

I thought long and hard before posting this. Possibly controversial, but it's my blog and my opinion, so here we go... 

I was very sceptical about the threat of this virus at the beginning, there was a brief lull when I thought it really might be something serious… my scepticism has now returned and has grown massively while I’ve been sitting here in lockdown; a lockdown which is absolutely not necessary as far as I can see and which was extended yesterday for a minimum of another three bloody weeks. Deep joy.

We still only have a very small percentage of cases and an even smaller percentage of deaths – 90% of those deaths were people who were already very ill and/or old, as this BBC report shows.  Meanwhile the country’s economy is being wrecked, people’s livelihoods have disappeared - gone forever in some cases, children's education is being damaged and many people’s physical and mental health will never recover.

I'll be long gone before our economy gets back on track – my grandchildren will be paying off the debt incurred in this fiasco.

I know Boris & Co had no experience of a situation like this but it seems they’ve been gripped by fear and a herd mentality, i.e. “Other countries are implementing a lockdown – we must do the same”. It wasn't thought through and alternatives don’t seem to have been considered. It was a knee-jerk decision which seems to have been taken purely in order to “Protect our NHS”.

We shouldn’t be bankrupting the country in order to avoid overloading the NHS, particularly when the NHS says it has spare capacity and it can cope. If that's the case then why the hell are we all taking part in this very expensive pantomime?

The response from the Govt has been disproportionate to the risk and the threat – we’ll end up in a position where the cure is worse than the disease.

I like the NHS – a lot of good people work for it. The NHS saved our son’s life when he was born and it saved mine eight years ago when I was blue-lighted to hospital in the middle of the night. I’m very grateful, really I am, but it’s become a new religion – a sacred cow which mustn’t be criticised and can never be held to account. It’d be more helpful if we had people in Govt who were adult enough to accept that sometimes sh*t happens and people die. Death is an inevitable part of life – medical science doesn’t have all the answers and nor does the country have a bottomless pit of money.

I’m doing as I’m told, despite thinking the rules are bloody ridiculous; I stay home, I go on my allowed walk once a day etc., but I really can’t take this ‘crisis’ seriously. Come back to me when UK deaths are going up by tens of thousands a day and people are dropping down dead in the streets. That might be a crisis – this is not.

In years to come when a timeline of deaths is looked at, I suspect 2020 won’t even show a blip on the graph.

Incidentally, in the winter of 2014/2015 more than 28,000 people in the UK died from flu (PHE figures). Did anyone notice… did we bring the country to a standstill over it?

Right, I’ve got that little lot off my chest... I’m off to hang the washing out.