Get Ready for the Second Wave of Covid-19 Deaths

As of 28 May 2020 the number of excess deaths in the UK which are attributed to the Covid-19 outbreak is approximately 64,000. If that number is too big for you, it means for every million people, 940 have died in the first wave of Covid-19 infections.

It doesn’t sound much does it? There’s a lot of people running around saying that it’s no worse than the flu. To put that in perspective, the last flu epidemic we had here in the UK was in was the winter 2017-18 and 40,000 extra people died from it in 2018. The death toll was so high partially because the decision for what strains to put in the flu vaccine for that winter was wrong.

You probably don’t even remember there was an epidemic as no steps were taken to minimise the risk to public health. It was pretty awful for those who had to deal with it. One of my acquaintances works for a funeral home and at its peak the home had refrigerated vans in their back car park to store the bodies before the funerals.

To add a little more perspective, that 40,000 was over the winter until around April 2018. So in 4 months, 40,000 people died who probably wouldn’t have. In 2020 we have Covid-19 on top of the normal influenza and within a 8 week period, 64,000 extra people died from Coronavirus. That’s with a lockdown, social distancing and all other manner of restrictions on our lives. Don’t underestimate the virulence of this virus and it aims to kill. Not only the old but the young. Although the younger you are, the less likely you are to die.

In the 3 months since Covid-19 has been spreading through the community, the government has singularly failed to follow scientific advice and has done the absolute bare minimum to stop transmission.

The government abandoned track and trace within days of the first Covid-19 death. It has sourced tests that didn’t work, failed to marshal the testing laboratories, gave contracts to companies like Capita, who have no expertise in testing, who then put the test sites in places that you could only get to by car and were usually miles away (so bad luck if you don’t have your own transport), ended up sending a large number of the tests to the US for processing because of the failure to marshal the labs, and have been lying about the number of tests by either counting the two parts of the tests as two separate tests or, more egregiously, counting tests that had been sent out without a return address.

It failed to impose the lockdown in a timely manner. Unlike Spain and Italy, the UK didn’t have a full lockdown and despite penalties for breaching it, the government here continued to give mixed messages and people continued to breach it. Spain and Italy have finally tamed the spread to such an extent they are gradually loosening lockdown. Here, it’s a free for all, the government says one thing and allows its own advisors, including Dominic Cummings, to breach it without penalty. Why? because they made no secret that they didn’t want a lockdown as it would affect business and only bowed to it because of pressure from the public. To paraphrase a quote from Cummings, ‘If that means some pensioners die, too bad.’

The Johnson government still fails to provide adequate PPE to the NHS and care workers and what little it did have at the outbreak of the pandemic was past its use-by date, apparently because the company it paid to manage the PPE stocks is incapable of managing stock rotation. It did manage to silence the health and social care workers from speaking out about the danger of the lack of provision but somehow still can’t provide workers with it, the best it managed was to claim it had ordered some from turkey, after it failed to arrive on the date they said and people noticed they actually placed the order and it was sent. The problem was that it wasn’t fit for purpose.

Right now, most PPE they wear comes from community groups. Yet this is no longer a scandal as the NHS workers can’t speak out and the media doesn’t care as it has gone back to its normal role of supporting the government’s bread and circus’ distractions. Meanwhile our health and social care workers are still going to work each day, without adequate protection and are dying.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of their wilful negligence and incompetence. They’ve been lifting lockdown for weeks now, not in any kind of managed way but in various contradictory statements that people are eager to hear. Rather than being where we should be getting back to normal as the virus has be brought under control, we’re actually being released to reinfect each other again and again.

The gaslighting of the population by the Johnson government makes it inevitable that the second wave of Covid-19 is on its way. Johnson claims with a straight face that his management of the pandemic here in the UK is envied by other countries and now the worst affected countries in Europe are lifting their lockdowns, to keep the pretence that the government is managing the epidemic successfully, he needs to follow their lead. For if we were to continue lockdown then it would show the Johnson government has managed the pandemic worse than our hard hit neighbours. So they ignore the fact we still have a daily death toll higher than when we went into lockdown and that the number of cases are rising. From a government and business perspective, it’s all fine and we need to get back to normal.

But it’s only sound bites he has, for saying something doesn’t make it so. The infrastructure that European governments have implemented prior to lifting their Covid-19 lockdowns are absent here. There is still not enough testing capacity to reach the 100,000 tests a day promised by the end of April, despite the government promising tests to all who want them. In what appears to be a distraction manoeuvrer away from the Dominic Cummings fiasco, Johnson’s government announced the lifting of more of the lockdown measures and announced the deployment of the the track and trace contact tracing functionality.

Despite the inability of the government to deliver the tests needed and that the computer system deployed a few days ago is still under development and is not currently fit for purpose and will not be until the end of June. The contract for the contact tracing app that people are supposed to download to their phone was handed out without any tender process. The company appears have developed it without NHS input and have decided they’re going to keep everyone’s data for 20 years.

Here we are. The first wave of pandemic deaths is not over yet but lockdown is being lifted, despite none of the precautions we need to be in place being there. People are being told to go back to work and soon the only places that will be shut are restaurants, pubs and hairdressers. Children who aren’t in a fee paying school are being told to go back, despite children being just as likely as middle aged adults to be carriers and spreaders, there’s no consistency of message from the government about what you can do and not do. Scientists that are on the SAGE government advisory group are speaking out against the government’s move to remove restrictions but still people are ignoring it all and doing whatever they feel like.

No matter how tempting it is to go outside or to have friends and family over for a party, don’t. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be asymptomatic but you can still spread the disease. At the moment, scientists think that every person who has it can pass it on to at least one other person whilst they’re infectious – this is that ‘R 1’ thing you hear talked about. We need to it be around half that before it’s even remotely safe. There was an increase in the weeks following Easter and another increase after the May Day bank holiday. There’ll be another in a week or so after the end of May bank holiday. Now people are ignoring lockdown advice, expect it to rise once more.

The second wave of Covid-19 cometh before the first wave has been controlled. Stay home and save lives. The life you save may be your own.

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