BACK IN THE COVID - The Lockdown Diary Day 55

Our great grand daughter Grace had her 1st birthday today and we have great grandson no. 4 on the way for an autumn arrival. Not being able to be with Grace at some time on her birthday was upsetting. Our pregnant grand daughter is not able to enjoy the business of being a mum to be and all that entails amongst her peers and family and that too is upsetting. This is day to day stuff but that is how it is. Short term we focus on the tragedy of so many deaths, many that could have been avoided if timely action had been taken and professional advice followed, but longer term the costs in human mental suffering will be immense.

My feelings are particularly exercised by the proposal to re-open schools which I am adamantly against. I shudder to think how deep and long lasting will be the mental scarring in small children attending school and forced to sit on their own, isolated but within sight of their little mates that they are yearning to play with. Anyone who knows anything about child development knows that at the nursery stage it is all about physical and relational play. Whatever a child that age ‘learns’ has always been turned into learning masquerading as play. Parents and teachers would worry about a child’s wellbeing if the child chose to be on his own and could not or would not interrelate in play so why is there any rush to force them into just that situation.

So the lie is exposed again, the government’s argument that children’s education must not be allowed to suffer is yet another lie to cover up their real intention, at the expense of our little ones’ mental health, to free up parents so that they can go to work.

There should be absolutely no misunderstanding about what government policy is and has been all along. Herd Immunity. Government was knocked back a bit by size of the deaths estimate, hence the lockdown, but never altered their basic premise. The UK must, at whatever expense in death, be first out of the starting blocks ahead of the world and will not wait for a vaccine solution.

So the government have not been planning for the first wave of this pandemic at all. Their intention was to prevent the NHS from being overloaded in the short term but longer term to plan for and actively initiate the second wave. Second wave planning has been underway for some time. Three Nightingale hospitals took in only 50 patients. Huge warehouse morgues were built and not used. PPE equipment has been stocked and not fully distributed.

The second wave has been initiated. Now all governments actions are aimed at getting people back to work. Or expressed another way, now we have all the elderly folks and care homes locked up and the NHS able to cope, and PPE supplies ready and huge hospitals and morgues ready to switch on and possibly most important have established the ‘stay alert’ message so we can blame the public, LET THE VIRUS RIP!

Government knows, and have cynically exploited, the fact that many people must go to work, must use public transport, will not assiduously follow social distancing guidelines and that employers, many of them, will pay only lip service to those rules. Government knows that people will visit each other under some excuse or other and some will sneak off from a virus infected city to spread it about in Devon and Cornwall and the Lake District from their second homes. Government knows that children will infect each other at school, that tennis players will forget that the ball will carry the virus nicely from one hand to another. Government knows without a shadow of doubt that the public if going to work will see no issue with visiting each other out of work rules or no rules. They will, and policy has been carefully calibrated to exploit this natural human urge. By these and many other blindingly obvious routes Covid 19 will spread rapidly.

And just as certainly we can also deduce that in two weeks from today, Day 69, for this dairy the death rate will have gone up not down, the NHS will be under extreme strain and the government will be blaming the public because they did not ‘stay alert’ and at the same time will be crowing about how well prepared the government was.

For the sake of all those that might suffer a family tragedy as a result I hope I am wrong and that I am back here on day 69, contrite and admitting my poor analysis. For once I will be happy to be in the wrong.