Hot air and inaccuracies

Subject: Hot air and inaccuracies. 

It's eerie to think that the films we watch today on Netflix or made for television last year were made when the world was a very different place. The street scenes, the offices were all filmed in that world which followed the period of black and white moves and colour movies in the pre virus era when people mixed and cavorted without masks. It was a period when aeroplanes flew regularly and you could buy a ticket without a medical examination. It was a time when people used to meet at restaurants and in pubs to say hi and swop stories. It was a time when doctors surgeries and hospitals treated a whole range of things not just Covid 19, when to enter a hospital wasn't like entering a war zone with specially contrived routes to get around open spaces and sanitisers positioned on every corner. It was a time when you parked your car and entered the shop of choice without a queue and a limit on how many people could enter the shop at any one time.
Looking at the film made only last year the environment we lived in was so totally different. There was no sight on the faces of the people appearing that this was a finale, a final showing of life before the virus arrived and the pandemic got under way. There was no flag waving in the streets, no last hurrah as the curtain came down, no drum roll, no Vera Lynn melody to sing us all to sleep.

Instead we woke up in January to a news story from Wuhan in china, one of those eternal stories of people far away facing some sort of trauma but as usual, remote enough not to register. The following few days there was a quickening of the blood and more attention as our trusted politicians nervously mounted the rostrum to announce restrictions, well not actually restrictions rather a polite sort of "help us out" and oh please stop shaking hands (even though our esteemed Prime Minister continued to do so) above all "wash your hands" became the mantra. Slowly but surely the volume was ramped up and the worried face of the politicians began to recite their new lines disclaiming what they had said the day before. 'Lock down, everybody inside', no more work until further notice was announced to a public throughly confused as to the seriousness of the matter having been informed that it wasn't serious.

We learnt that it killed but only the old and infirmed. We discovered that the Old Age Care Homes had been forgotten in the rush to reorganise the hospitals and had become the new charnel houses with, in some cases, as many as 50% of the inmates dying. No one thought to close the door and isolate the poor old buggers.

One minute testing was the flavour of the month (as it still remains across the world) but we knew better (as we always do) and stopped testing. We now find was due to the inadequacy of our testing labs, and the insistence we use only the NHS ones which, due to a chronic shortage of funding were unable to provide the analysis.

Another instance of running down stocks to balance the budget, the protective equipment for frontline doctors and nurses, desperately needed in their fight to keep patients alive, was unavailable, stocks run down and unable to be replenished because our 'one supplier' need them to fight the disease at home in china. No war time spirit was evoked by letting our own industry get on with producing the PPE, instead, companies, able and willing, are still waiting 'the return call' from the ministry.
From beginning to end we have shown the world how 'second rate' we have become. How incompetent we are at pressing the right buttons, how ignorant even of which button to press.
With Brexit just down the track and the guys in charge being the same ones who made such a mess of providing for the pandemic, I feel for the country. Ideologues, blindly wanting to get out, chanting the same jingoistic phrases, much like the pandemic phrases, full of hot air and inaccuracies.