A Long Drop Into Hell

 

I recently spoke to my friend, Oha Maslo, in Mostar. I would be there now with him and his family, but am stuck here ‘self-isolating’.

My blogs are my way of breathing out my anger against what is supposed to be our government.

Until recently, they gave no figures for Covid-19 death rates in care homes. Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland,` admitted the government "chose" not to test people for coronavirus in these homes while the pandemic spread. "We needed to make a choice about what to do with the capacity the government had back in March.”

Boris Johnson has said he "bitterly regrets" the coronavirus crisis in care homes and that the government was "working very hard" to tackle it. A "huge effort" was going on and that there had been a "palpable improvement" in recent days. He added that "it has been enraging to see the difficulties we've had in supplying PPE to those who need it, but we are now engaged in a massive plan to ramp up domestic supply”.

Meanwhile Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, announced that testing for all care workers and residents would now be available, regardless of whether they are showing symptoms of coronavirus. He went on to claim “the performance on testing has been unbelievably positive”.

Matthew Nutt, managing director of Accurocare which runs homes in Oxford and Basingstoke, takes a different view. “The left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing,” he said. “It has been a complete system failure … We don’t know when we are going to get test kits … How many more people have to die?”

Meanwhile, workers in care homes and hospitals who are trying to keep us all safe and alive could face “deportation” if the Home Office decides to withdraw their right to remain.

This is getting very personal. My brain surgeon was Nigerian, my heart surgeon Egyptian, the nurse who visited me most days, even when off-duty, Filipino.

I hope Johnson and his ministers take a long drop into Hell and with no NHS there to ease their fall.

It is very hard to calculate the coronavirus death rate in the UK because of government lies and prevarications. This is as accurate as I can be and would welcome other peoples investigative and math skills.

It seems to me that, to date, the coronavirus death rate in the UK is one death for every 1,330 people.*

Compare this to Greece which stands at one death in every 68,000 and Oha’s country, Bosnia Herzegovina, at one death in every 11,000.

This is the result of Boris Johnson’s ‘huge effort’.

Cabinet minister, George Eustice, insisted, "We don’t accept the caricature that we took an approach that was wrong. I think now we've got to focus on the here and now."

I dare him to say that loudly over the graves of the unnecessarily dead.

* I have taken the ONS' figure of 50,000 Covid-19 deaths in UK to date.