The execrable garbage on social media – and a Covid Mad Hatter’s tea party
GILES WATSON WRITES:
Another toxic meme is circulating.
It tries to claim that most of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Italy were accompanied by “comorbidities”, and it insists that most of the deaths were in nursing homes.
Given that this meme is appearing repeatedly on my news feed, I’m going to put my answer to it here, rather than tackling this execrable garbage every time it crops up.
If you’re my Facebook friend and you are sharing this rubbish, please read this and then decide whether you still want to be my “friend”.
Just because these people had underlying medical conditions, it does not mean that they were going to die from them – certainly not with the horrible, desolate suddenness which COVID-19 dealt death to them. Most of us have an underlying health condition as we get older; it depends purely on how you define it.
As for the part about 90% of deaths coming from nursing homes, it seems rather irrelevant to the discussion unless we have decided that we are not going to honour old people for their past contributions to society, or care about their welfare now – which is frankly just abominable. The meme includes no statistic showing how many health workers were killed, I notice; are they dispensable too?
We could also just look at the bare evidence of our senses. Italy’s health services were overwhelmed. Military planning was required to deal with the numbers of the dead.
This is one of the reasons, apart from the physical evidence, why I say that the anti-lockdown movements are driven by neo-fascism: because they are based on a fundamental disregard for the needs of others.
They also lack historical perspective. We are extraordinarily lucky that we have gone a century without being affected by a major pandemic. We’ve had a century to prepare ourselves for it, and to put measures in place to ensure that everyone was protected medically and economically.
We are witnessing worldwide failures, by most governments, to do that. And given our encroachments on wilderness, our long-term abuse of antibiotics and the way we encourage zoonotic disease through factory farming, we ought to be expecting more pandemics soon. We are not going to defeat them without tremendous human cost if we just go on living lives as normal.
My parents are both over 80. To me, that increases the value of every extra year and month that they live. It is precious time. People saying that only the old are dying are not only wrong; they are engaging in a colossal callousness, and it makes me wonder
just how much they respect the aged in their own families.
Those who claim that lock-downs are themselves some sort of “fascism”, rather than a compassionate social response to the threat of mass death and bereavement, don’t seem to have complained about any of the other colossal curtailments of freedom over the past decade, such as police raids on our national broadcaster as a punishment for exposing war crimes, or the gag put on public servants which prevents them from criticising government policy, or the silencing of health care professionals working in our offshore internment camps, or the threat of a life sentence hanging over a whistleblower who revealed bullying tactics in our tax office.
Suddenly, when lock-downs have become necessary to stop a lethal pandemic, these people are vocal about the curtailment if freedoms they never gave a damn about before.
So, here’s a question you could ask, instead of railing against sensible measures to prevent mass morbidities.
People have been paying taxes into our system for the past century, and we have known all along that a pandemic was inevitable one day. The fact that it has taken a century is a massive reprieve. Yet our governments, despite all that warning, can’t afford to pay a universal basic income to protect people from hardship and stop people from dying horribly and prematurely.
Why not?
DORRIE BRIDGE WRITES:
Whey hey, some parts of Greater Manchester have been ‘eased’ on lock-down.
But, sadly, it gets more like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party by the minute. You don’t need a big black opera hat, nor a dormouse, not even a grinning cat.
You can have your tea party in a restaurant, six to a bubble – but there’ll be a penalty if you take one sixth of that bubble and sit them opposite you at the other end of your dining table. Is it any wonder that Alice began to accept madness as the status quo?
Did she, like us, start to make it up as she went along. Ultimately I wonder if Lewis Carol is a pseudonym for Boris?
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