Saturday 4 April 2020
Covidiots are everywhere (Mashabale India)
I went for a walk today, my permitted hour of exercise, and returned feeling unsettled. It was Bond Street that did it, that hive of shopping activity in normal times. The place was completely empty. Windows of shops with household names were lying bare and when I looked through and beyond the windows, the shops themselves had been stripped naked.
There was no sign of life at all, not a single car on the road, me the only pedestrian, and no evidence of a future. Bond Street had settled in for a long haul. If there was ever evidence of the extreme economic damage created by this crisis, look no further than London’s Bond Street, a shopping epicentre of our land.
Way down its far end was the Churchill and Roosevelt bench, they call it Allies, where normally the two sculptures would be separated by a selfie-taking tourist. Now the two dignitaries looked at each other, with no one between them.
The situation this morning – 4 April 2020 (courtesy Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University)
“You’d know how to handle this,” I whispered to the two sculptures as I walked past, albeit with no one else to hear me. For a moment I was sure Churchill winked, Roosevelt certainly smiled, and moments later I had left them behind as I headed further into central London.
I made it through to Hyde Park and aimed to complete my standard circuit, which is basically a jog around its margin. The place had plenty of people and most were maintaining a proper social distance, but unleashed dogs were up to their normal chaos.
Unexpectedly, at one point an Airedale Terrier came very near to me, so I shouted, “Stop!” and the hound did as instructed. I looked beyond the animal, which was clearly seeking someone to sniff, and I saw the owner. He was tall and hulk-like, huge in fact, and was walking beside a woman whose mind was somewhere different. Her social distance to the hulk beside her was nearer to zero than zero itself.
“Can you please control your dog?” I asked the hulk, who looked down at me from imaginary clouds.
“Shut up!” he shouted.
“Dogs can get Covid,” I said.
“Shut up!” he repeated. At that moment I sensed it was better to back down than to have a social-distancing punch-up with a man five times my size, so stayed silent and went on my way. Yet the hulk had me worried, as he was a sign of social irritability, speaking so intolerantly to a stranger. Social tetchiness can lead to civil unrest in moments. It was safer to let the covidiot alone.
Social distancing – it’s easier to think of one cow (or two calves)
In contrast was the South African family whom I met several hundred yards later – father, mother, and two sons happily kicking a football. When they saw me approach, football stopped, and they stepped to one side to give me distance.
“We were trying to work out two metres,” said the father, in a most charming tone, as I walked by.
“One cow,” I replied.
“Cow?”
“Imagine the length of a cow, then you have your two metres.”
“I like that,” replied the South African, turning to his family. “One cow it will be.”
Plenty have tried to make social distancing easier, as it is clear so many have trouble with the idea. How you assess it depends on your understanding. There is one cow, two calves, a broomstick held at arms’ length, or even three badgers, but I will stick with the cow.
As I headed from Hyde Park to my apartment, and back to my indoor existence, my route took me past a number of churches. Outside one, I saw a masked and gloved man kneeling on the pavement facing towards one corner of the church. Most churches are locked these days, so there are few places left to pray. This one had a sculpture of the crucifixion and the supplicant was somewhere distant. I did not disturb him, but quietly crept by on the other side of the street. I could only hope he had not lost someone thanks to Covid-19, as London is not doing very well at the moment.
My volunteering efforts have so far drawn a blank. I am one of zillions who have offered to return to the NHS and have now completed my documentation and interviews. The NHS has simply told me to hurry up and wait, although I understand from others that this is normal. I have agreed to be a referee for several colleagues who have also put their hat in the ring, yet currently not one reference has been requested. I sense the NHS is struggling badly and the public is only being told the information the NHS is happy to release. Any institution can only be as good as the people who run it.
The private sector is no different. I volunteered for that as well, as so many of its doctors will now be focussed on their NHS establishment and private practice has largely ceased. “We shall be back in touch shortly,” I was told, with an estimate of no more than 48 hours. That was six days ago.
An elderly charity was another option and I volunteered to do what I could. They were excited, I was excited, and everything was cleared. That was eight days ago and, so far, all I have heard is silence.
So, all dressed up with nowhere to go I have spread the net further. One charity has replied and for the first time I sense direction. It may be that I will be a non-medic, but as I know next to nothing about chest medicine anyway, that is probably no bad thing. Right now, our country needs hands-on-deck and this is the time to step forward. I sense the NHS is just swamped and has little idea of where to turn.
A colleague of mine in northern Italy has been in touch today and has written a seriously impressive description of his work on a Covid ward. It is truly emotional to read, and he is a master with the pen. I have spent much of the day reducing his words from 3000 to 800, which is the standard length for general articles. We will send it out to the major journals tomorrow as the world needs to read his words. He has also developed Covid-19 himself, and many of his friends have perished, so there is no prize for working out how he is currently thinking. I should stress that his odds of pulling through are better than good.
Thanks to the life I led before this, I am in regular touch with colleagues around the world. Many of the orthopaedic surgeons are not doing very much right now. A few have been called in for more general duties, but plenty are hunkered down somewhere and waiting to see what happens. I recently held a meeting by videoconference with 23 different countries simultaneously. Not one country was saying anything different.
It is remarkable how a crisis like this has made folk pull together. What is clear is that every country is thinking the same. Each has difficulty accessing PPE, each has too few medical staff, each has too few beds, and each has problems with testing. There is nothing unusual about UK, whatever our media may imply. I am veering towards the psychology that I adopted during the Brexit negotiations. It was simpler not to listen to the radio news bulletins as they invariably struck just the right tone to make me upset. For Brexit, I turned off the news for a good three months. I was in a better mental place by the end.
Tomorrow’s good weather is worrying the bigwigs
The Government is in a state at the moment about the weather, as tomorrow is forecast to be glorious. The bigwigs are worried that the dough heads – another term for a covidiot – will once more emerge and cram themselves shoulder-to-shoulder in London’s parks. The dough heads did it before, and may do it again, which will be bad news for the rest of us. I will not be a happy person if exercise out of the home is banned, something that has already been threatened by the Health Secretary.
The question, I suppose, is how to keep the dough heads at home and from thinking they are exempt? Some things are simply impossible.
