This one is a tough one to write, sometimes you get an idea for a blog and you put it down and you think it’s awful or it’s terrible or people are going to shout at you so bear with me on this.
At the end of March this year when we closed the practice, it was with a real sense that I was not confident that I could protect my patients and my team and at that time I was also concerned about my family but particularly Grace who’s my eldest daughter, who at the time seemed to be more susceptible to this ‘killer virus’ than the rest of us.
I was due to give blood in early April but I postponed because I was not well (Coronavirus?) and then returned to give blood for the missed appointment at the start of May.
The visit to the blood transfusion service at Rushcliffe Arena in a mobile unit at the start of May entirely changed my outlook and my approach to dealing with this professionally and personally.
I got all the information from the blood transfusion service telling me what I had to do and not to do, how careful I had to me, how I had to wear a mask, how I had to stand 18 feet apart from everybody else and all of that stuff and then I got there and it just wasn’t like that.
As I approached the desk in the corridor for my appointment and from a distance away the guy on reception asked if I was ok and if I felt well and I responded with “Yes”. He instructed me to apply hand sanitiser and make my way in.
When I went in there was a sense of ‘business as usual, don’t worry about it. There’s nothing special going on here. Thanks for coming".
There were staff not wearing masks, there were loads of patients not wearing masks, I was struck by the fact that I was given a pen (which wasn’t cleaned and then I gave it back and it wasn’t cleaned and I loved that).
I wasn’t concerned that this was a huge risk to me, and I was delighted that these guys were convinced it wasn’t a huge risk to them.
What had happened here I think is that they had lived through the first 6 or 8 weeks of this and probably none of them had died (or even become sick). This is what Malcolm Gladwell called ‘a near miss’ in David and Goliath where in the Blitz in London in 1940 they were convinced everyone was going to go insane at the stress but in fact if you didn’t get killed by a bomb you rose up and felt invincible.
And so last night I watched a video sent to me by my friend Simon which was about 36 minutes long on WhatsApp and I never watch videos that people send me on WhatsApp.
It was presented by an Irish professor of Virology trying to make some sense of the public health statistics related to Covid-19 from around the world.
The Covid-19 epidemic follows the same pattern in all countries with the same climate.
It has two possible distribution curves. The first is for temperate climates where you get a sharp rise, sharp fall and then low bump along the bottom. The second is for humid climates where you get a first bump, drop and the second bump and everything is seasonal.
It’s why America looks bad because it has two climates, the north-east coast took the big bump and the long drag, the southern states and the west took the second approach.
The fascinating thing is that it entirely and totally copies the Flu distribution curves from around the world for the past however many years.
The other fascinating thing is that you can track the countries that had a low Flu season last year (UK & much of Europe), they call this the ‘dry tinder effect’. What happened last year is that less people were killed by the Flu because it was a very light Flu season and they were ‘stored up’ and then Covid hit and it took them out.
The overall death rates over a longer period of time show a very limited increase as we go through the process over a longer graph than the ones that were presented on the BBC News App.
I’m not suggesting that people didn’t die from this that were tragic but actually people die from Flu every year which is tragic, and it never makes the newspapers.
In August in the UK more young people between the age of 20-30 committed suicide (a large increase) than the amount who died of Covid.
The other part to this video presentation demonstrates the impact (or lack of impact) of lockdown and mask wearing on the distribution of the virus.
The general tenant of the presenter is that you cannot cheat biology and locking down and restricting will make no difference.
The fact is that there are 20% of the population who are more susceptible to a Coronavirus (very common virus around the world) and 80% have some form of heard immunity already.
If you continue to test on a massive scale you will detect old and broken pieces of virus in people’s systems who have or don’t have symptoms but the main measure now is hospital deaths.
The hospital deaths and admissions have to be taken into considerations against what has happened over the last few years and a serious discussion must be undertaken as to whether it is worthwhile ruining society (and causing considerably more deaths) for the perceived benefit that will arise.
Clearly Dentistry should’ve never been shut.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve had this growing sense of unease about the response to this since May and I thought it was worth putting down my thoughts here particularly after I had watched the video.
If you want to see the video, then comment and I will send you the link.
Blog Post Number - 2493
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