... I know the NHS will be at least far better prepared by the end of June.
Better informed, but less resilient as it has had no time to recover its losses or for its staff to get some R&R.
... 500,000 retired NHS workers volunteered to return to work in April.
Don't you mean 50,000? I'd say less than that. And it's not simple, as they are all older, so more liable to illness, exhaustion, etc., and they have to be retrained.
... New temporary facilities have been built and funds made available, etc.
The Nightingale hospitals are empty, it transpires, not because of a shortage of patients, but because of a shortage of equipment – respirators and dialysis machines, etc. Also, a shortage of trained personnel.
The idea was hospitals would pass the worse cases to the Nightingales, but in reality those patients need treatment here and now, and hospitals are loathe to surrender their equipment when they're undersupplied, under-equipped and underfunded in the first place.
ITS ALL PR:
In the dark days of WWII, there was the big drive to make Spitfires, so the RAF could win the battle of Britain. The news was our plucky boys needed planes to take the fight to the enemy. There was the famous 'garden fence' campaign when people were asked to give up iron and steel fencing, pots and pans, old bedsteads, any metal at all that could be repurposed for the desperately-hungry factories making planes and tanks and ships, etc.
It was all a nonsense. At the end of the war, piles of collected scrap that had been sitting in dumps for 5 years were left to rot. There was no real system for processing scrap.
Nor was there a shortage of Spitfires. The shortage was pilots. They were ill-trained and inexperienced and getting knocked down almost as soon as they went up against the enemy.
So utterly desperate was it that the British were obliged, nay, indeed forced against all the best advice of the Air Ministry, to make squadrons of — Good God — (gulp) —
foreign pilots operational. It goes against the grain, really, but there you go, 'needs must when the devil drives'.
And the Polish pilots, let loose on the enemy, bagged more enemy aircraft per nationality than any other during the Battle of Britain.
The point is, we're living in a media circus of jingoism. The Nightingale Hospitals are a distraction – another example of a knee-jerk, ill-conceived, destined-to-fail propaganda exercise, which is why the media has been so quiet about them.
I know thousands of people with families are going to be jobless if the lockdown goes on beyond that -- especially in the aviation and tourist and restaurant business, etc. The summer is the bulk of the annual business for many.
all of whom the govt could support, if it chose to.
I believe the Gvt is doing the best it can.
Well the govt is investing millions in unregulated data firms to create a digital NHS
Rainbow flags and people banging pots on Thursday night for NHS workers is cool (it's what they do here) but there are other workers affected too, imo.
They're not dying, to keep you alive tho, are they. Balance, mate ...
The sad fact is, we've had it good, and now we're entering the lean years ... progress is not a never-ending exponential upward curve it needs to be to sustain all these industries. We had our monies, from the North Sea Oil boom on, and we've pissed it up the wall. Thatcher sold the silver, our housing stock, our utilities, and successive govts have been selling off the rest ever since.
Now it's the NHS, being discreetly sold behind closed doors.
+++ NOTE TO MODS +++
I find myself becoming more and more politically involved. Maybe I should withdraw. If these posts are becoming too ranty, or too political, let me know.
