COVID-19; But Seriously…

This is ridiculous; I feel I don’t want to leave the house, and it isn’t because I might catch germs. It’s the hysteria that has been created in the mismanagement of safety measures during the Coronavirus pandemic. I don’t want to hear the figures being attributed to Covid-19 being, as they are, over-exaggerated. Since when did it become acceptable to publish figures stating a death toll due to a virus, with the written or spoken caveat, “deaths from any cause within 28 days of a positive test for Covid”. The Sunday Times stated on 10th Jan that 1 in 3 people who contract the virus are asymptomatic. Could it be, then, that people, distracted by a Positive test result and wondering if it’s one of the many False Positives given by the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) test, are so busy pondering that they step under a bus? How furious they must be, in the spirit world, hearing their death misattributed, when they hadn’t even felt unwell?

Children, largely asymptomatic, can continue to attend school, especially if their parents are “key workers”; yet the 1 in 3 adults who may have no symptoms are not supposed to leave the house, except once a day for “essential shopping” and “exercise”. In case we kill someone by spreading the infection. I watch coverage on social media of Police harassing pedestrians and I feel an awful chill about what might actually be going on, under the pretext of “keeping everybody safe”.

I understand that the Coronavirus can be awful; deadly, in fact. I understand that there are people more vulnerable to it than others. But I take umbrage at being told to do simple common-sense things like wash my hands and keep space between myself and others; I have been doing this all of my life. I don’t mind wearing a mask in retail outlets, but the distinction between being asked to use common-sense and being force-fed instructions as though we had no brains is, frankly, insulting.

In this climate, in which the common-sensical are condemned for putting everyone in danger by, say, going out twice a day, and the hysterical-paranoid are praised for conscientiousness, my mental health switches to hyper-vigilant. We are all urged to spare the NHS from being overwhelmed but, over the years, it has been left to decay, a cluster of ill-run related concerns, poorly administrated and clunky at best; I know from experience that the NHS is great at saving lives; I also know (from experience) that, should you live, you are largely left to your own devices to navigate, in my case, a ‘Severe Traumatic Brain Injury’. Unable to get the support that I needed from the NHS when I was having a mental breakdown, I asked to be referred to a private practitioner and the GP whom I had asked to make the referral had drafted a letter and then left it behind the reception desk. For three weeks. It was the psychiatrist’s secretary who had telephoned me, three weeks after my initial enquiry, to check whether I had got my referral yet. She asked for the telephone number of my GP surgery and, within half an hour, rang me back to offer me an appointment.

Now that I had ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and seen a private practitioner , my NHS surgery queried the recommended prescription and suggested that I come off the medication that I had been prescribed since early days with the brain injury; they were corrected in the form of a fax which stipulated that I must have this that medication plus the other, and I have been on the two ever since, with alterations made to the dosage as necessary. My surgery thought this very strange. I wonder how many people are dead now because they didn’t get the right medication.

Over the years, I asked for additional support including a brain scan, but was told that these were not generally recommended unless there were new symptoms. I pointed out that a mental breakdown was a new symptom, receiving short shrift in return from a GP who has a namesake in Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and I can see why. A few months later, a letter purporting to be from an NHS neurological clinic, but with no letterhead or telephone number, arrived to tell me that a brain scan scheduled for a month hence from the date of postmark had been cancelled, and informed me that I would receive details of the amended appointment. Needless to say, I did not.

Over the years, the psychiatrist wrote to my GP recommending additional support, as did the private neurologist whom, in a desperate bid to get to the bottom of my post-injury difficulties, my mother had paid for me to see. During the year that my son, who has Autism, was discriminated against, being unofficially excluded from school by a SenCo and a Case Worker unfit for purpose (unless you’re Hitler), and found no suitable alternative, my mental health took more of a bashing. I asked for a mental health assessment and was told that I wasn’t bad enough to qualify for support. When finally my son had a school to go to (thanks to my family fighting tooth and nail and stumping up ridiculous amounts of money for advocates to keep the pressure on the case worker to do his job) I was horrified, when I visited my psychiatrist, to find that my GP surgery had ignored letters, which he showed me, that he had written to them.

He increased my medication dosage with immediate effect, and my GP Practice Manager explained that it isn’t mandatory for the GP to act on recommendations made by other practitioners; neither is it clear to them (the three people who, I was told, read every letter) who is taking the action recommended. “You need to check,” I told the Practice Manager and the Senior Partner, “this is how people fall through the net and die. I am sure you will forgive the fact that, during a breakdown, I omitted to ask to be copied in on any correspondence between my psychiatrist and my Doctor’s surgery” I said. I showed my psychiatrist the letter from the mental health team, which said that the discrimination against my son was having an impact on my mental health. He was shocked, “But your mental health is impactable,” he said, “Your history would suggest this.” They hasn’t checked, clearly. Over the years, various technology firms have had to pull out of creating, with and for the NHS, a central database which tells medical practitioners, at the click of a button, the patient’s full story. The NHS has simply been too dissolute, too set in its ways of paying over the odds for equipment from “approved providers” rather than sourcing cost-effective health equipment, to be able to take on a database which would enable it to deliver appropriate healthcare to all comers, as was its remit when it was created.

You would think that, having lived with a brain injury for years, I would be used to walking about in the illusion of a sort of dream, but this Pandemic situation takes the biscuit. I know for a fact that this country does not regards the brain as a vital organ, and this situation is the proof; the Powers That Be are pushing the biggest porky-pie in my lifetime: that everyone is culpable when it comes to spreading the virus, no matter what common-sense measures are taken, and the people who need protecting the most continue to die because they can go out and about just like everybody else. The hotspots continue to exist, but we are not told why. If the Government was serious about this, why don’t they do something like Italy and Romania, for example? There, the more vulnerable members of the population are made to stay inside, while younger, fitter people continue to keep the economy running. This country has trounced its own economy in nine months flat; to what ends? Even people as intelligent as my Father are ‘looking forward’ to the vaccination – rushed through and with no research into possible side- or ill- effects (such as the narcolepsy with which recipients of the swine flu vaccine ended up afflicted); while I have a distinctly uneasy feeling in my gut. There is a section on the Government web site which talks about compensation in the event that a vaccination renders you disabled, with the unwritten proviso that an NHS practitioner agrees that you are disabled according to their criteria. Again, I am one of those people who was declared, five years ago, suitable for employment-based training despite my brain injury, my receipt of DLA and my single-parenthood of a child with special needs. The woman to whom I had been assigned (working, thanks to outsourcing, indirectly for DWP through G4S) had not been given my medical information, it turned out, and stated, at our first meeting, that she had worked with “worse than you”. How could she know?

After a great deal of unpleasantness and an open-ended sanction on my benefits when I missed an appointment, and ignoring the fact that I had tried to reschedule it, I received a House of Commons-headed apology. The appointments continued, however, until two years had passed and the system spat me out and I had to re-apply for benefits. At least I was spared Logan’s Run.

I am therefore highly sceptical of a rushed-out vaccine being “rolled out” under Government auspices, after almost a year of changing restrictions and the creation of scapegoats, who are people like me who question the validity of the measures and who are possessive of our immune system, having survived more than would kill differently-wired people, left to our own devices. Do not, therefore, attempt to interfere with me now. Or is this cover for something else? Something horribly totalitarian?