Covid deaths are on the rise again, so what happens? Mask-wearing in hospitals is scrapped
George Monbiot
Mon 16 Oct 2023 06.00 BST
For some people, going to hospital may now be more dangerous than staying at home untreated. Many clinically vulnerable people fear, sometimes with good reason, that a visit to hospital or the doctors’ surgery could be the end of them. Of course, there have always been dangers where sick people gather. But, until now, health services have sought to minimise them. Astonishingly, this is often no longer the case.
Across the UK, over the past two years, the NHS has been standing down even the most basic precautions against Covid-19. For example, staff in many surgeries and hospitals are no longer required to wear face masks in most clinical settings. Reassuring posters have appeared even in cancer wards, where patients might be severely immunocompromised. A notice, photographed and posted on social media last week, tells people that while they are “no longer required to wear a mask in this area”, they should use hand sanitiser “to protect our vulnerable patients, visitors and our staff”. Sanitising is good practice. But Covid-19 is an airborne virus, which spreads further and faster by exhalation than by touch.
The story this policy tells, which the government would have us believe, is that Covid-19 is all but over. It’s not true. Despite a collapse in testing, which means the figures will be grossly understated, the number of death certificates giving Covid-19 as a cause has been climbing steadily as autumn approaches, rising from 80 per week in early August to 306 in late September. Who knows what the real number may be?
Forget it, be happy, keep shopping: if you don’t live and work as though the virus has vanished, you’re holding the country back. There could scarcely be a more powerful symbol of the all-clear than doctors and nurses greeting their patients without masks.
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Long Covid is so debilitating that a study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) this year found many who suffer it reported a lower quality of life than people with stage 4 lung cancer. Another study found that typical symptoms of long Covid “had an impact on health as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury”. Some doctors, the BMA survey found, are unable to work, to care for their children, cook, perform basic arithmetic, even brush their hair. Some are now facing the loss of their homes, bankruptcy and destitution. Though most caught the virus in the line of duty, they’ve been bright-sided, sacrificed to the officially sanctioned delusion that it’s over, and we should all get on with our lives. They must wish they could.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -hospitals
Illustration: Matt Kenyon
