How the pandemic tempts us into insults and sports metaphors

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Britain has approved the first Covid vaccine, thereby starting a robust exchange of insults with a random sampling of other countries, and in case that didn’t bring enough joy to the world, setting off another round of the sort of chaos that allows us to recognize Boris Johnson’s government even when we’re blindfolded in the woods on a moonless night. 

I look at each day’s news with a mixture of dread and glee.

The insult exchange

It started with Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, who you might think (being the education secretary and all) would know better but, hey, silly you.

Williamson went on the radio and said Britain was the first country to approve the vaccine because “we’ve got the very best people in this country and we’ve obviously got the best medical regulator, much better than the French have, much better than the Belgians have, much better than the Americans have.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all, because we’re a much better country than every single one of them.”

Several winces later, Conservative peer Michael Forsyth (his friends and family call him Lord Forsyth; you can call him Mikey) tweeted, “Frankly, [that’s]  just unseemly.” 

European Commission spokesperson Eric Mamer pointed vaguely in the direction of the high road and said, “This is not a football competition.”

 

Irrelevant photo: erigeron

Anthony Fauci, on the other hand,  ignored all of that, but he was critical of how quick Britain was to approve the vaccine, saying the UK hadn’t reviewed it “as carefully” as US health regulators.

The next day he backtracked, saying, “I have a great deal of confidence in what the UK does both scientifically and from a regulator standpoint” and on top of that, “I did not mean to imply any sloppiness.”

The difference in speed is because the US regulator often goes back to the raw test data while both UK and European Union regulators work from the reports the companies assemble. 

A few people have commented not that the slower approval process would be any safer but that people might have more confidence that it was safe. It could be a valid point, but where’s the fun in that?

 

The Brexit connection

Unable to see a flap going on and not jump into the middle of it, prominent Brexiteers in the government waded in and claimed that Brexit was the reason Britain had been able to approve the vaccine so quickly. 

“Prominent Brexiteers” describes pretty much the whole government, but this was only a couple of them, Matt Hancock and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Their quotes, sadly, are as boring as they’ve turned out to be inaccurate, so we’ll skip them, but you can follow the link if you want all the Ts dotted and the Is crossed.

The inaccuracy, though? EU law allows individual countries to distribute a vaccine in an emergency. They don’t have to wait for the European Medicines Agency to approve it. In fact, since Britain’s in a transition period until the end of the year, we’re still running on EU law and yes, that’s what we’ve done.

 

The chaos

Having approved the vaccine so quickly, we’re kind of like the kid who snatched the first potato out of the oven. Yes, he made sure he got the big one, and yes he gets to boast to everyone else about that, but he might’ve been smart to grab a potholder first. It would only have taken a few seconds.

In other words, as far as I can tell, from my vantage point on the couch, we’re having trouble figuring out what to do with the vaccine now that we have it. Because it all happened so fast and we haven’t exactly been (I know this’ll surprise you) planning for it. 

I seem to remember some loose talk, oh, maybe last week sometime, about frontline staff being a top priority for the vaccine, although I don’t remember hearing a definition of frontline staff. There was equally loose talk about NHS staff being at the top of the list. Whether those two were the same thing or not is anyone’s guess. 

During the first lockdown, we were all governmentally cranked up to respect the underpaid people who kept the buses and trains running, the stores stocked, the cash registers registering, the packages delivered, the food produced, and the cabs zipping around our towns. They put their lives on the line, we were reminded, and if they didn’t get the pay they deserve and need, they did at least get a bit of recognition.

Now that a vaccine’s imminent, are they still frontline staff? 

Well, um, it doesn’t look like it.

The government’s circulated (and the newspapers have duly published) a priority list with nine categories, starting with care home residents and the people who take care of them and working its way down to people over fifty. The list has some oddities, including putting frontline medical (and only medical) staff in the second category instead of the first and not bringing in the clinically vulnerable until the fourth category, where they keep company with the over-seventies. The Black and minority ethnic people (it’s a category in Britain, however vague it may seem to me as a foreigner) who are statistically at higher risk are mentioned nowhere. It also leaves out teachers and people who work in public transportation and food processing and retail the many other jobs that put people at risk. You know, all those people we appreciated so much the first time around and have now forgotten.

Then, after the list had been circulated, it somehow looked like care home residents and their carers might have to wait, because the vaccine has to be stored at the temperature of dry ice and you can’t just toss it in your back seat and drive it to the nearest care home. But hospital inpatients and outpatients who are over eighty might just skip to the top of the list because they’re easy to find. 

I have a picture of NHS staff running down hospital corridors vaccinating any random person who looks old enough. Whether they’ll find them again when it’s time for their booster shot is a whole different problem. But we have weeks  before we have to solve that one.

What we do know is that the first batch of the vaccine has arrived in the UK and that it will be distributed to hubs–places selected because they have the equipment to keep it cold enough. 

How many doses do we have? 

Um. Dunno. The business secretary, Alok Sharma, said that by next week, when vaccinations are supposed to start, the government’s “absolutely confident” that it will have 800,000 of them. 

I wasn’t worried until I saw that “absolutely confident.” 

Are they going to divide those 800,000 doses so they cover 400,000 people at two doses each? Or is the plan is to give one each to 800,000 people and trust that the second dose will be available when it’s needed? More doses are expected before the end of the year, but Sharma couldn’t say how many and NHS Providers said the UK would have to assume that more doses might not arrive “for some time.”

Sober-sounding voices on the radio advise us not to try to book a vaccination. The NHS will contact people to let them know their vaccination category is open and tell them how to register. But the NHS generally communicates with patients by letter. You know letters? Those paper things that appear in your mailbox or fall through a slot in your door? They take time to write, to print, to seal into envelopes, to move from wherever they started to wherever they’re going.

In theory, the vaccination program begins on Tuesday.

Independent of all this, I’ve read that it may be April before everyone in the nine at-risk categories is vaccinated. 

 

Mass testing

In the meantime, we have lots of twenty-minute Covid tests, which are also called lateral flow tests, in case it makes your life better to know that. They were supposed to be game changing, but the government’s announced so many game changers since the start of the pandemic that I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be running around with a tennis racket or a pool cue. 

The tests were rolled out on a mass scale in Liverpool, which has a high infection rate, and Dr. Angela Raffle, a consultant in public health and an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, said, “The infection rate in Liverpool has come down no quicker than in many other places that haven’t got mass testing and we haven’t yet seen a proper evaluation report from Liverpool.”

I read elsewhere else that mass testing alone isn’t a solution. You have to do something useful with the results if testing’s going to bring down the infection rate, and we seem to have missed that part of the plan. Possibly because it involves different sports equipment, which is stuck in the government’s Warehouse of Sports Metaphors. We filed forms that will let us get our hands on it long ago, but they’re still waiting for approval.

The NHS test and trace program, which is the key to doing something useful with the test results, usually hits the headlines because it misses some absurd percentage of people (4 out of 10 a month ago, which is–holy shit–almost half), but recently it improved its contact rate. 

How’d it do it? 

It changed the way it reports its data. I’d love to give you a link on that, but I heard that on the radio and I can’t find the right combination of words to coax the information out of Lord Google. But it was the BBC, and whatever complaints everyone from all sides has about, it isn’t known for making up its facts.

The rapid tests are also being used to allow relatives to visit people in care homes and do what I’m old enough to remember once seemed natural: hug them. But because the rapid tests miss some problematic percentage of infections, the BBC writes that “there has . . . been concern in some parts of the care home sector over the use of the tests, with homes in Greater Manchester reportedly urged not to use them to allow visits.” 

Some homes report not having received tests, in spite of a government announcement that everything was in place and reunions were possible. Others say they have the tests but not the training to use them

And there I have to leave you. A masked delivery driver is at the door and I hope he’s brought my sports metaphor delivery. 

He’s not on the list of priorities for a vaccination and he’s working on a zero-hours contract.

54 thoughts on “How the pandemic tempts us into insults and sports metaphors”

  4. My husband, who works in operating theatres has been given lateral flow test kits which he has to do twice a week ( not sure for how long, until they run out I suppose). Apparently they don’t give many false positives but 50% false negatives, so he’ll be none the wiser, but probably have a sore nose.

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    • I’m torn between typing (cheerily) that at least that filters out half the positive cases and typing something more dismal. I read an article recently that says, basically, that there’s no perfect test, it’s just a question of find the one with the least problems for the given situation.

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  5. I am concerned that it’s all a bit chaotic…one minute they will be vaccinating the medics, then the nursing homes and then, it’s we may not get more vaccine for a while. What about the second jab? It seems it would be better if they waited to make sure that they could inject people in an orderly fashion (and twice) but what do I know? Or we they just hurrying a few vacciantions through to get the haedlines before this country falls off the Brexit Cliff slap bang into the fabled sunlight uplands?

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  6. Yogi Berra to the rescue on sports quotes: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
    But I prefer the doyen of Australian Football League commentators, Dennis Cometti: “He went in optimistically and came out misty optically.”

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  8. Same story in the US. The Trump administration has plans on distributing the vaccine the day after approval in super cold containers, but they forgot to plan on what medical professionals would be administering the vaccine, or in other words, who is actually going to inject the vaccine into the arms, since the whole medical system is overloaded with caring for the covid patients with no relief in sight. Oops, the Trump administration does it again! Are they going to hire unqualified people off the street to jab people in the arms? That will not help in the vaccine fears that more than 40% of Americans have and refuse to take the vaccine! The covid virus will prosper and continue to kill well into 2021!

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    • All complicated in the US–or so I assume, since I haven’t been following it closely–by the American medical system, which is anything but free at the point of use. Or at any other point. If everyone has to pay for the shot, it’ll limit the takeup well beyond that 40%.

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  10. And when there’s yet another cock-up, if I hear any other organisations/companies/governments not apologising but instead speaking of how they will use the experience to learn from it, I shall hide under the bed too … with my fingers in my ears and shout “La! La! La!”

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  13. Well, one bit of UIK news that reached us was that your system has in place (and had had before Covid) a system of funds for people who get the vaccine and have side effects that need to be treated. This is not new for the Covid vaccine (the report said – probably from the BBC) but has been in place for unexpected effects of previous vaccines too. This, I venture to say, has not even been thought of over here. Claims are that the Covid vaccine will be given free. Depends on which administration is saying this, of course. And given opinions expressed by various gummint officials – such as the lt. gov of Teas, who suggested that all of us older folks should be happy to die in order to keep the economy robust by keeping the bars open – I am skeptical that folks in care homes will be vaccinated first, given the view that they are expendable anyway. And don’t necessarily have huge lobbyists advocating for them.
    It is twilight and there is this kind of sleety-rainy snow falling, perfect metaphor for the situation. Regards to Fast Eddie and the dogs . You and Ida stay safe.

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    • The system responding to vaccine side effects is news to me but not impossible. There are also various forms of support for people who’ve been told to isolate, or who are out of work because of the pandemic, but they’re so full of holes that a lot of people have been hit hard economically.

      We, though, are good so far, thanks. You be careful as well.

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  14. Congratulations on your vaccine which will hopefully make its way into the appropriate arms of the population as determined by the prioritization of somebody in high places. Perhaps even the man in the high castle.
    We Americans are being typically American and doubting the safety of vaccines that we consider poorly tested.
    However, never fear. Former Presidents Clinton, Dubya and Obama are going to roll up their sleeves (or something) to get the first shots of the vaccine on tv so that the American public will have confidence in also being vaccinated.
    Sounds like the King’s taster program of yesteryear – only the Kings are the tasters. Hm. Alrighty then.

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    • China, I think, has had a few outbreaks. So has New Zealand. They’ve been able to get on top of them, but the virus is clearly hard to stamp out completely. My partner and I, given our ages, think that whatever risks there may be with the vaccine–and I don’t honestly think there are many–are less than the risks of not taking it.

      What strange, unknown territory we’re in.

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      • I think covid will be coming back every year just like the seasonal flu! That is why I think the far UVC lights are the only answer for eliminating the spread of infectious airborne and surface spreading diseases. The pharmaceutical companies do not want to eliminate the spread of diseases because it will destroy their bottom lines. A vaccine is a good idea for prevention getting infected but be prepared to take it every year or more! That is still an unknown for covid but not for the seasonal flu. Only two diseases have every been eliminated with vaccines!

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        • I expect you’re right about not eliminating it–or at the most optimistic best, not quickly. And you won’t find me going into the business of defending the pharmaceutical industry, but I don’t think they’re deliberately holding back from eliminating it. They just don’t have that possibility at hand, with either Covid or many other diseases.

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          • Pharma is not in the business of disease prevention except for vaccines. One example is vitamin D. More than 50% of the world population is deficient. There have been multiple scientific researches as to the effects of this deficiencies. Higher breast cancer raes and all cancer rates, more susceptibilities to colds and flu including covid, higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, pre term births, depression, neuromuscular diseases, and not a peep from big pharma and governments! Big money is made from treating disease and not from prevention. That is why they do not want far UVC to help in preventing the spread of flu, covid and all related diseases!

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            • Perhaps. I’d certainly agree that they’re not in the business of curing or treating rare diseases–they don’t pay–and they love diseases that need a daily pill. I’ll still wait to hear more about UVC, though.

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              • I have a google alert for “far UVC” news and have noticed an uptick in news lately. It makes economic sense for businesses to invest in them specially ones that involve many people like airlines, cruise ships and restaurants. The CDC also is saying that the current vaccine will not have any effect on reducing covid rates until at least 100 million are injected and that will not be achievable until the end of spring! Probably the same in the UK.

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