Britons should go to work if they have a headache or feel tired – even though both are now officially recognised as Covid symptoms and the public is advised to stay at home if they have Covid symptoms – Health Secretary Sajid Javid said today. MailOnline has more.
Asked whether he would still go to work if he had a headache, Sajid Javid claimed he would “first reach for the Nurofen”. He said it would also depend “how tired I felt”.
Health chiefs last week quietly expanded the list of tell-tale signs of the virus to warn of nine other symptoms. As well warning of headaches and feeling tired, officials also now say that a blocked or runny nose, a loss of appetite and feeling or being sick can signal that someone is infected.
The decision marked a huge change in the Government’s stance on symptoms, after acknowledging only three for the entirety of the pandemic (a fever, cough and loss or change to taste or smell), despite other countries and health bodies including up to 14.
The move coincided with the vast majority of employees in England no longer being able to get any free swabs as part of Boris Johnson’s “Living With Covid” strategy. Experts warned the axing of free tests for all but the most vulnerable – coupled with the expansion of the NHS symptom list – will trigger a “free for all” on staff absences, leaving workers to decide “whether or not they stay at home and for how long”. …
The NHS notes on its website that the now 12 Covid symptoms – which also include an aching body, a sore throat and diarrhoea – are “very similar to symptoms of other illnesses, such as colds and flu”. People experiencing these symptoms, who also have a temperature or don’t feel well enough to work, should “try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people”. They should also take “extra care” to avoid contact with anyone at higher risk from the virus.
The Health Secretary told Sky News: “There are still three major symptoms but it’s right others have been added to give people a bit more information about what may or may not be Covid.” However, just suffering from one or two of the symptoms “doesn’t in itself say that you’ve got Covid” and people should “look out for” the three main symptoms.
The problem of course is that the Government is still ‘advising’ people to take special action not to spread Covid, and many people and employers are still bending over backwards to avoid doing so. But Covid symptoms are, as the NHS now officially acknowledges, largely generic viral symptoms, so without specific tests (which were of questionable reliability in any case) the special guidance for addressing this one virus is impossible to follow.
The truth is, until the Government removes all special treatment of Covid in its guidance, all references to it being a peculiar threat, we will not be able to return to normal, and the chaos among workers and the clamour for funding for the tests that facilitate following the special guidance will continue. The Government only has itself to blame for this, because while it has withdrawn all legal and financial support for treating COVID-19 as a special threat, it has not ceased to treat it as such. The solution is simple: abolish all Covid guidance so that the disease is formally treated as one of no special social concern. But will the Government have the clear-sightedness and backbone to do what is necessary?
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I wonder what will need to be added to next year’s edition…
If the censorship coming our way is implemented there won’t be a next year’s edition….
Yep. Labour will probably introduce an amendment to counteract crockery misinformation.
Ha! What a beauty I want one!
It’s a bit of satirical fun I know, bit it just doesn’t capture how I feel about the last two years – Big State, Big Pharma, Big Tech. and the idiotic masses all conspiring (most completely unwittingly) to create a dystopian society where a law forced people to die alone, banned people from breathing too much fresh air, brainwashed all the lemmings into thinking they would kill Granny, deliberately pitted citizens against each other to create hatred against one group, killed childhoods (literally for some) created mandates that meant unless you gave your body to the state for experimentation then you couldn’t work etc. No, it somehow fails to capture the ridiculousness, the malevolence and the downright lunacy of the last two years. It doesn’t capture the frustration, the astonishment and the simmering rage that I know many of us feel. A lot to fit in on a plate I suppose! Perhaps a commemorative elephant might be a more suitable canvas? There’s certainly no longer a problem fitting one in any room these days.
A superb piece which captures the evils foisted upon us these last two years.
As I read through your post I thought – did we really allow all this, did we actually live with this medieval nonsense? It upsets me now just thinking back on what we went through. The sheer evil of it all is now difficult to comprehend.
God forbid.
The hardest thing for me to take was, still is, the complete feeling of helplessness. Of knowing that the world has lost its head, gone absolutely batshit bonkers, but of knowing there was little that could be done. It’s easy to forget these evil w*!@£$^s – might as well use some currency symbols while I still can! – played a long-in-the-making and disempowering hand. They had roleplayed all the scenarios, knew from current societal trends (supported by social media data), how this would unfold. They did their homework and then some. Most of us (I was definitely one) were too comfortable in modern life and were caught completely off-guard. That shock formed one of two responses, either total submissiveness or total bewilderment/astonishment/anger. It was (still is) the biggest fight or flight test of our lives. Being in the former group, the much smaller dissenting group, there was little we could do to quickly and peacefully fight back – we found against a globally coordinated system that ran so deep that virtually nobody could believe it even existed. A system that owns and orchestrates pretty much everything that we see, hear and touch; a system that is omnipotent. Don’t beat yourself up too much, to say we’re up against it is the biggest understatement that was ever uttered.
Completely agree. Another terrific post.
Each and every N95 self-muzzled housewife-activist out there who’s still righteously glaring at a heartless and indifferent world is secretly yearning for the good times, when everybody had to listen to their hysteric ranting about dangerous germs all around, to be brought down on us again. These people are a stark reminder that we’re really just temporarily out on bail and not free. Johnson has promised them that they can have it all right back if they can come up with a credible pretext.
It cannot be long now before books such as Laura Dodsworth’s ‘A State of Fear’ and Robert Kennedy Jr’s ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ are condemned to the banned list and ritually burnt outside Parliament.
I agree totally with the comments preceding. It’s a shame that this piece of craft is so expensive… £100-£200 buys quite a lot of energy, food and/or fuel…Perhaps DS could offer one as a prize in “Most Convincing Debunking Of Official Orthodoxy”-type raffle?