A Lockdown Sceptics reader has written to tell us about an unfortunate experience she had with NHS Test and Trace when her deceased husband tested positive for Covid.
On March 17th, my partner died suddenly and unexpectedly. We are still waiting to find out the cause of death, but early indications are some sort of heart problem which no one knew about. Naturally this has been a shock to all of us.
A few days after the event, I received a phone call from a young lady representing NHS Test and Trace who told me that I had been identified as a contact of someone who had tested positive for COVID-19 and that I needed to self-isolate for 10 days. She named my partner as the contact. When I asked where the information had come from, she didn’t know how his name had got onto the database and when I explained that he had died, she didn’t know that either. I know that he had never had a COVID-19 test as he worked from home, so I can only assume that the test was carried out post mortem.
The young lady was very apologetic and embarrassed and, to her credit, didn’t press me further about matters. I really don’t want to blame her for doing her job, but you’d think a bit of context might be helpful for people doing this job.
Inevitably, COVID-19 has been mentioned as a contributing factor on the preliminary report. We won’t know any more now until after Easter, but we owe it to him to find out what took him from us. Whatever it was, he didn’t die of COVID-19 and I find it highly unlikely that he even had it, given that I have to be tested when I go to work (only occasional work and no positive tests to date) and he hadn’t been anywhere. Despite our scepticism, we have kept to the guidance, mainly because all of our hobbies which took us out of the house to meet others have been on pause for the past year. He was a lockdown sceptic from the get-go, and I know he would be incandescent that his death would be recorded as a COVID-19 statistic. I do, however, regard his death as a casualty of lockdown. Perhaps the post mortem will tell us that he had a condition which would have taken him from us sooner than expected, but this wicked and pointless lockdown policy stole the last year of his life and deprived him of the things which gave him so much pleasure in life.
I am beyond angry about how our media and political classes have treated us and so disappointed by the way the people of this country have colluded with them through complacency. Thank you for all the work you do in exposing this dreadful state of affairs.
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I’m not sure I agree with the ‘deferment’ explanation given above.
Students who defer a year have known grades (and other qualities) and will thus already have an accepted place at their chosen institution.
Ie, if a course has 100 students per year and 14 deferred from last year, the institution knows that it will only have 86 places available for this year’s candidates, and it won’t act as though it had 100 places re this year’s offers.
If there are more students that have to go through clearing it can only be because they didn’t meet the grades expected of them.
Sure, this could simply be because of the ‘grade disinflation’ that we’ve seen this year (although it still hasn’t normalised to the pre 2020 levels), but the intention to go through this disinflation process was well telegraphed by the government and exam bodies and I can’t imagine that the HE establishments based their offers on the relative %age grades seen in 2021.
I suggest that the problem is actually that this year’s candidates didn’t sit any GCSEs, but university places were offered with some consideration of the GCSE grades that were gained based on teacher assessment (ie, the teachers guessed). Thus the problem has resulted from a fair number of children having much higher GCSE results than they’d deserved (even taking into account the crazy grade inflation that occurred during 2020), and then getting worse A-levels than their GCSE results might have suggested.
I imagine that there will also be a similar number of pupils who in the end gained far better A-level results than their GSCE results suggested, only because they were ‘the quiet workers’ who the teachers didn’t even realise were capable. We, of course, won’t see the impact of this because the individuals concerned will have simply been happy that they got their first choice.
I’d like there to be an assessment of how much harm this stupid process (‘Guess the result’) caused these young adults, but like everything else related to our mad Covid response it’ll get shoved into the weeds and those whose lives will have been affected will never get any acknowledgement that it occurred.
Elephant in the room is that universities no longer even have a moral duty to preferentially consider domestic students. If a British undergraduate can only be charged a maximum of £9250 per year in tuition fees but their wealthy overseas classmates can be charged £24,000 for EXACTLY the same service, a self respecting, bottom line chasing vice-chancellor would be a fool not to prioritise overseas students.
For example, Imperial currently recruit 61% of their students from overseas.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/strategic-planning/statistics/trend-analysis/student-nationality/
Why, when many bright UK students are left without university places?
Not only tuition fees, but overseas students will pay higher accommodation fees as they tend not to return home in the holidays and they will also be more likely to rent the more luxurious penthouse rooms.
“Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” Munger
This is also relevant to today’s other education story, about how medical school places are back down to 7,500 a year.
The excuse given, as it always is, is that they can’t simply magic up medical school places — but of course they can — all they have to do is stop overseas medical students studying in the UK. Sure, the medical schools would complain (they make lots of lovely £££s from them), but our nation’s requirements are more important. Anyway, if we said that the medical schools had to meet the home demand before they could start training others then I’m sure they’d suddenly find that it was possible all along to increase training places.
The other excuse given is ‘but it is expensive’ — sure but:
I was really shocked recently when an article in these pages told me that the number of doctors in the NHS had gone from 85,000 30 years ago to 250,000 now. The narrative is always that we need more and need them faster, but it would appear that the problem is how we get the existing doctors to apply themselves to their worklist better.
I have felt for a long time now that the National Health Service had become the National Wellness Service, pandering to all our hypochondria’s and minor ailments and wishes. Certainly the range of treatments and who they are applicable for has mushroomed over time. I’d be interested to see how the average patient visits to the NHS have changed over the last 30 years. Are we just trying to use it more and more.?
Wouldn’t it be really weird if it turned out there was plenty of trained people and funding for them to provide us with a decent health service, but the whole thing was fucked up by legions of non-jobs and unrequired levels of managers getting in the way just to justify their expensive existences..?
The number of medics working part time might partly explain the change in doctor numbers.
The nation’s requirements stopped being a concern of the universities a long time ago.
Recruiting students from overseas could also increase the number of ethnic minority students at a university which will be a huge advantage in the eyes of some vice-chancellors.
Those £400K+ Vice Chancellor salaries have got to be funded somehow
Exactly what I was thinking when I read this article
Trust me, your gov’ts could care less about you. The covid virus is a bioweapon released to do one thing…..depopulate. Very effective so far, more deaths to come. Excess mortality in all countries heavily vaxxed in addition to declining bitprth rates.
Where the hell is Whitty et al and Ferguson – the designers of this awful outcome. Probably collecting their undeserved gongs from the Palace. And as for the Gormless Johnson, don’t get me started.