Up in Raheny library the other day - and I borrowed Dr. Hammond's Covid Casebook - this from 'M.D.' the health correspondent for Private Eye. M.D. is Phil Hammond, an NHS doctor and his reports throughout the pandemic were and continue to be excellent. I'd not have been in lockstep with him on some issues - he was for example clearly more enthusiastic about lifting lockdowns at an earlier point than I would have been, albeit in retrospect he does make a good case for that, though he's not hostile to them per se, but in the broad brushstrokes would generally agree with his analysis. And it's quite something, essentially a republication of his columns from across the pandemic with some additional information to contextualise the situation and that's about it.
And yet, it provides a devastating and scathing critique of how the Tories handled it and how matters progressed.
As early as May 2020 he was writing:
It's no surprise rich countries with high death tolls from Covid-19 are generally poor at prevention. The UK and US didn't initially take the virus seriously enough, but nor do they take public health and care of the elderly seriously enough. They both have high levels of income and social inequality, a strong aversions to a nanny state, threadbare social care and a diet of more than 50 per cent cheap sugary ultra-processed foods.
Most premature deaths from Covid-19 are happening in those with a pre-existing chronic disease often related to poor diet and obesity (metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, fatty liver, kidney disease). If the government wants to reduce premature deaths from Covid-19 it needs to improve preventative health all round.
He also was profoundly hostile to the herd immunity strategy the UK government initially adopted.
There's also something about the presentation that brings home the unbelievable impacts across such a short period of time. The first column printed was on 16 March 202. 383 daily cases, 21 daily deaths, 65 UK deaths to date.
4th of May brought 5,006 cases, 520 daily deaths and a staggering 28,490 deaths to date.
1st of February, which would be roughly a year after the virus arrived21,246 daily cases, 1,018 daily deaths and 106,564 UK deaths to date.
Thankfully vaccines arrived that were efficacious. But amazing to think that Boris Johnson had early in the pandemic argued perhaps 6,000 people would die.
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