Celtic Diary Monday March 23 : Coronacrisis: Stay Safe

With the football taking a back seat and the media coming out with stories that even our pish stained sources can only laugh at, we discuss the only thing on anyones agenda at the moment, and ask what could be done right when so much has gone wrong…

We’ve learned a lot about ourselves over the last few weeks.

The fabled British bulldog spirit, the stiff upper lip that saw us through the blitz, and most importantly, the knowledge that we know best about how to handle our own affairs.

The Brexit mentality, if you like, how we can cope quite well without any help or advice from anyone else, especially anyone with a foreign accent…

We’ve learned that it is a fallacy.

What we have learned is that in adversity, we gather together in our hundreds and fight over toilet paper, pasta and paracetamol.

Though in keeping with finest military tradition, it’s usually at dawn.

Some of us have listened and learned to what those who understand what is going on in regards to a devastating new viral pandemic, and others have packed the kids into the car and gone to the beach to avoid those bloody nurses moaning about how much more important they are than the rest of us.

Then, it’s off to find a pub that will let us in the back door so that we can have a bloody good whine about how flu, fireworks and falling down the stairs kill more people than this coronavirus and it’s all the fault of the Chinese for eating bats anyway.

In the meantime, in the rest of the world, other countries operate a much more grown up attitude about the whole thing.

They have tested to see who has the virus.

They have tested to see where the virus is spreading and noted how it spreads more quickly.

They have put on place measures that not immediately but eventually will bring the outbreak under some kind of control.

that’s because they have seen that in south east Asia, there are signs that this policy works.

It’s not easy, but it seems to work.

Here, we have a government that thinks it’s all rather a bit of a wheeze, in fact.

No pun intended, not like when  Prime Minister Johnson made his Operation Last Gasp quip,

Since then, the original policy of allowing the illness to sweep through the population, which he explained to one of the few interviewers he’ll actually sit in front of, the intrepid political analyst Phillip Schofield and his sidekick who hosts the dancing programme, we have seen that this is   the modus operandi.

He’s asked people to stay at home, especially if they’ve got a cough, presumably so that when his policy leads to thousands of unnecessary deaths he can shift the blame to us, for not taking his advice.

And testing ? Well, that would just show that quite a lot of people have it, and they might want to have treatment.

And those forty new hospitals with 50,000 new nurses to replace the ones his party have lost due to their austerity schemes aren;t quite operational yet, so it’s perhaps better to pop a couple of pills and watch the telly for a couple of weeks.

Leaders, incidentally, are not paid to advise. They are paid to lead.

Asking people to stay home is not leading. It leads to uncertainty and a feeling that it’s not quite as serious as the rest of the world is saying’

Advisors are paid to advise, and his main man, Dominic Cummings is quoted today in the Sunday Times as saying at a strategic policy meeting a few weeks ago that of some pensioners die, then “so be it ” .

Johnson repeated this during a national press conference.

.

That’s that then, we might as well all head out and join the battle for toilet rolls in supermarket aisles.

Then, after realising he’d made a catastrophic error, Johnson reversed the old Govian mindset of having had enough of experts, and listened to those who said that there was no way of gaining herd immunity without first losing a big chunk of the herd, and then discovering the vaccine.

And, as we are far closer to achieving the former than we are the latter…..he said if it wasn’t too much trouble, could we all give the pub a miss for a bit.

And perhaps not buy quite so much toilet roll.

The government policy on deadly pandemics is enough to loosen the stiffest of bowels, but the people who have been buying it haven’t bought it for that purpose.

They’ve bought it because their pals have been putting pictures of empty shelves on social media, and therefore they’ve had to empty the shelves again -before someone else does.

Those of us who thought that people couldn’t possibly be that stupid have been sadly proved to be wrong.

Then again, look who they voted in as their leader…

A man who had nothing but a slogan about getting Brexit done.

A man who excels at pretending he’s just like us.

Johnson and his team have ruthlessly exploited this by using simple slogans…

” Wash your hands ” is the new ” Get Brexit Done “.

He’s got no idea what to do..Trump is his role model.

He’s chosen advice from whichever advisor he thinks will make him popular, and again he’s told us what he thinks we want to hear.

There’s no substance to any of it.

There is no clear agenda to slow down this disease, and far less an idea of how to stop it.

Johnson doesn;t understand what’s going on, so he can;t explain what needs to be done.

As a result, the sheer numbers are being ignored by the public.

Show them three people dying in a hospital bed…. it gets the message across.

Ever increasing numbers on a chart ?

Nah…thats boring. And probably fake news.

Well, it’s real. Even if you hide under the blankets, this monster is still sitting at the edge of your bed.

When a  new virus threatened to kill us all back in the eighties, a massive campaign telling us not to die of ignorance slowed down the rate of infection.

Simple, but effective. Better to overreact than underestimate.

There was no desire for herd immunity back then, no urge, however much fun that might have been, to spread it throughout the population. As, indeed, was never policy with smallpox, measles, mumps or polio.

We need now to keep it simple once again. A new slogan, one that actually means something.

Stay home, stay safe.