Coronavirus Pandemic

[Rhythm]

My experience with covid was more a continual dirty taste in the mouth, rather than 'no sense of taste'.. does that ring true for anyone else?

Not taste, but my parosmia first showed with a smell of rotten meat *everywhere*. I'm a vegan so I know it wasn't anything at my place, and visitors confirmed it was absolutely a phantom smell. It makes cooking for the kids "interesting" - they're not vegan but I can't tell if food I'm making for them is bad or not

[(o)(o)]

My experience with covid was more a continual dirty taste in the mouth, rather than 'no sense of taste'.. does that ring true for anyone else?

Not taste, but my parosmia first showed with a smell of rotten meat *everywhere*. I'm a vegan so I know it wasn't anything at my place, and visitors confirmed it was absolutely a phantom smell. It makes cooking for the kids "interesting" - they're not vegan but I can't tell if food I'm making for them is bad or not

Bizarre.. and sounds yucky!

I'd say my mouth taste was chemically/metallic... same after minty wash / teeth brushing teeth.. and everything was imbued with that flavour for a while.

[merman]

Queen of Denmark tested positive for COVID after attending the Queen’s funeral, she attended multiple events...

[PFVA]

Just a little bit but Covid 19 is on rise here according to the last official data.

[merman]

Just a little bit but Covid 19 is on rise here according to the last official data.

On the rise here too, after children went back to school. Large rise among 11-16 year olds and 35-40 year olds according to the estimates.

[Rhythm]

So my partner got rushed into hospital a week ago Thursday with severe chest pains. They sent her home with antibiotics for an infection they'd noticed, along with painkillers.

Same thing happened the next day so we went back in, they found evidence of heart issues and again confirmed infection.

She got sent to cardiac ward where they took her off the antibiotics and started arsing about trying to find anything wrong with her heart. In the meantime she's coughing her lungs up every couple of hours in some serious pain. They'd taken her off her anti-anxiety meds, meaning she was spiralling into some nasty mental spaces.

Along with the above and after I witnessed a nurse bullying her I complained. Finally got her rechecked for infection and lo and behold, it's still there after all. Also got them to allow her access to her existing meds.

Yesterday they pushed her to the respiratory ward and this morning it's been confirmed she has pretty advanced bacterial and viral pneumonias at the same time. Obvs being off antibiotics for a week didn't help.

And this morning they've just locked down the whole ward - no-one in or out until the 11th as there's a confirmed covid case on the ward

The NHS is great but JFC this last ten days has been a complete shitshow. They're really not funded well enough to handle this at all

[zip accident]

So my partner got rushed into hospital a week ago Thursday with severe chest pains. They sent her home with antibiotics for an infection they'd noticed, along with painkillers.

Same thing happened the next day so we went back in, they found evidence of heart issues and again confirmed infection.

She got sent to cardiac ward where they took her off the antibiotics and started arsing about trying to find anything wrong with her heart. In the meantime she's coughing her lungs up every couple of hours in some serious pain. They'd taken her off her anti-anxiety meds, meaning she was spiralling into some nasty mental spaces.

Along with the above and after I witnessed a nurse bullying her I complained. Finally got her rechecked for infection and lo and behold, it's still there after all. Also got them to allow her access to her existing meds.

Yesterday they pushed her to the respiratory ward and this morning it's been confirmed she has pretty advanced bacterial and viral pneumonias at the same time. Obvs being off antibiotics for a week didn't help.

And this morning they've just locked down the whole ward - no-one in or out until the 11th as there's a confirmed covid case on the ward

The NHS is great but JFC this last ten days has been a complete shitshow. They're really not funded well enough to handle this at all

And the Tories want to cut it.

[Rhythm]

And the Tories want to cut it.

Labour broke it first. John Reid, Andy Burnham, Frank Dobson, the muppet procurement team in charge of updating the IT system...

Neither of our main parties can be trusted to be in charge of it at all.

[zip accident]

And the Tories want to cut it.

Labour broke it first. John Reid, Andy Burnham, Frank Dobson, the muppet procurement team in charge of updating the IT system...

Neither of our main parties can be trusted to be in charge of it at all.

I'm pretty sure the Tories started in on it in the 1960s if not the 1950s. You could take the "Doctor" films as propaganda against it.

A big commitment to it from anyone would be good. It's not a big burden on the state, and it does help with the after effects of the defence of the realm.

[KlaxonCow]

I do sometimes wonder if the "Miners' Hospitals" wouldn't have been better left alone.



This NHS facility in Caerphilly is a special place, as the words carved into the stone testify:



Because this building started life as a miners' hospital.

Basically, in the early Industrial Revolution, South Wales was digging up the coal that steam-powered all that industry.

But, back then, employment rights, and health and safety, just didn't exist. Essentially, until the Industrial Revolution, nothing had ever happened on this scale before, so there'd never been a real need to formalise, in law, employment rights.

So there were no notions of employment contracts, compensation for injury, unfair dismissal or, for the employer, the culpability of "corporate manslaughter".

This was an age of the 9am siren. Folks queuing up outside the factories, early in the morning, for the 9am siren to sound and then the first X amount of people in the queue were let in to have a day's work and a day's pay. And once all the jobs were filled then, sorry, it's tough shit and you're out of luck. Try tomorrow, and queue up for work earlier.

Coal mining, though, was a dangerous job. Injuries and mine collapses - and though no-one understood at the time, sucking up all that coal dust day in and day out can cause some pretty horrid long-term lung diseases.

And, as mentioned, no compensation or even a guarantee of keeping your job. If injury rendered you sick, then you just didn't get paid. If this went on for more than a few days, someone else would get your job. No such thing as "unfair dismissal" or compensation or anything. It's just "natural law". You can't work, so your employer dumps you unceremoniously there and then, as you're no use to him.

Neither employers nor government gave a shite. So the miners took it upon themselves to look after their own.

A simple concept. All of the miners would make a "contribution" from their pay to a collectively pot of money, which they then used to buy a hospital building and pay doctors and nurses to work there.

And, you know, because they all collectively owned the miners' hospital between them, then they could seek medical treatment "free at the point of use". As they'd already paid for it, by their contribution from their pay. They would just walk in and receive treatment because, collectively, they own that building and, collectively, they're all paying that doctor's wages.

Ringing any bells?

Yes, this is the model that Aneurin Bevan - a Welshman, of course, so he'd seen the Miners' Hospitals growing up and seen these places in action and knew how they worked - copied and then applied to the whole of the UK as "the National Health Service".

But before the government got involved, the miners did this off their own backs. Abandoned by their employer and government, they worked collectively to look after themselves.

And, sometimes, when I watch successive governments fuck over this system, I do wonder if maybe it would have been better if it had remained privately owned by the workers themselves... and that the idea would just have naturally expanded to all professions and across the whole country, as folks just realised it was the best way to do this shit.

Because, you know, then it'd still be privately owned and the Tories couldn't fuck it up and try to destroy it. New Labour couldn't have started the rot, as Blair accepted "Thatcherism light" in his economic policies.

It's funny because Blair was keen to talk of a "third way". This is, historically speaking, an unfortunate way to phrase it, as fascism had been previously called "the third way" (in contrast to capitalism and communism, as being the first two ways).

And maybe Cameron had the better name for it: "the Big Society".

The idea of community-owned not-for-profit public services. That are neither run by government - nationalised - nor are they run by greedy profiteers - privatised - but sit in the middle, being owned and run by the very community that directly benefits from it (and it's not-for-profit, so any profits are re-invested back into expansion and just making it better).

Indeed, it must be something in the water in Wales (pun intended), because Welsh Water was bought up for a nominal £1 by some local campaigners - Western Power Distribution, who bought the privatised "Hyder" only wanted the electricity generation side of the business, so were happy to just give away the water side of the business for £1, to "offload" that burden - and they set up Welsh Water as a not-for-profit with no shareholders.

Then there was Tower Colliery. When British Coal shut down the colliery, they paid the miners redundancy pay... and they all clubbed together and bought the mine.

Tower continued to operate - every year making a profit, in complete contradiction to the claim by British Coal and the Tory government that the reason for closing all the coal mines is that they couldn't be profitable (but we all really know that Maggie did it, simply to smash the unions) - from 1995 to 2008. It only finally closed because, you know, there was no more coal left in the ground.

I reckon that we'd be better off with a lot more of this. I mean, when Cameron was saying it, he was full of shit. But the concept of "the Big Society" - where communities can expand to take over their own public services in a not-for-profit way, to actually keep both government and greedy profiteers out of it - is a valid concept, long predating him.

I do wonder if we'd all have been better off, if instead of Aneurin using government to take it all over, with nationalisation, he'd just used the power of government to expand "the Miners' Hospitals" system to cover the whole country, a community-owned NHS, and then government would have stayed out of it. And it wouldn't matter if the Tories did or didn't get into power, as they couldn't touch it to trash it, as it's not owned or run by them. And politics would not be involved - it'd just be the local community looking after their own health needs. Looking after themselves. And fuck the government and corporations. We're doing this for our own benefit, and you all can just piss off.

[Dio]

And, sometimes, when I watch successive governments fuck over this system, I do wonder if maybe it would have been better if it had remained privately owned by the workers themselves... and that the idea would just have naturally expanded to all professions and across the whole country, as folks just realised it was the best way to do this shit.

Because, you know, then it'd still be privately owned and the Tories couldn't fuck it up and try to destroy it. New Labour couldn't have started the rot, as Blair accepted "Thatcherism light" in his economic policies.

The same thing happened in the US. Without the intervention of the NHS it's quite clear to see how that evolves into today's US medical insurance system, where the majority of people's healthcare is supplied from their job.

And where if you don't have a good job, you're totally fucked.

So be careful what you wish for. That's exactly where this country is slowly going and exactly where the Tories want us to go - "pour encourager les skiveurs".

[KlaxonCow]

True.

It was a "what if?" and there's no guarantees with such "alternative futurology" that things would actually end up the way you might envisage it ought to, in an ideal world.

[Dio]

Sure, and there's a reason historians refuse to engage much with counterfactuals, but I think the US and UK systems are in pretty direct analogy here, so I strongly suspect that the same outcome would have ensued - if maybe not quite so much in the early days, convergence would have been almost inevitable after the 80s and increasing globalisation.

[gilesgoat]

A simple concept. All of the miners would make a "contribution" from their pay to a collectively pot of money, which they then used to buy a hospital building and pay doctors and nurses to work there.

And, you know, because they all collectively owned the miners' hospital between them, then they could seek medical treatment "free at the point of use". As they'd already paid for it, by their contribution from their pay. They would just walk in and receive treatment because, collectively, they own that building and, collectively, they're all paying that doctor's wages.

Ringing any bells?

Isn't it what any worker/taxpayer pays the NHS tax for ?

The difference between a privately owned NHS and "a government one" SHOULD BE ( as they teached me long ago it should be ) :

- the government one works with a "non-profit logic" and has the goal to provide the best possible service at the lowest ( possibly 0 * ) cost

- the government one having the government ( in theory ) many resources ( to get money from ) in case of need/etc. can be more easily helped

- the government one should be better administered ( as they have more resources/specialists they can put in )

- the NHS should have the goal to be as much accessible to everyone rich and poor ( especially the poor ) with no differences

- the NHS should not have any "profits goals" in mind but "services goal" ( quality and accessibilitiy )

- the government one should hire more people and such because so they can also provide more jobs

In essence when I was at school so many years ago they told me that "all primary/essential services should (**) - in the theories of those times - government controlled to avoid 'profit logic' to come in" and to avoid the fact that then someone that could have such control could start pushing up prices and/or limiting access to only people that can pay ( sounds familiar ).

(*) in places like Italy for example is NOT that "all it totally free" you do pay for medicines and some services ( at a reduced price ) IF you can really pay something ( if you are totally broke you pay nothing ) but usually is something very affordable.

(**) so things like water/power/transportation/education should "not be in the hands of private contractors" ( and/or should be heavilly regulated ) in order to avoid precisely the situation of "you can access this ONLY IF YOU CAN PAY ( a lot ) " ...

Or in other words "the government is for the people, not the reverse" "you don't vote them to have power for themselves, you vote them they have the power to make things work for the people".

Therefore it could be argued if you vote someone that then does something that actually damages the mayority of people that's at very least a "treason of trust" ? ( even worse if that happens "at the expense of a mayority that is not rich" ? ).

Otherwise what are you "A nation builder or a revolution builder" ?

[F-ZeroOne]

Got my third booster today, so four jabs in total - this is the Pfizer covalent one. Bit of a contrast to last time, I barely felt this one go in whereas my third jab was a lot more noticeable.

Will let you know about side effects, but hopefully this is the one that finally rewrites my DNA so I become a techno-organic cyborg!