My big achievement today - vacuuming the whole house, which I find more and more exhausting: oh dear! While Lois bakes some delicious marmelade flapjacks - yum yum!
I gaze longingly at Lois's newly baked marmelade flapjacks - yum yum!
Having been told yesterday on the radio that the UK wasn't making any more of a mess of the pandemic than other European countries, it's a shock to hear this detailed study that contradicts this comfortable notion - yikes!
An international team has been comparing the performance of UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany, South Africa and South Korea when it comes to their services of test-and-trace technology from June to August 2020.
The new centralised UK test and trace service was launched in May, after the long-established local services found they couldn't cope.
The first job is to identify who's got the virus. But the way we have collected samples for testing in the UK is quite different to the methods used in other countries. In Germany and South Korea there have been lots of local sites where you can go to be tested, and lots of nearby labs where the samples can be processed quickly. And the samples are collected by properly trained personnel.
In the UK there have been insufficient numbers of testing sites and people have had to travel further to visit one. As a result, we have mainly been relying on people to collect their own samples at home following complicated instructions about swabbing throat and nostrils, and sending the results off to one of the new "lighthouse labs".
The labs are also a problem here. The UK has unfortunately for several years been running down the NHS's existing high-performing capacity for lab-testing of infections - hence the new "lighthouse labs": but these are not staffed by people with the right qualifications as the NHS labs have been - nor have the lighthouse lab technicians been connected either to the local public health teams or to the IT systems that would have reported the results to local GPs. In short, we've created a fragmented system.
Once a person with the virus has been identified the next job is to notify anyone they may have come into contact with. Both South Korea and Ireland have been doing well at this - they have had recent experience of other epidemics (SARS and MERS). South Korea had made sure that, in addition to manual contact tracing, the authorities had the authority also to use personal data: mobile phone data, CCTV and credit card details - quite invasive of privacy, but very effective! In Germany there has been manual contact-tracing by local health authorities, and this has worked well. In Spain the contact tracing was at state level, with insufficient staffing, and the system soon became overwhelmed.
The UK response has been centralised, because the local structure was not well-resourced to begin with. But the system has been fragmented again: some work has been carried out by individuals with medical training who try to inform the contacts of the infected person; but some of this work is also being done by individuals without medical training, albeit experienced in "customer service" - my god! The information they obtain is then passed on to a lower tier of local personnel who have no contextual information to help them - just a phone number - and in many cases the people they phone may already know that they're a contact of an infected person, perhaps because they're living with them - yikes! So you often get a bombardments of calls to people who already know the situation anyway = oh dear!
The point of contacting these people is to get them to isolate themselves, and ideally to be supported while they do this. In Germany self-isolating people are regularly contacted and monitored by the health authorities through visits and phone-calls, providing checks on their well-being. In Spain, Ireland and South Korea there are phone calls or text messages. In South Korea you are required to download an app and the authorities can tell if you're moving out of your home. In the UK there is no follow-up at all to see if people really are self-isolating and how their health is - oh dear!
Additional support for self-isolators may also be important too. In the surveyed countries other than the UK there is better funding, and people are being brought food, medicines etc, and even having accommodation provided for them.
On tonight's programme Prof Michael Hopkins tries to sum up the UK's biggest mistakes. And he says that basically, although a pandemic has officially been on the Government's major risk register for years, essentially nothing was done to put in place the resilient systems that we needed to cope with one. All of the systems that we have developed since the pandemic began have been ad hoc ones.
Yikes (again) ! Sounds like a typical British half-hearted response to me. My god!!!!
What a crazy country we live in !!!!!
20:00 We watch some TV, an interesting self-portrait of the filmstar Hugh Grant, with comments by some of his co-stars.
A really entertaining hour's viewing, because Hugh is so funny and unassuming. People think he must have come from a rich background because of the way he talks, but this is not the case. I notice that he had a similar upbringing to myself through state primary school, "direct grant" secondary school (with scholarships for "bright" boys whose parents couldn't afford the fees), followed by University (Oxford). The difference from me is that I wasn't good-looking or charming - sob, sob! Oh dear!
It's interesting also to find out that Hugh "works on" his Richard Curtis scripts tirelessly, all the time the filming is going on: he makes notes on it, with suggestions for improvements etc. He's not content to just approach the role in a kind of a passive way, and I'm sure this pays off.
21:00 We watch a bit more of "GI Blues", the Elvis Presley film from 1960 marking his return to show business after his stint in Germany as member of the US Army of Occupation.
It's nostalgic for me to see this film and hear the songs, because my late sister Kathy bought the album from the film, and used to play it over and over in her bedroom at the back of our house in Redland, Bristol.
The action in the film is like it's another planet in a way. The self-confident "swagger" of the US troops going around the streets of Frankfurt, getting admiring looks from the German girls that they're trying to get dates with. It was a more assured world somehow - everybody knew that the West were the good guys, the Russians the bad guys, "West" Germany was re-emerging, but only a little bit, because it was still an occupied country - witness the film's first song "Occupation GI Blues", where Elvis sings about how he can't wait to get back home, "stateside".
We see the first half of the film. We notice that the only Germans that feature strongly are the beautiful girls that the soldiers are dating or whistling at, the children (who look like multiple versions of the Von Trapp family), and comic older German men - middle-aged, balding, some with typical German hats, or suited businessmen.
What you don't see are younger German males - so the frauleins appear only to have the Americans as potential dates, and we can see why the film has made it that way: more straightforward, and fewer distractions or complications on the "boy meets girl" front.
Yes, altogether a simpler world - sob, sob (again) !
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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