HAPPY 'COVID-19 DAY OF REFLECTION'!

How did you spend Sunday March 9th? Throwing a nostalgic socially-distanced BBQ in the garden? No, thought not...

The official ‘Covid Day of Reflection’ — a governmental initiative — was set up by ‘The UK Commission on Covid Commemoration’ to ‘find appropriate ways to remember those who lost their lives since the pandemic began, and to explore how we mark this period of our history’.

Apparently, The Commission ‘held an in-depth consultation’ and in September 2023 it published its final report, recommending ‘an annual UK-wide day of reflection’.

That report entirely passed me by; I had other stuff going on in September 2023. However, if you would like to find out more about today’s commemoration (and I have no idea why, though each to their own) you can do so here:

https://dayofreflection.campaign.gov.uk/about/

Perhaps you will be sufficiently moved to encourage some small children to paint rainbows and stick them in their bedroom windows? Meanwhile, older kids could attempt to log on to Microsoft Teams and participate in a bit of spontaneous extra-curricular schooling? And because the weather has been just as lovely as it was back in spring 2020, why not invite some elderly relatives over for socially-distanced tea in the garden? Finally, at the end of a fun day of Reflecting on Covid you could stand on your doorstep, banging a saucepan… after which you’ll want to open too many bottles of wine and play a board game on Zoom with your best mates...

I think there’s a lot to unpack around the existence of ‘The UK Commission on Covid Commemoration’ and its desire to ‘explore how we mark this period of our history’. A quick inspection of the interactive map of the day’s commemorative events revealed the two closest to my home (in Hastings, East Sussex) are in Eastbourne and Romney Marsh, Kent, while another seems to be a business-as-usual Sunday with spurious ‘Commemorative’ branding:

Join us on the COVID-19 Day of Reflection (Sunday 9 March) at Forestry England’s Bedgebury Pinetum. Take time to remember and reflect whilst relaxing in the fresh air. Being among the trees is good for your wellbeing whether you are having a gentle stroll or maybe going for a run or riding your bike — everyone is welcome to spend time in these beautiful, calming surroundings…

This sentimental ‘Day of Reflection’ does not feel like a movement with much momentum. Very few people have any interest in revisiting — much less ‘reflecting’ — on the Covid era: 2020-2022; fewer than half of my subscribers have even bothered to open my previous post, much less ‘like’ it or comment below-the-line.

Yet, we really should ‘reflect’. Not least because so many of the issues the UK struggles with today have risen as a direct result of the insanity of the Covid Era. Take, for example, our current inability to fund a functioning military in a world which now demands we have one, having blown pointless billions on Test-and-Trace and utterly useless PPE. And in case you think I’m being cavalier with the facts, here they are from a source you may conceivably trust more than you trust me:

Said the report from way back in 2021:

In May last year NHS Test and Trace (NHST&T) was set up with a budget of £22 billion. Since then it has been allocated £15 billion more: totalling £37 billion over two years.

· Read the report summary

· Read the conclusions and recommendations

· Read the full report: COVID-19: Test, track and trace (part 1) [PDF 330 KB]

· Public Accounts Committee

The Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) justified the scale of investment, in part, on the basis that an effective test and trace system would help avoid a second national lockdown - but since its creation we have had two more lockdowns.

In its report Public Accounts Committee says that while NHST&T clearly had to be set up and staffed at incredible speed, it must now "wean itself off its persistent reliance on consultants"; there is still no clear evidence of NHST&T's overall effectiveness; and it’s not clear whether its contribution to reducing infection levels - as opposed to the other measures introduced to tackle the pandemic - can justify its "unimaginable" costs.

And what of all that useless PPE? Again, don’t take it from me — take it from the same helpful UK Parliament official source...

Once again, here are the deets:

PAC also voices concerns about risk of further questionable payouts as NHS commissioning restructured under upcoming reforms.

• Read the full report (HTML)

• Read the full report (PDF)

• Read the report summary

• Find all publications related to this inquiry, including oral and written evidence

The Department for Health & Social Care (DHSC) lost 75% of the £12 billion it spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) in the first year of the pandemic to inflated prices and kit that did not meet requirements – including fully £4 billion of PPE that will not be used in the NHS and needs to be disposed of. There is no clear disposal strategy for this excess but the Department says it plans to burn significant volumes of it to generate power – though there are concerns about the cost-effectiveness and environmental impact of this “strategy”.

In a report today the Public Accounts Committee says that as a result of DHSC’s “haphazard purchasing strategy” 24% of the PPE contracts awarded are now in dispute - including contracts for products that were not fit for purpose and one contract for 3.5 billion gloves where there are allegations of modern slavery against the manufacturer.

The Committee says this only exacerbates DHSC’s “track record of failing to comply with the requirements of Managing Public Money even before the further exceptional challenges of the pandemic response”. It also raises concerns about “inappropriate unauthorised payoffs made to staff by health bodies”, with the planned large-scale NHS restructuring “increasing the risk of this happening again.”

I would point out that this report is from June 2022 and we now know a great deal more about the-then Government’s fiscal diarrhoea. This is not to make a political point, per se — arguably, a Labour Government would have spent even more, even less discriminately; the Left, after all, loved the whole idea of Lockdowns. Anyway, the point is that absolute power absolutely corrupts.

And Michelle Mone is still a Baroness.

I could wang on about depressing Covid-era stats-n-facts all day, though I won’t; you’re still not paying for my Substacks — such good value! — so I’ll move on, somewhat circuitously, to the point I really want to make about the ‘Covid Day of Reflection’ — which is that it is symptomatic of an out-of-control sentimentality in which this country is emotionally — if not very intellectually — increasingly ensnared.

Whether ‘Long Covid’ or (ironically) the near-deranged obsession with ‘mental health’, we’re officially — the stats back it up! — a nation of wusses weeping-and-retreating from the real world.

Even a Labour Government recognises this can’t continue—though it must necessarily couch the news in a way that won’t scare the horses. Check out this cleverly worded release, from the DWP, on March 6:

Note the use of ‘bolsters’, ‘support’, ‘sick and disabled’ ‘unlocked’ and ‘sustainable’. This is how a Labour Government necessarily grapples (veeeery softly-softly...) with the exceptionally tricky issue of wider reforms to an (entirely broken and wholly unsustainable) benefits system.

This is a particularly choice sentence:

1,000 work coaches [will be] deployed to deliver intensive employment support to sick and disabled people as part of the government’s Plan for Change, which will break down barriers to opportunity.

The ‘1,000 work coaches’ — a number presumably settled upon because it looks tidy — will cost a bit, I guess. However, if they can ‘deliver intensive voluntary support to around 65,000 sick and disabled people — helping them to break down barriers to opportunity, drive growth and unlock the benefits of work’ it will be money well-spent!

And I do so love ‘break down barriers to opportunity’ and ‘unlock the benefits of work’... disguising what is, after all, a kick up the arse for the Benefits Class (which now transcends older notions of what constitutes Class, incidentally). Whether you are a public or private sector worker, or on long-term out-of-work benefits, if you’re sitting at home signed-off from work because of your ‘mentals’ (as the youngsters have it) or your debilitating ‘Long Covid’ (whatever that is...), may I suggest reading this ( for me extraordinary, life-changing) book by Susan Sontag (click the button for an Amazon link).

In 1991, after six months spent bedridden with M.E (then known as ‘yuppie ‘flu’) I read this and it instantly gave me ‘ownership’ of my illness. (The details of my recovery are perhaps for another time, especially as —unbelievably! — I have never written about it previously).

Essentially, Sontag challenges the language — often military, invariably macho — used to describe diseases and the people affected by them. ‘Fighting’ cancer is the most obvious and popular, which in turn characterises the disease as an invading ‘other’ rather than as something that is yours, to own — and deal with (or fail to deal with) accordingly.

While there are no guarantees of recovery, re-thinking your relationship to illness can stop you feeling like a victim of it.

It may also empower the unwell to make their own decisions rather than handing themselves over, passively, to medics whose own professional relationship to illness is invariably not the same as having a personal relationship to illness.

Indeed, these two positions are very often entirely at odds; I will never forget the Consultant Oncologist who told my octogenarian father — who had bladder cancer — that he was ‘a nihilist’ for not wanting further intrusive procedures.

While the so-called Medical Industrial Complex (essentially any business providing health care for profit, including pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care services) used to be geared towards saving lives, I’d argue it is now largely about extending lives. And I think we saw the worst of this trend during Covid‚ when healthy youngster’s lives were curtailed unnecessarily — they just weren’t at risk, as all the stats reveal — in favour of extending the lives of their elderly relatives.

Whitney was right— children are our collective future! If you want kids to grow into well-balanced adults, get jobs, pay taxes, raise families and generally keep the UK’s show on the road for the forseeable future, then maybe it would have been better not to have treated them like second-class citizens during the pandemic? And if you did treat them as second class citizens then don’t be surprised when they want to bugger off and become Digital Nomads on a beach in Thailand, buying/selling Crypto while posting snarky stuff about Boomers on their Socials...

Just saying.

Anyway, here are some more stats, from www.gov.uk.

It is important to bear in mind that the phrase ‘Deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test’ means, in effect, Deaths of people who have recently tested positive for Covid—and not necessarily because of Covid. The vast majority of the people under 30 who died ‘with Covid’ already had health issues which made them particularly vulnerable. If you are prepared to go deeper into the stats via the occasionally opaque https://www.ons.gov.uk/ (where, incidentally, I spent huge amounts of time during 2020/21) you will find all the facts-n-stats, right there...

So, imho, Covid-19 has not only made terminal ‘victims’ of the people whose lives it took, it has made faux-victims of far too many who were uninterested in facts, favouring sentimentality over science.

And if that sounds tough… well, I make no apologies. Because I am tough.

I was a ‘Lockdown Sceptic’ during the pandemic and, as I mentioned in my previous post, I took some flak for it—though many other people took a lot more. I remain a ‘Lockdown Sceptic’ in 2025 simply because nothing — not a single thing — I have learned since then has persuaded me that locking down the UK was either a sensible or appropriate response to an unpleasant respiratory virus. This was a political decision, made by graduates in PPE — as in Politics, Philosophy and Economics — rather than by any of the PPE-wearing class.

I had Covid a couple of times and it was unpleasant. I had a friend of the same age who nearly died of it very early in the pandemic (now fine). However, these days I am also in a very strong position to talk about potentially devastating Grief — and how to navigate it. My thoughts on this subject won’t be for everybody, and that’s fine. However just because they may not be to somebody’s taste does not mean they are not valid.

I said this at the time— way before my 21 year-old son lost his precious life — and I’ll say it again, right here:

The death of somebody who has lived a full and functioning life for 60+ years longer than (for example) my son lived his may be deeply saddening, the circumstances — a chaotic hospital discharge into a locked-down care home, for example — deeply regrettable (and worth interrogating as a result), however it is not inherently tragic.

In our largely Godless western 21st century society we’ve all but forgotten that we all have an expiry date. With endless possible interventions many people habitually expect the Medical Industrial Complex’s Big Pharma to keep them going, come what may. Fear of death is big business.

Call me a sad old Boomer (my kids got there before you) but whenever I see a fit, earnest youngster in expensive running shoes pounding the streets with a furrowed brow, I just think why are you running? As *Generation Lockdown* obsessively embraces ‘wellness’ culture — effectively the Industrial Medical Complex in Birkenstocks — I would argue not only that this isn’t living your ‘best life’ but that it’s the outward manifestation of your fear of losing it.

You might call this hot-take ‘faith’, or ‘a belief system’, ‘spirituality’, ‘superstitious nonsense’ or ‘God-bothering’. Whatever. If I’ve learned anything at all in the 18 months since my son died, it’s that embracing the existence of death as the end of one journey and the beginning of another has helped me not merely to ‘manage’ my own (potentially devastating) grief— but to find unexpected beauty in that process, too. This knowledge is allowing me to navigate the rest of my life with infinitely more strength than I would ever have thought possible. Indeed, the only ‘victim’ of my son’s death was my son.

It’s time to shift the collective scared-to-death-of-Covid paradigm. Until then, Happy ‘Covid Reflection Day’!

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*GENERATION LOCKDOWN*: PART THREE… COMING SOON!

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‘Kathryn Flett’s Sixty Sense’ is still free to read. If you appreciate the work that goes into writing it then perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee! Thank you.