Thanks for that interesting response @Kwif. I have been trying to figure out how we are all going to come out of all this, which as some have said may never end as far as Covid is concerned although hospitalisations are expected to go down.
In my region, we are fairly lucky with regard to hospital occupancy due to Covid. ICU occupancy with Covid stands at 24% but other regions are more than twice that, around 80% of French residents over 12 years old have now been double vaccinated and around 47 in every 100,000 of those have received a positive pcr test. There is talk now of a third dose along with the flue vaccine.
Not that these statistics really say much, I have more faith in what people in the hospitals are finding.
It seems the main difference in surgical and ICU procedures, outside of Covid, appears to be that in the UK you have a faster turnaround and back home after surgery than we do here. The problem I see is that hospital staff are already working flat out, as you say it takes many years to train consultants,doctors, nurses, xray and scan technicians.So it seems to me that although ploughing huge amounts of money into the system might solve a few problems in the short term clearing up the backlog of elective surgery is going to take a long time, however much money you throw at it. Even longer if long Covid, or new mutations take hold or vaccines aren’t quite as effective as we hope they are. IMO the economic recovery from Covid Is going to take quite some years in most countries, not just in health services but in all walks of life. Some industries will never recover, other industries will need a big change in their business models. Perhaps in some areas that might be a good thing.
Throwing money at health services may be good punlic relations but could be a complete waste if not targeted well.For instance it might be better to target the money towards prevention of things like obesity, diabetes, the other main causes of heart disease, alcoholism and drug abuse. But to get both short term and long term best results it might be necessary to take some sort of draconian measures. But if Covid has taught us anything, measures to force people to help themselves are not well received.
There will always be a vociferous group against such measures.
Perhaps the money would be best spent on researching new drugs and new techniques to solve certain problems. The Covid vaccines have undoubtedly shown us that given the right support scientists can achieve great things in a short timescale. But just as you have anti vaxxers you will have certain antis of any type of drug. Take statins for instance. On the opposite end of the scale there are people who think that they can eat all the fat they want and just up the dose of statins when their cholestérol levels rise.
The other problem is that the scientists and researchers of new drugs cannot guarantee success, however much money is thrown at a programme.
Finally, the money might be better spent on after care and care or nursing homes. After all it seems to be that it is the old and those with comorbidities who have suffered most from Covid 19. Where once these people would have died, now with the vaccine and with what doctors have learnt during the pandemic they will survive, but they will still be elderly and perhaps frail and the comorbities will still be there and to add to this there may be an unknown number of young people with severe long covid who will also need perhaps, long term care.
Much of the world has an ageing population whilst at the same time there is a decline in the birth rate. Even in France😊
So IMO the care and nursing sectors are going to be the long term growth industries. Residential/care/nursing homes in the UK, already cost 3 times the average cost per person in many European countries. One has to ask the question why? If it is the case that such homes are better subsidised by local government in those countries, perhaps the UK government should look at redirecting funds there as a priority. ( I admit to bias here as I have an elderly relative in a home in the UK at a cost of nearly £50,000 per year).
I am not picking on the UK here, I bring it up only because the UK Government have announced a plan for the future of the NHS and the care sector. Or at least to fund it.
Each country and each industry will be IMO faced with their own economic decisions to take post Covid 19 (or at least post having to learn to live with it). It could be seen as an opportunity to re-think our lives and make changes which we might otherwise have not made if we were not forced into it.
Or we.can just try to go on as before, as if it was a passing phase.
The aviation and travel industry have had nearly 2 years to consider their future and to look at all threats to their industries, and they are not just coming from Covid.
In GA there are many vehemently fighting against Covid passes or passports as curbs on their freedom. Yet they still expect to fly to someone elses home airport and criticise any barriers that may be put in their way, by people who also want freedom and whose freedom to go about their normal life they think you might be threatening. Or are these people just supposed to take your word that you are no threat to them.
Apologies from a woolly minded liberal who can appreciate both sides of some debates and still end up sitting on the fence shrugging🙂
This is not a day too soon:
They could have taken 91 percent of the sellers off the list – the shysters, crooks, wide boys and criminals.
What happened in other countries in Europe. Nobody wants to talk about that. Did the govt impose strict price controls on the kits and ensure that the websites for getting the results and linking them to the govt travel databases all work?
Tests in France are free to French Nationals.
They were free to everyone until some French people returning from the UK complained about the high prices of tests. So the Government here introduced a charge for non French nationals. It is capped I think (I may be totally wrong here) at €5 for the anti gen test and €29 for the pcr test.
Peter wrote:
think you are talking about “gaming” PCs, and parts for these will be in a short supply because so many people are sitting at home
I think the release of MSFS2020 had quite a bit to do with this. In that community, there is a massive shortage of graphic cards, some of which have the price of a small car. Really glad I got out of this hardware madness with FSX.
“Have a substance injected into your body against your will in order to be allowed to live a normal life.”
In the UK, if you had not acquired natural immunity to tuberculosis, demonstrated by the Heaf test, which involved multineedle skin injection, there was strong pressure to get the BCG vaccine. And also to have annual chest X-ray regardless of vaccination status. The only alternative was a blood test. I don’t know if any jobs were available to refusers.
PS at 9, when first tested, about half my ~36 pupil primary school class were immune, including me. None of us ever developed TB.
Strong pressure. But not law.
I’ve no natural immunity, no BCG, and no chest x-rays. No-one has ever questioned why I don’t have these things, or attempted to insist I should have them in order to live a normal life. If they did, they’d be told where to go.
I have never heard of jobs being conditional on a chest x-ray. But if they were, thankfully some sensible employment law has put an end to that by making it very clear that medical history isn’t territory where an employer has authority.
gallois wrote:
So IMO the care and nursing sectors are going to be the long term growth industries. Residential/care/nursing homes in the UK, already cost 3 times the average cost per person in many European countries. One has to ask the question why?
I was not aware of that, and I have to say I’m very curious because the cost of care homes is basically down to the cost of employing staff for them. It’s hard work done for close to the minimum wage. There are no real short cuts other than neglecting residents which is why all of the decent ones are sailing financially close to the wind. I used to look at the price tags of residential or nursing care and wonder how it can possibly be justified, then I worked in a home and realised that there were more full-time staff there than there were residents… by a fair margin.
I have heard of people going e.g. to nursing homes in Eastern Europe that are cheaper – which makes sense because wages are lower. But how you would run a cheaper nursing home in Germany or France I don’t know. Perhaps the classification of homes differs – e.g. is the threshold for when one moves to a nursing home from a residential home different from one country to another? The more people can do for themselves, the cheaper it is to look after them.
A quick google turned up this . The prices quoted there seem to mesh with my preconceptions of how high wages are in various countries.
I have no idea how COVID / long COVID factors into all of this. I thought originally that house prices would go down because of all the recently vacated properties. I’m not good at seeing the future. Demographics were such that we would be seeing an increasing care home population anyway. Most residents die within a few years of going into care, but people with long COVID might stay around for much longer… But are there that many of them who need to be institutionalised in the longer term? Locally I only know of one, but there may be others.
One thing that was very refreshing during the pandemic was that we learned to take risks again. We were much keener to get people home on the grounds that it was safer for them to be out of hospital, and we didn’t always follow-up people whom we might have followed up before. Somehow residential and nursing home placements seemed to happen much faster – possibly because they had lots of vacancies and were keen to take on new residents. By and large I think it worked out quite well for patients, getting them home before they became institutionalised and where they are likely to be more active. We saved many people from long and expensive journeys whose justification was primarily medicolegal. I don’t have the full picture, but we didn’t seem to have an epidemic of people falling over again and coming back in.
It also made life much easier in the hospital. I had a blissful few months with a fraction of my normal numbers of patients, but without enough COVID locally that we needed to go and help out. Perhaps I was a little pessimistic earlier about the prospects of doing a lot of surgery and catching up on the waiting lists. Surgeons like to operate and would be able to do a fair amount more if workload was reduced in other areas, which it could be.
Different care homes have different policies.
One way to minimise staffing is to admit only
and I bet you the lower prices published on the mainland reflected these types. My mum was in one of these when it had a more general policy but was chucked out when they changed the policy to the above.
The CV19 workload appears to be heavily concentrated in spots. Down here (Sussex) it is very low.
Peter wrote:
What happened in other countries in Europe. Nobody wants to talk about that
They are given out for free. Don’t know of anyone who have used them though. Right now they are mostly used in schools and universities.
The scams have been around travel testing, so probably most relevant where the domestic population travels abroad most.
Brits are big travellers to mainland Europe so it’s been easy to scam them. The travel related tests all require an “official report” (i.e. not 100% DIY).
The “pre return to UK” ones are the lateral flow tests which nowadays are DIY (they used to be done over video) and you email a photo to the firm which emails you back a certificate, so obviously it is trivial to fake it; even if they check the QR code on the test kit in the photo, you can just drop the reagent-only in it so you can be assured of getting back home. The “post return to the UK”, for 2x vacced people, is just one PCR test and that one goes to a lab, but is largely irrelevant now because there is no quarantine (for 2x vacced). Before this, you were not released from the quarantine until the negative test(s) came back, and the Indian script monkey call centres would harrass you on the phone until the Day 2 test result came back ok. The only real gotcha now is that the airline won’t fly you back home if you do a supervised pre return test (say, at an airport) and it comes back positive, which for a family of say 4 is quite a high risk.
Right now, domestic tests are free in the UK. You can order as many as you want, more or less.
