Cancellations

Hard on the heels of my blog post on the subject of the new lurgy, I find myself succumbed to a lurgy.  Only a mild one, but I’ve removed myself from this evening’s concert and meal out and will check NHS advice before resuming social life.

Or rather, I removed myself from the meal out with my friends, that Jen had arranged for after the concert.  ‘Cos the concert itself was one of many cultural events to be cancelled by its organisers.  This evening I’d’ve been in the audience, but three concerts I am (or was) due to perform in this spring have also been cancelled or are at risk.

Yet our government, unlike many others, hasn’t actually banned events like these.  They’re leaving it to event organisers.  I suspect there’s an important beneficiary of that: insurers of all kinds of events could be on the hook for financial losses if the government forced them to close down, but can escape that if the decision comes from event organisers.  Perhaps they’ll legislate but are leaving time for events near enough to have incurred substantial costs to be cancelled beforehand?

I also heard on t’wireless a discussion programme on coronavirus that included a number of callers.  A couple of interesting nuggets emerged from that: quite a few callers described symptoms very similar to mine (evidently it’s a lurgy “doing the rounds”), and many callers complained that they wanted to get tested for coronavirus but couldn’t.  Even those with very good reasons (for example a GP keen to know whether he would be personally safe to treat virus sufferers once he’s recovered) had faced an impenetrable wall of bureaucracy.

So we’ve moved from attempting to refusing to count cases, thus perhaps paving the way to fudge relevant statistics.  They’re talking about “herd immunity”, which would imply a large majority of the entire population going down with the virus.  At a 2% death rate, that could be a million deaths!

Quite a contrast to the draconian and stupid measures we had to rid ourselves of Foot&Mouth (against which a vaccine is available) back in 2001.  Have Brits really changed so much in less than a generation that we’ll no longer obey rules?  Particularly when the threat this time is to humans, and the rules (if well-considered) have a purpose other than to support the economic interests of a small number of very big and very rich farmers!