Tag: Covid-19

Paying for Vaccination

(4th December 2020) As the weather worsens the coming vaccine is good news. The priority order seems reasonable.

However, what does a 40-year-old rich person do? They will be down the list. Nevertheless, I am sure that there will be clinics in Switzerland who will oblige, for a fee.

So here is an idea based on three known facts.

  1. There are wide levels of income inequality in this country.
  2. The vaccination programme will cost a lot of money-eventually paid for by the taxpayers (us).
  3. The rich are in the best position to minimise their tax payments (see Lady Green who owned Arcadia taking a £1.2 billion dividend) a few years ago and paid no tax on it.

Thus, a logical idea- given that people drafted in to give the injections are paid the curious figure of £ 11.32 per jab (call it £15.00 to allow for admin and NI), we could set aside 5% of the jabs for people to pay to jump the queue. I suggest £5,000 which is probably cheaper than going to Switzerland twice. This would pay for 332 ordinary people to have injections.

Assuming 100,000 rich people took up this offer it would pay for over 33 million jabs. Given that the top one percent of the adult population would number over 400,000 people this is a modest proposed take up. (If Lady Green had paid tax of 30% this would have covered nearly another two and a half million jabs).

Suggest this to anyone you know with power and influence; I wonder what the Daily Mail would think?

For the Manga not the few

Thank you NHS

(13 March 2020) Not much more to say on Covid-19 except my paper said that 80% of us will get it and half a million will die. Which is a bit worrying.

However today I want to praise the NHS.

I had a cataract operation this week- at an outpost of Moorfields at a local hospital. It seemed to go well and all the staff were extremely courteous and professional. Inevitably, and quite reasonably, they had a session that processed six people in a batch so I was there a few hours.

Nevertheless, it was still at no cost to me other than a cab home. In the USA it would have cost at least $4,000 and possibly more if it was complicated. So much and many plaudits for our glorious NHS.

However my rant is about one of the patients who complained bitterly about not being first on the list (they actually prioritised the order so the people who appeared quite ill went first), not appreciating what they were getting. It demonstrates the false expectation of entitlement and one I will return to in future posts. Sadly I did not remonstrate with him as he had someone with him who was also angry and had many more muscles than those that protrude from my body.

Oh well; here’s a kitten.

The Corona virus-COVID-19

This whole story is quite scary as one begins to wonder whether it will be the event at the beginning of the end, a precursor of it or just another bad thing.

Those of us who watch post apocalyptic movies particularly, will be struck by the similarities to a zombie movie. Over the opening credits you see newspaper headlines and ticker-tape under the news; it starts with a case or two here or there, there is the first death, it spreads to other countries and then quarantine kicks in.
Then tipping point is when the infected break out of quarantine and start to rampage. I believe the government are, or probably should be, making plans to cut off the Wirral Peninsula.

However the most serious point and the one we would all like to know, is what chance one has of dying if one contracts the virus.

The winter flu, with which we are all familiar, has a death rate of roughly one in 10,000 cases. This figure came from a serious and impenetrable American website; it does the calculations and is useful if you understand statistics. American Statistics
Public Health England also publish an annual lengthy report which you might find interesting though it does not seem to spell out the odds of dying from Flu. http://Flu Report 18-19

Of course, for the winter flu many people are vaccinated which is not the case in the current situation, so crudely, with around 60% of over 60s vaccinated we could double the rate to two in 10,000 cases.

So to repeat what are the odds of dying from COVID-19?

The BBC, helpfully, have this information in a drop-down menu at the bottom of the page below, (the bit people don’t usually scroll down to) BBC story
If you are healthy then they quote 0.9% or crudely 90 in 10,000 cases but for the elderly, vulnerable or ill it rises to 11% or roughly one 1,100 in 10,000 cases.
So it seems we should not ignore it, take the sensible hygiene precautions and, in my view, ensure you have enough food at home to ensure you for can self isolate for up to three weeks.
Bit grim but here’s a picture of a kitten to cheer you up.