Covid-19

As the four horsemen of the apocalypse gather to ride through our hospital wards, we are about to see a collision between the brutality of the covid-19 epidemic and the Easter message of deliverance and hope. Across the Christian world, the very reverent are even now penning sermons to be live-streamed over the Easter weekend. Those that manage to avoid setting fire to themselves or activating the wrong sort of video filter will Dr No expects focus on the message that while media vita in morte sumus, there is beyond sure and certain hope of the resurrection. Never mind the divine escape hatch buried in that wonderful familiar phrase — the noun is hope, sure and certain merely adjectival flummery — there can be no doubt that the over-arching message will be one of sure and certain deliverance from the evils of plagues.

The GMC, in typically high handed fashion, yesterday dropped emails in countless retired doctors email inboxes, informing them that they have been co-opted back on the register with a license to practise, without so much as a by your leave. Many of these doctors will not have seen a patient in years if not decades, and many will be elderly. With due respect to Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller — who would no doubt have got today’s email had he not died last November — Dr No offers this update of a classic Beyond the Fringe sketch.

Happy is the epidemiologist who works on deaths. This observation arises because death is the ultimate hard end point (the patient is either dead or alive), and usually there is a more or less certain cause of death. These normal certainties however come under threat in times of crisis. In the face of the double barrelled assault of a combined pandemic and panicdemic, and the ensuing rush to ‘get something done’ it is all too easy to gloss over details, and start getting things wrong, perhaps seriously wrong.

numerology noun: the use of numbers to try to tell somebody what will happen in the future [Oxford learners dictionary online]

Of all of the miserable contortions and distortions wrought by the covid-19 pandemic, there are at least three that are sufficient to cause Dr No to come back from retirement. The first two have to do with the numbers, and the third has to do with the government response to those numbers. This post covers the first of those three concerns, and still to come posts will cover the other two concerns.