Current affairs - Covid stats and staff shortages

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 Prior to the Holyrood elections this year, Nicola Sturgeon held daily COVID briefings but stopped doing so after this. She claims this was because of the complaints about these from the opposition parties - but the opposition had complained about these before the election because they felt it provided her with an unfair advantage leading up to those elections. I suspect that Ms Sturgeon, now that the election is over, was quite happy to end those daily briefings as she’d got the pre-election coverage she wanted.
When it became clear that the daily briefings were no more I decided to use a spreadsheet to log the basic, daily statistics issued by the Scottish government (just so I could keep an eye on how the virus was spreading) - but I did not start doing this until the 8th of June. The statistics I logged were; the number of tests, the number of positive cases, the percentage of positive cases, the number in hospital, the number in ICU and the number of deaths.
On the 23rd of July I published a post indicating my concern about the UK government removing all COVID restrictions with the Scottish government relaxing Scotland’s restrictions soon afterwards (although some restrictions are still in place in Scotland as I write this).
Was I over concerned about what I feared? The number of new cases did indeed shoot up again but the percentage of deaths, especially amongst the double vaccinated, was substantially lower. At the same time the number of deaths did, once again, increase. Keeping in mind that I did not log the deaths for the whole of June, the number for this month was around 40, while the number of deaths for September was around 470 (I say ‘around’ to account for any data entry errors I may have made). I would say that this is far too many deaths and that this could have been kept to a far lower number if those relaxations had been delayed until everyone, who wanted to be vaccinated, had been vaccinated. It is also worth noting that the number of deaths in July rose to just under 200. This would suggest that we were being hit by another wave and that, for me, indicates that relaxing the restrictions, at that stage, was unwise and bordered on criminal.
In recent weeks we have also seen our hospitals and ambulance service struggling to cope, with the army called in to provide extra ambulance services. It’s my understanding that the problems experienced by the ambulance service were because of the log jam at our hospital A&E departments. The ambulances were doing fine until they got to the hospitals but found they were unable to offload their patients and had to wait until they could before responding to further calls. In addition to that, the Louisa Jordan hospital was closed at the end of March 2021. It’s also my understanding that the Louisa Jordan never admitted any COVID patients but it also strikes me that it was a mistake to close it before the pandemic was clearly under control - which it clearly isn’t, even to this day. The LJ may not have actually treated any COVID patients but it did help ease the strain on other aspects of the NHS and its ability to cope with the situation. The Scottish government has been forced into decisions it clearly didn’t want to make (like relaxing restrictions too soon and being unable to control Scotland’s borders) by Johnson’s cavalier UK government - but it has clearly also made many of it’s own mistakes (and I say that as an SNP supporter and member).
Of course, keeping the LJ open, not to mention keeping our normal hospitals functioning, has not been helped by staffing issues. The pandemic resulted in staff shortages with some self-isolating while others were also sick or dying from the virus. This situation has only been made worse by BREXIT as many workers returned to their own countries as a result of this. I remain flabbergasted that the opposition in Scotland, especially the Tories, attack the SNP for resuming plans (just plans) for IndyRef2 while Johnson’s Tory, UK government went ahead with BREXIT in the midst of the pandemic. Anyone with a modicum of sense should have seen that BREXIT was only going to add to staff shortages - and at a time when staff were going to be badly needed. Now, of course, we have the added problem of a shortage of truck drivers and getting food delivered to supermarkets, and fuel delivered to petrol stations, has reached almost emergency levels. Johnson and his government should be put on trial for endangering the safety of the UK population - and all of this simply because he wanted to ‘get Brexit done’, regardless of the cost in other ways.

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