WHEN I WAS a child, we had ‘outbreaks’ of diseases. Living very close to Aberdeen, I miraculously survived the famous (only if you lived near Aberdeen) typhoid outbreak of 1964, which hospitalised hundreds of people. The only thing it killed, temporarily, was the corned beef trade, as the outbreak was traced to a tin of the popular Fray Bentos product. Life soon returned to normal, as did the consumption of tinned meats.
That was the first and last ‘outbreak’ that I can recall. Almost anything that more than a couple of folks have caught since has been named an ‘epidemic’. That sounded much more threatening, until it was superseded by the term ‘pandemic’, which seems to be the ubiquitous phrase for anything that used to be an epidemic.
Trying to distinguish an epidemic from a pandemic is a fruitless task. The definitions seem to differ depending on where you look and, for all intents and purposes, are interchangeable. The problem for the public health brigade is that, clearly, neither term instils sufficient fear into the population, as demonstrated by the Covid-19 fiasco.
Admittedly, they rode high for a time. However, very few people, for example, still wear face masks, apart from a few fainthearts, virtue signallers, and those once again mandated by their NHS employers. Enthusiasm is waning for covid vaccines. Nevertheless, they must be given credit for their tenacity; they simply don’t give up.
In their efforts to paralyse us with fear, pepper the joy of the festive season with a little misery and turn our minds towards the perpetual worship of the NHS, we now have a new category of killer to cope with: the ‘quad-demic’. In case you are interested, this is an allegedly lethal cocktail of ‘flu, Covid-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and norovirus’.
The quad-demic didn’t seem to do the trick, as the irresponsible British public celebrated the birth of Jesus, visited their families and partied like it was 1999. The outcome? According to NHS England, this has resulted in a ‘tidal wave’ of flu and, in a week, a 70 per cent increase in hospital cases.
On New Year’s Eve, clearly concerned that we were not listening, the quad-demic has been upgraded with the epithet of ‘terrifying’. How do we know this? Apparently, over a quarter of British people, or at least those gullible enough to take a test, have tested positive for influenza. This does not take into account any false positives, which plague this kind of testing, and it does not report how many of these people were symptomatic. In other words, such testing statistics are virtually meaningless.
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, NHS National Medical Director, said that the worst of the tidal wave was on its way. There have been almost 4500 flu patients every day, with 211 people in critical care. Therefore, 0.0078% of the population is hospitalised with flu and 0.00037% is in critical care. Expressed like that, the tidal wave seems more like a puddle in a car park. So, why the fuss? Obviously, it is to do with pressure on the NHS which, above all, must be ‘saved’.
The usual guilt-inducing measures are employed to imply that it is all our fault, thus it has been reported that the surge in infections will continue to pick up pace in the coming days as a result of more people socialising indoors over the Christmas and the New Year period. Mask-wearing is encouraged, social distancing rears its ugly head and our old favourite lockdown-style measures have been recommended by virologist from the University of Warwick, Professor Lawrence Young. Laughably, it is recommended that you isolate yourself if you have the flu. In my experience, as flu is a near-death experience, the last thing you would want to do is move, eat, drink or speak.
Of course, like Covid-19, all things are not equal with flu. It tends not to strike people down in the prime of their lives; the NHS is not overwhelmed with athletes and extreme sports enthusiasts. People in general good health, while not immune to flu, tend to pull through. The usual suspects are the most vulnerable:
- Adults 65 years and older.
- Children younger than five years old and especially children younger than two.
- Individuals that are pregnant.
- Having a medical condition like a chronic lung disease (e.g. asthma, COPD, bronchiectasis, or cystic fibrosis), heart disease, stroke, or chronic kidney disease, amongst others.
I am the last person to play down the severity of flu. I have had it and, as I write, my son, his wife and two of my daughters, both nurses, have it. It is a horrible infection which I sincerely hope to avoid. However, as explained by Dr Clare Craig, flu is not spread asymptomatically, therefore a person testing positive, who has no flu-like symptoms, poses minimal danger to others. Moreover, the flu virus is airborne, meaning that it quickly spreads after a few people with symptoms have it.
To cut a long story short, there is very little that anyone can do either to stop it spreading or, once it is spreading, to avoid encountering it. Most people who do encounter the influenza virus will never know it, as their immune systems will deal with it.
Attempts by our public health masters to terrify us into submission with the latest ‘demic’ are just that: attempts to terrify us. Given that they know the above facts as well as we do, and that measures such as face masks and lockdowns are futile, we can only speculate about their motives. If only there was a vaccine!
