Taking breath

Have just finished an honest and heartfelt book about what it has taken, certainly in the first few months of spring 2020, to deliver medical help in a pandemic and deal with all the difficulties and pressures it presents individually and collectively. It’s author was keeping a journal (and no doubt continues to write in one) of her frontline experiences as a doctor as well as a few observations and comments about the bigger picture. It is well worth a read.

Is it hopelessly naive, anachronistic even, to expect verbal sincerity and candour from today’s politicians in calamitous times? ‘I must level with you,’ the Prime Minister told us early on, and I craved and needed that levelling. But in my darkest moments, I worry that all those televised Covid press conferences were used increasingly to distract us from what was really at stake. That the flood of pseudoscientific statistics was intended, primarily, to bamhoozle – to leave the population dazed, bemused and therefore compliant. When you are invited daily to celebrate Supersized statistics – 100,000 tests a day, no, make that 250,000 – it is easy to lose sight of what matters.

Rachel Clarke Breathtaking