Nightingale Hospitals, Hospices or Workhouses? What is the Exit Plan?

Now that we’re about to enter a second lockdown in England, we should all be asking what the exit plan is?  Last week the Office for National Statistics announced that 568,000 people have had Covid.  In one way, that’s good news; if we can keep that infection rate up, we’ll all have had Covid within two years, so we can get back to normal.  If it’s an underestimate and more of us caught it in the first wave, we might even manage to get to herd immunity by Christmas 2021.  (I’ll come back to the “h” word later on).  But nobody else seemed to welcome the news.  Such is the level of fear which has been spread in the last year, that the very mention of these big numbers has been taken as evidence that we all need to lock ourselves down again.  Epidemiologists are being wheeled out with scary predictions of just how bad it will be.  Nobody seems to be giving any serious thought to how we might be able to live with Covid.

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The Hearables Market – a Covid Update

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”  Dickens’ could have written that opening line to preface an account of the Covid year for the hearables industry.  Over the last six months consumer demand for earbuds has risen to an unprecedented level.  In contrast, hearing aid manufacturers have been dealt a body blow, with sales tumbling by up to 75%.  As one industry executive put it “we’d have done better if we were an airline”.  Covid has also had unexpected effects on the service industries which have been traditional drivers of hearables growth.  Audio streaming services like Spotify have seen listening times go down, while video streaming and video conferencing have experienced unprecedented demand.

As countries came out of lockdown during the summer, we saw further shifts in usage, but it’s apparent that overall, hearables have done well out of the crisis.  That trend looks set to continue as we face a second wave of the pandemic and further lockdowns.

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Keep Quiet – Lockdown’s over

There haven’t been a lot of positives about the Covid lockdowns, but one of the few which has been widely reported is that we can hear birdsong again.  As traffic volume has diminished and we work at home, the level of noise around us has fallen to a point that most of us can’t remember.  It means that we can hear things we haven’t heard for many years.  On the flip side, we’re missing the sound of social interaction.  As restrictions are relaxed, it’s interesting to consider whether we have learnt anything from this period of unexpected quietness and how it might change our lives going forward.

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Gambling with Testing and Tracing

We regularly read about fraud in sport, whether that’s cricket, football or horse racing, where a player accepts money to affect the result.  There are arrests, trials and the culprits either banned or sent to jail.  But what happens when a Government Minister takes a bet on a Government policy and then manipulates the data to win it?

It may sound bizarre, but that’s what has happened here in the UK, with Matt Hancock, our Secretary of State for Health.  In an interview on LBC with Nick Ferrari, he was asked if he would take a £100 bet on reaching his target of accomplishing 100,000 coronavirus test each day by the end of April.   Anyone with a scrap of morality would have answered “I don’t gamble on people’s health”, but not young Matty.  Although not an ex-Etonian, like many of this cabinet colleagues, Matty always looks as if he wants to be seen as one of the posh boys who likes a flutter.  After a brief hesitation, he accepted the bet on behalf of NHS charities.  I’m sure that Nick Ferrari thought he was betting on a certainty, unaware that the result was about to get fixed.

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Tom Lehrer Revisited – My Lockdown

Looking back on the past few months, everything I’ve written has been about the effects of Covid-19 and lockdown.  It’s all still best described as a global experiment, where most of our politicians are still guessing. 

It felt that it was probably time to lighten the tone.  I grew up with the songs of the great American satirist, Tom Lehrer, which still feel as fresh as when they were written.  Lockdown seemed to be a good opportunity to revisit and update them, so here’s my offering based on one of his classics – My Home Town.

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