Known global cases of
Covid-19 nearing 1 million. Recorded deaths 44,000.
Continuing saturation coverage by the news media
of rising numbers of confirmed cases and fatalities, of the day’s current
version of what the newly re-respected experts are saying is the best way to
manage the situation, and of the latest failures in the supply of essential
protective & testing equipment. After all, it’s not as if pandemics have
been recorded in history since the Plague of Athens in 430 BC, or that there’s
been a recent cluster of zoonotic respiratory diseases to give us all a
heads-up, otherwise we‘d have to conclude that all that expensive Eton &
Oxford education in the current government is worth fuck-all in the real world.
With Prime Minister Winston de Pfeffel Johnson on a
sickie, the daily parrot-of-spin slot has been passed to a sequence of
swivelling underdonkeys - Raab, Govey, Sharma, to spout the current waffle
about how all the zig-zagging and u-turns of Britain’s War Against Corona have
been part of a meticulous forward-thinking strategy, just like the long term
fragmentation and underfunding of the NHS & devaluing of essential service
workers.
To put the fatality statistics into context,
according to the World Health Organisation, 3.8 million premature deaths
annually are attributed to ambient air pollution – mainly from the burning of
fossil fuels, and 6 million children die of malnutrition each year. That’s not
to diminish for one moment the catastrophe and tragedies unfolding around us but
merely to reflect on the viral obliviousness to what lies behind our affluence
in the so-called developed world.
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