You Say Po-tay-toe

 

We are in the midst of a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic to really hit the UK.  Medical staff are reporting that hospitals in London and the South East are overwhelmed, with ICUs running, in some cases, at 137% capacity and patients having to be transported by ambulance as far away as Bristol for treatment. And yet none of the media are showing anything of the over-crowded wards, the NHS staff struggling - this time, largely without the moral support of the weekly 'Clap for Carers' that was such a feature of the first wave.  It was fine, seemingly, to have shown us the fleets of mortuary vehicles arriving at night in Spainish and Italian cities to remove the dead when the pandemic first hit Europe.  It was equally ok for us to be shown the piles of coffins and the temporary mortuaries at the back of New York hospitals when America was first hit.  But it's a feature of the UK experience that has been curiously absent.

Absent, too, is the media coverage of the nonsense Covid 'deniers' such as those filmed gathered, maskless, outside St Thomas' hospital on New Year's Eve, chanting "Covid is a hoax".  Although I can quite see why one might not wish to give them the oxygen of publicity, I'm at a loss to really understand why there is no factual reporting on the conditions inside British ICUs to counter these baseless conspiracy theorists.  One theory is that it is insensitive to the feelings of those whose relatives are currently in hospital being treated for Covid, and that it would make the stress and the fear so much worse for them.  Hmm... we weren't so concerned about their sensibilities before.  Indeed, reporting rarely is.

There are suggestions that individual medics have been threatened with dismissal, and entire NHS Trusts threatened with having their funding cut, should they allow journalists to see what is really going on in hospitals right now.  It's a theory that more than holds water when you know respected journalists have been struggling for weeks to get access.

So one does have to ask oneself just what kind of government would suppress the media in such a fashion?  One answer might be that of a Banana Republic, but I can't quite see the UK in that light.  Bananas are, after all, foreign, exotic things.  No, we're more at home with the humble British spud.  So a Potato Republic, then?  There's certainly more than a whiff of vodka about the place ...