Wednesday 30 December 2020

30/12/20 Bobbington and the failure of the state

A rain-free day for once, although the temperature stayed at just 2 C all day. Feeling a need to confirm that the outside world still exists outside the version of it that lives on the internet, I took the car out for a drive and ended up at the Bobbington nature reserve just outside the village of Moreton. That gave me a reasonably decent walk, and as it's all on paths I abandoned the walker and did it with just a stick. However, I did underestimate the amount of mud I'd find on paths that had clearly been flooded by the recent heavy rain...

Nothing else to report. Still waiting for copies of GP letters from the two neurologists, still waiting for contact from an oral surgeon, and of course still waiting for a COVID vaccination date. The GP surgery website tells me that they will be working together with several other practices in a "Primary Care Network" and that they have identified a Medical Centre on the western edge of Chelmsford as a suitable venue because its layout is good for social distancing and queue management. Apart from that, it seems they have very little information about what they will be expected to deliver, and how. Seems to me that they haven't got enough parking available, especially with the requirement for drivers to wait 15 minutes after injection in case of a negative reaction, but perhaps they've taken that into account.

If we've learned one thing from COVID so far, it must be that the machinery of the state has been completely not up to the challenge. Everything from the failures of Public Health England through to accepting volunteers to help with testing and vaccination has been frustrated by an obsession with irrelevant rules and targets and a failure to show the flexibility needed to cope with an unexpected crisis or to co-operate with the private sector, all combined with far too much panic spending. We need a complete revolution in how we get things done, and what better an opportunity to reboot all these things than Brexit?

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