My thoughts have been drifting this week ... dipping in and out of an emotional roller-coaster driven by heartfelt interviews from the care home frontline and from the homes of those bereaved by Covid-19
A 13-year-old boy dying in hospital without his mum or dad at his bedside just makes any parent want to weep. Not being able to say goodbye to your mum as she passes – the surrogate NHS nurse holding her hand in your place. Like so many of you – I imagine – we wept at such heart-wrenching stories when they appeared on TV.
I have also laughed with joy and cried with warm compassion at the deeds of good and the acts of courage or kindness. Who could fail to smile at 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore trying to raise £1,000 for NHS staff welfare by walking round his garden … and the astonished look on his face when the Just Giving page rocketed into the millions, and on to the dizzying heights of £20 million and more (and counting).
Yes, living in a box this week has been a mixed bag of highs and lows, and new contemplations.
I’ve heard myself muttering away my frustrations at the nonsensical assumptions, comparisons and references made by commentators and contributors to the daily statistics rolled out on TV, radio and in newspapers from Government sources as to how many people are affected and how many have died in various parts of the country.
And I’ve also got really frustrated by headlines proclaiming that the USA has overtaken Italy as the worst-affected country for Covid-19 deaths. Seriously? The USA with a population of 331 million and Italy with 60 million. This was actually a headline message on national TV news broadcast across the UK this week.
This fixation with “league tables” and comparisons is utterly misleading – if anything, comparisons should be made per 100,000 of population, but even then ...
So, then I turn to my Scottish statistics. And every day the map of our little country is displayed in the tabloid press showing official coronavirus deaths in the regional areas of Greater Glasgow and Clyde compared with Lothian and Lanarkshire and Grampian and Tayside and Ayrshire & Arran and Forth Valley and Fife and so on.
Let’s face it, three months ago only around 3% (or 3,000 per 100,000 of the population) knew what an epidemiologist was or what the word epidemiology even meant.
Now everyone listens intently to every word these experts in public health utter. So let’s interpret for ourselves what the Scottish stats map is actually telling us.
So, what would an epidemiologist make of the league table map showing infection and death rates? The names on the map are the geographical borders of our health boards. The map shows us that most deaths are in NHSGGC, second highest is Lothian followed by Lanarkshire and then Grampian etc.
Guess what? The correlation fits exactly the percentage of the Scottish population in each area. The largest by far is NHSGGC with 1.2 million population followed by NHS Lothian with 800,000, then Lanarkshire with 655,000 and Grampian with 500,000.
Lightbulb moment: in an area where fewer people live there are fewer infections and fewer deaths, and where there are more people there are more infections and more deaths.
We know official death rates are but a veneer of the actual casualty rate but they do give us an indication if things are rising, slowing or levelling – and of just how devastating this damned virus is to so many families who are losing loved ones before their time.
But let’s stop the daily production of the stats map.
Talking of keeping things in proportion and meaningful, I’ve also spent some time reflecting on the huge events that have taken place on this planet over the last few thousand years, and there have been many devastating plagues and huge disasters. I bet it’s true that when any really big thing happens the people of that particular era are almost certainly going to regard what is happening to them at that particular time as be the biggest thing ever.
There have been some horrendous famines, earthquakes, floods, plagues, bloody conflicts – historically the wars between the world’s religions have a long and shocking bloody history too.
And yet, what a sharp intake of breath was heard across the globe when it was announced that the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan were being put on hold until at least 2021. That’s not happened for more than 100 years – the last time being in 1916 due to Second World War.
But maybe it’s not such a really big thing in world history terms. After all, the Games may be postponed but the eternal flame will not be allowed to go out. At least in that regard many of us have something in common with that symbol of hope – just like the eternal flame we won’t be going out any time soon either.
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