May 5, 2020	INDEX
I think the way the virus is being handled is a crime. Two months on, we don't know basic things like how many have actually had it. How the Government thinks it can calculate this magical R number without knowing how many people have actually had the disease is a complete mystery. Some things we do know, however. For example, small children are very unlikely to get the disease, if they do they will have a mild version and are very unlikely to pass on the virus to anyone else. So the government shut the schools!!! We also know that people in their 20s and 30s are extremely unlikely to suffer a severe form of the disease and be hospitalised. So the government orders them to stay at home and thereby causes the most severe economic slump we have seen in hundreds of years. If there had to be a lockdown to save the NHS then why couldn't they have locked down people over the age of 45? The Government is trying out an idiosyncratic contact tracing app on the Isle of Wight. Firstly this is putting the cart before the horse because to have an effective system you need tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people to get on phones and talk to people at risk. The NHS knows how to do this but the project is being led by the spooks not the health workers. GCHQ sees this as an opportunity to gather information on you and me. As a consequence there will be legal actions which will slow it down and worse if it ever does come about it won't work with similar apps in the rest of Europe where they are keener on human rights than our government. As a consequence if you want to go to Calais you may soon have to go into quarantine for a fortnight because the UK app won't work with the continental system. It would be possible to see all this as a joke, but the damage they are doing to people (the poverty and even hunger caused, the loneliness and despair, the disruption to our children's education) just isn't funny. It is very very sad and very very unnecessary.
INDEX	May 5, 2020 Jonathan Brind