When it comes to coronavirus, I’ve got bad news and good news.
The bad news is that, at 6.6, we have fewer intensive care beds per 100,000 population than not only Germany (29.2) and France (11.6), but even such economic powerhouses as Cyprus (11.4) and Latvia (9.7).
Altogether Her Majesty’s realm possesses merely 4,250 such beds. Thus, should coronavirus claim more patients at the same time, doctors will have to claim God-like powers and decide who lives and who dies.
One suspects they aren’t going to assess the agglomerate of each person’s human qualities before drawing lots. Their decisions are more likely to be based on actuarial factors only, such as age, medical history, life expectancy and so on.
Hence we can confidently look forward to a wholesale cull of wrinklies, especially those in dodgy health. One suspects that people with deformities and learning difficulties also have much to fear.
But rejoice, for here’s the good news. We have the NHS, a fully socialised system of medical care that none of those other, backward countries can boast.
Hence we lead them by a wide margin in such vital job descriptions as directors of diversity, facilitators of optimisation, optimisers of facilitation, administrators, administrative assistants, multiculturalism consultants et al.
That’s why I have it on the good authority of popular mythology that all those foreigners, swarthy or otherwise, envy us something rotten. So far they’ve managed to contain such feelings enough not to imitate the NHS – but give them time.
Once they’ve seen how expertly all those directors of diversity usher old people towards the morgue, they’ll come round to our way of thinking. Isn’t the NHS grand?
“doctors will have to claim God-like powers and decide who lives and who dies.”
To some extent doctors have been doing this forever.