One mention of possible fuel shortages and people are queueing up all over the place. On the plus side, once these clowns have emptied all the filling stations my bike will still work and the roads will be quieter.
As a fellow cyclist I'd concur with that, except blaming the panic buyers is blaming the symptom, not the actual problems. The actual problems here are complete lack of Government planning and handling of the shortage problems, and, as they've often done with covid, the media collectively sensationalising a particular story, leading to hysteria and negative reactions. In an ideal world media behaviour would be investigated for this, but for now one advantage of the supply shortages is the media and Government are more focused on them than on what covid is doing.
‘A bit of a mystery’: why hospital admissions for Covid in England are going down
Analysis: Experts say it is first time since start of pandemic that sustained decline is recorded out of lockdownwww.theguardian.com
Falling infections despite more mingling.
What do you mean back to the pub? I've been here for 18 months, waiting for to all blow over
There have been excess deaths reported by the ONS for several weeks now, albeit not in excess to the extent of previous pandemic waves. What is different this time though is that excess deaths would still exist even if nobody was reported as dying with covid, so fallout from restrictions in this way may well be being seen here.
The thinking with heart attacks are that people often have a few warnings before the big one. It's surprisingly easy to brush these off as anything from muscle pain to indigestion, but if they are detected and taken seriously can often lead to earlier treatment much better survival rates. If heart attacks return to normal and survival rates don't go down then happy days, but the worry is that a lot more people will be coming in with less-treatable conditions or not even making it to hospital.
Twenty months or so ago, if I had a vague pain in my chest, I would have got an appointment to see my doctor in person. Now…
The NHS has been failing to recruit anything like enough GPs for 10 years. That's been a training issue combined with people seeing that the job entails long unpleasant hours and deciding to pass on it. Covid and Brexit have brought it to a head, but the fact is that GPs have too many patients to even pretend to provide the service anybody expects.
Sadly it will also mean the loss of many jobs as some employers have kept people furloughed for too long.
Good thing that there are so many job vacancies at the moment. I hope everyone who is laid off can find a good, sustainable job offer.
Individuals choose how they respond to media reporting, so I would collectively blame the panic buyers for the situation we find ourselves in now, especially as we went through something similar with food and essential goods in spring 2020 and I would have thought lessons would have been learnt, but no. It really doesn't take that much effort to do a bit of research on a claim or report, the problem is people are cognitively lazy and can't be bothered to use a bit of time and mental effort to fact find, so they lap up buzzwords and phrases that are taken out of context because that requires no effort.
Unless the Government announce a massive funding for training in the relevant areas of shortage, those vacancies are not getting filled quickly, especially as existing training spaces are filled up by the covid backlog created.
The problem is there is something of a "prisoners dilemma", the best situation for everyone is if noone panics, but if other people panic and you don't then you are the one that finds yourself running out of supplies.
Might go a bit higher first and then drop back, but there's certainly a fairly hard limit on how long it can go on at these numbers. Good to see nobody really panicking about it anyway
Perhaps the lack of panic is due to the lack of furlough.
