LONG COVID IS A THING ...

 

Early on last year doctors didn't know what to make of it when people complained about strange ailments - extreme fatigue, joint inflammation, brain fog, chest tightness, dizziness, shortness of breath to name just a few, that had suddenly descended on them. Some people remembered having flu-like symptoms a short while before, but because they weren't hospitalised or possibly even confined to their beds, they assumed it couldn't be Covid - and if they did wonder if it might be (perhaps a mild case) they were finding they couldn't get tested, anyway, as the tests were, understandably,  reserved for front-line workers. I know because I tried. 

Talking to my GP about the debilitating pains in my shoulders, elbows, wrists, hands and fingers - the inflammation in my right ankle, the memory / concentration difficulties and the fatigue that was disrupting my life on a daily basis, was met with the usual diligence and blood tests. When these showed nothing out of the ordinary, more tests followed.

The markers in my blood were normal - so what was happening to my body? Was it my cancer causing these pains and the tiredness? I'd had fatigue before with the hormone and radiation therapy for prostate cancer, but nothing like this.

Weeks passed and the fatigue and upper-body joint pains were still with me - the inflammation and pain in my right ankle, too, all of which meant no gym visits and I now needed a walking stick to get around. 

Then, slowly, a condition called Long Covid began to gain ground in the media and I found people were suffering many of the symptoms that I was experiencing - people who had had covid in many different forms of seriousness from four or five days of feeling 'unwell' to those hospitalised. 

I mentioned this to my GP and he nodded, sagely. He'd heard about L.C. and decided more tests were needed. These were inconclusive. But because the pains were causing me problems with my daily life both mentally and physically, he rather reluctantly (because they lower the immune system and covid was still rampant) gave me a course of steroids. Within days the pains stopped - although I put on a stone in weight (apparently normal with steroids). However the fatigue, brain fog and the ankle inflammation persisted.

The course of steroids stopped and the pains returned. More tests and hospital visits (physio for the ankle - ECGs and upper body Xrays). More weeks (and Christmas) passed and the peroneal tendon in my ankle was deemed to have split and needs surgical repair. 

Long Covid is now a recognised condition and people suffer all sorts of ailments as a result of it. Some complaints are short lived - others drag on and cause the host body (and mind) dire problems. Hopefully, the medical profession will get to the root cause of why Covid does this.  

    

I have been lucky. My problems with Long Covid have been mild compared to many and my fleeting association with Covid 19 left me standing - for which, after all the sad fatalities, I am grateful.  

E-scooters - the way forward?

 

This week in my city centre myself and other pedestrians were almost knocked off our feet by a head-to-toe black clad e-scooter rider slaloming along the pavement at what I can only regard was reckless speed.

My concern after seeing the rider disappear into the distance was what injuries someone could sustain being in collision with him / her. Many of these machines are capable of 30 mph, although it seems rental scooters are restricted to 15.5 mph, but, even then, an elderly person or a child being hit at that speed by what could be 150 - 180 lbs of rider and machine could sustain life changing injuries.  

In light of the fact that privately-owned electric scooters are prevented from being on public areas, I can only assume that the machine in question had been hired from somewhere local. Had it been a motorbike cruising the pavements I could at least have taken the registration and reported it to the police. However, these e-scooters have no markings and that concerns me as how can anyone identify the rental company and then the person who rented said machine without a visible registration plate? How would anyone know who to contact in the event of an accident where the rider does not stop?

I have, subsequently, taken up both the issue of speed and registration plates on these scooters with my local MP and the Government's Transport Minister Grant Shapps. 

Control - new balls needed?

A century ago a company* set out to control the oil business. The secret of its success was control - it dominated production, ran all the refineries and pipelines and owned all the ships, tankers and petrol stations. It squeezed out competition with ruthless price cutting until only it was left. 

Does that M O ring any bells? Are there certain online companies out there doing the same thing nowadays? Does it matter? It should do, because the next thing that oil company did when it had the control it sought was to hike the prices. 

Some may argue that our high street stores should have upped their online game, should have seen online shopping coming - and Covid will not have helped, with everyone being locked-down - unable to visit shops and stores. But these tech giants are gaining more than just our shopping from us - they have data on everyone who uses their facilities (yes, my books are on Amazon Kindle - so, me included) and do we know what they do with that data? Do they sell it to the highest bidder - to any bidder? Does it matter? Well, it might if it's sold to someone you would rather it wasn't. But you have no control over that - you don't know and have no way of finding out with whom these tech giants are trading your personal information. And it's not just the data you give them, it's the data they collect from algorithms which record our every move online and many of our moves off-line. 

A series of anti-trust lawsuits has been laid against Facebook and Google in the US courts in a bid to stop their monopolistic behaviour and the Australian government has taken up the cudgels, too. Google's response has been to threaten to withdraw its service from Australia. Which rather sounds like - if we can't play football our way we'll take our ball home. Maybe the rest of the world needs to get some balls of its own!   

Tobias Ellwood (chair of the Defence Select Committee) made these points in an article in The Mail on Sunday (7th February 2021) he also wrote:  

"These firms assume we have become so dependent on them that they are irreplaceable, an essential part of life, like the air we breathe. This is not so."     

"Meanwhile, we watch our high streets being emptied of shops that have been household names for generations, victims of internet retailers such as Amazon that pay derisory amounts of tax and whose physical presence is merely a few giant warehouse hubs." 

"The internet's pioneers saw it as a way to share information free from Government control. How ironic that their creation has now been taken over by unaccountable corporations much bigger and more powerful than most countries."             

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*For information: The company was Standard Oil and it made its owner, John Rockerfeller, wealthier than Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and google billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry page are today - combined.  

2020 et al

Well, as we all know, 2020's been a hard year with Coronavirus sadly leaving its mark on people and the economy. Deaths linked to the virus (deaths from any cause within 28 days of a positive covid test) have just exceeded 100,000 in the UK and it doesn't look like letting up any time soon - although the vaccine(s) should begin to bring some hope of fighting it.  

Viruses are not new - I believe the earliest recorded cases of influenza were around Europe in the twelfth century and often it's people with underlying health conditions who die from it, but, as we have seen from Coronavirus, that isn't always the case. 

Then of course just around a 100 years ago we had the Spanish Flu which worldwide infected around 500 million people - and is suspected of killing 50 million - mostly the young and fit! Other than that it was similar to Coronavirus in that there was no existing vaccine and it was overwhelming hospitals and other medical services. (As a matter of interest - the UK Office of National Statistics tells us that deaths from influenza during the years 2013 to 2018 averaged around 17,000 per year -- of which 14,500 per year were in the 65+ age bracket.)

So, we have had to learn to socially distance - stay in - work from home (where possible) wear masks and not put ourselves and others at risk of infection. 

What we are also learning is that online shopping has become 'the thing', but at a cost - our towns and cities are not only losing their big department stores, but smaller businesses are failing, too. No foot-fall for weeks / months on end is having its effect on the owner's ability to pay expenses (rents, business rates, tax, salaries, etc). Whether the big stores have brought this upon themselves by not investing in online options - or whether doing that was just going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, who knows. But what it does mean is the huge corporations (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc etc) are hoovering up all that trade and at some stage will have no competition whatsoever. They will become all powerful - and we know what absolute power does. It would be different if those huge organisations paid ... I was going to say 'paid their fair share of tax in each country from which they receive income', but, of course they will say they do. And, perhaps, legally, that's correct, but is it morally correct? If they side-step paying then how do we keep services like the NHS or  local government departments operating? Because with the closure of big businesses comes big unemployment - and all that brings in personal and financial anguish? Governments need to up their game to ensure that these huge companies have no wriggle-room - perhaps we should make these companies advertise how much tax they've paid as a percentage of sales in those countries - maybe it could go alongside their fancy logos. Then consumers can make a choice about with whom they spend their hard earned cash. 

Well, that's my rant for today. Sorry it's taken so long to get into print again, here. 

Stay safe, folks.