A Killer Disease Is Rampant In Hospitals Around The World

In the US more people died of covid in January this year than died of the flu in the whole of 2023.

It’s the same story in the UK, where covid in January was a bigger killer in one month (more than 1,300 deaths) than flu is in many full years (there were 1,150 flu deaths in England & Wales in the last non-pandemic year).

The scandal upon the scandal is that some of the dead were infected with covid - now far and away the world’s leading infectious disease killer - in hospital.

Just this week the partner of Rhod Gilbert, a famous Welsh comedian undergoing treatment for stage 4 cancer, spoke out against the medical malpractice that leads to hospital-acquired covid infections.

There are too many anecdotes to list of people being infected with covid in hospitals, some of whom have then died. Family of those infected in hospital who died have reported fighting to have covid added to death certificates.

How many cancer patients, transplant patients or critically-ill people have been infected in a hospital with the the world’s leading cause of death by infectious disease? How many ended up dead as a result?

We don’t know, since public health either gave up on monitoring or won’t tell us. We have to comb through social media to find out.

I can hardly believe that’s a line I’m writing in 2024.

In Australia it took a Freedom of Information request to find out 5,614 people had been infected with covid in hospitals in Victoria, a state in the southeast of the country, and the country’s second smallest.

Public health is either keeping secret or not tracking at all the spread of the world’s most infectious disease. In hospitals.

Hospitals should be places of treatment, safety and comfort, especially for the most vulnerable in society.

They should not be places of danger.

When the places in society that should be most safe from infectious disease become the least safe, this is a sign that something is going badly wrong.

Yet where are the headlines?

Where is the outrage?

Where is the professional reaction?

Where is the political reaction?

It’s a huge scandal. Off-the-scale medical malpractice and negligence. With masks and air filtration these are entirely preventable deaths. We know this.

Yet apart from a handful of activists, there is silence. But within this silence one fact is being communicated very loudly: something is deeply broken.

Whether it can be fixed is an open question.

Of course public health didn’t just give up on controlling Sarscov2 spread in hospitals. They gave up on controlling it everywhere.

This collapse of public health would have been unthinkable before covid.

Tuberculosis, prior to covid the biggest infectious disease killer, was rightly considered serious enough that outbreaks were (and still are monitored) and investigations launched.

Just this week the UK announced it would investigate why TB cases are higher than they were before the pandemic. I wonder whether these experts will consider that TB can lie in a state of dormancy and reactivate when a person’s immune system is weakened? And that covid weakens immune systems?

We shouldn’t hold our breath.

Prior to the pandemic, whenever there were hospital outbreaks of the ‘superbug’ MRSA, or of the bacterium C. difficile, it made the news. Investigations were undertaken. When people died, legal actions were launched. Hospitals were sued. It only took a few hundred cases for the wheels to be set in motion.

This happened because there was an expectation that hospitals were places of safety. There was an expectation that no further harm should come to a person when seeking treatment for illness.

We agreed, culturally, that it was utterly negligent when this happened.

That expectation has died under a mountain of covid propaganda and a desire for normality so powerful that a form of cultural hegemony has arisen: from the political left to the right, covid has been disappeared. A collective vow of silence has been taken.

A silence that leads to normalisation which leads to more disease which leads to more silence, in a public health death spiral.

A big fear many of us had was that the normalisation of covid would bleed into the normalisation of other diseases which would ultimately collapse healthcare systems.

This is happening.

In the UK it was just revealed there were nearly 100,000 12-hour waits in accident & emergency departments in December and January, compared with 5,000 in 2019-20. A decade ago these waits were virtually unheard of - in the four winters up to 2013-14 there were fewer than 100.

If this isn’t the collapse of the urgent care system in a country I don’t know what is.

In the US, hospitals have been forced to ration care, as covid on top of flu has pushed some systems to capacity.

This is critical to understand. It is covid on top of flu that is doing so much damage.

In the UK an average of 3,747 people a day have been in hospital with covid since the second week of December.

Hospital systems were designed in a world of infectious disease that no longer exists. A world where capacity was calculated based on a bad flu year. That world died in 2020. It is never coming back. Yet governments refuse to take even the smallest measures in recognition of this fact.

It’s hard to view it as anything other than eugenics.

And that it is being covered-up.

It wouldn’t be the first time governments covered up how they destroyed a nation’s health.

This week I have been reading the astonishing story of the propaganda campaign that followed the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the US dropped the atomic bombs on those Japanese cities, the government pumped out propaganda, via mass media, to convince the American people and the world that the bombs had no effects on health after the initial blast.

That there was nothing dangerous to worry about beyond the acute phase. Those that survived, it was said, were fine.

The US government and military briefed reporters that the bombs were just big and destructive. They said there was no residual radiation whatsoever, that isn’t how atomic bombs worked. They said any claims from the Japanese about radiation sickness were lies being made up to garner sympathy and win a better post-war settlement.

Headlines about ‘Tokyo Tales’ appeared in US media.

It took more than a year for the truth to come out. Journalist John Hersey, who was sceptical of the stories being told by military PR men, travelled to Japan, spoke with doctors and victims, and revealed the truth.

When that truth finally came out, it spurred the anti-nuclear movement. International agreements were signed to prevent an atomic bomb ever being detonated in anger again. So far, despite the proliferation of nuclear weapons, those agreements have held up.

This is by no means a perfect analogy, but it does reveal the power of truth, and stories of suffering, to influence the course of events.

It shows us that even the propaganda of empire can be overcome and that narratives can change.

We have to believe this is still the case.