Patrick Christys: If you’re poor, you’re more likely to die. Wasn’t the NHS created to stop that from happening?

Do you actually care about the rising covid numbers? New figures from the Office for National Statistics show Covid cases are 26 times higher than they were this time last year. But, get this, figures also show that more people died from flu and pneumonia in July than from Covid.

Apparently roughly 760,000 people had Covid in the UK last week. But there was a seven day average of 112 deaths…. In July, there were 3,876 Covid deaths, and we all know that many of those will be ‘with Covid’, not from Covid.

Meanwhile, 4,564 people died from pneumonia or flu. In the same month there were 17,600 deaths from Dementia and Alzheimer’s, 17,100 cancer deaths, 16,248 heart disease deaths and 8,592 people sadly died from a stroke.

So at what point do we stop having our lives pumped full of Covid fear? To quote Sajid Javid, before he did what all good men of conviction do and retract his statement, do you feel like we still have to cower away from this thing? I tell you who I think is cowering away, and they’re making a lot of money from doing so, GPs.

It’s emerged that GPs are being paid £100-an-hour to work from home. In fact, a new deal from the NHS to GP practices will see them paid extra to hit targets for conducting more online appointments… So doctors are being incentivised to NOT go to work. Here’s a question? Would you feel more comfortable seeing a doctor face to face or over zoom? Because there were 420,000 fewer face-to-face consultations LAST MONTH ALONE.

Someone very close to me was misdiagnosed with excema over FaceTime…actually, it was cancer. So I’ve got personal experience of this omnishambles.

Doctors take a hypocritic oath to do no harm – surely the increased risk of not seeing patients in person has the potential to do harm. I find it barely believable then that GPs have had an 11% pay rise in the last four years. Have you had an 11% payrise? I say, and I know millions of us out there also say – GET BACK TO WORK!

But I’m sure this isn’t the fault of many GPs, who let’s be honest had a really rough ride at the height of the pandemic. No. It’s the unions who’ve piped up. The British Medical Association wants doctors to dictate the pace of a return to normality. Well hang on a minute, can Maureen from down the road dictate the pace at which her cancer spreads? Can Johnny from the local cricket club dictate how much pain he’s in from his spinal chord injury? No they can’t.

If you think I’m being dramatic, have a listen to this – there are a record 5.4m people waiting for NHS treatment, much of it, vital. People aren’t just paying to have that pesky in-growing toe nail carved out, no, they’re paying £20,000 to have a stent fitted so their heart doesn’t stop. So here we are, if you’re poor, you’re more likely to die. Wasn’t the NHS created to stop that from happening? And now Rishi Sunak is being told by NHS big wigs that unless he maintains the additional £7bn worth of funding they won’t be able to clear the Covid backlog and they’ll have to scale back services even more! Well, you could start by actually getting back to work!

It was health officials who told us to lockdown to save lives, now they’re telling us they need more money otherwise more people will die, because we locked down. I think I smell a rat there, don’t you. And they’re not the only ones at it.

A survey of 1,500 school leaders by headteachers’ union NAHT, which I’m inclined to pronounce NAHT, because they’re NAHT in a rush to get kids back into the classroom, found average extra costs for schools during the pandemic were around £24,571, mostly to comply with the Government’s Covid safety rules.

They say ‘we can’t even afford gluesticks’! We need more money! Do me a favour, if there was gender and diversity inclusivity programme being sold to schools for £25k a pop, they’d all find the money for that wouldn’t they! There’s no denying that doctors and teachers had it tough during the pandemic, but we all did! And now it’s patients and pupils who have it tough.

There isn’t a magic money tree, there never will be. Stop sticking your hands out, and start getting your hands dirty.