I’ve been made more than particularly misanthropic by the British public’s response to the coronavirus or rather the public’s supine response to the government’s monstrous cock up over how they’ve handled it. I see far too many morons who are wearing masks alone in cars or even wearing masks in the street. These morons, including the child abusing ones who are putting their bloody toddlers in masks and taking as absolute truth whatever bullshit is put out by our increasingly discredited and destructive government, lead me to believe that the British public are not thinking for themselves, as they should be doing.

But, I’ve recently seen an article, on the BBC no less, that gives me hope that there are more Britons out there than I may have at first assumed who are prepared to stick two fingers up at the government and the terrible way that they’ve managed the coronavirus issue. The BBC article purports to be an interview with a nurse who is working for test and trace. The article is quite obviously written in such a way as to elicit, from the unwary or naive reader, a feeling of sympathy for the nurse and support for government policy, but also to incite dislike or disdain for those who challenge the government and the NHS’s view.

However, reading between the lines of this bit of BBC propaganda, it’s plain to see that whatever the Government say, the public are starting to challenge the government narrative. What’s interesting is that the public are challenging the Government by way of civil disobedience, mostly by evading or saying ‘go forth and multiply’, NHS test and trace staff.

Now before I get into closely examining the BBC article, I feel that I should make it quite clear that whilst the article claims that NHS test and trace staff have been allegedly subjected to death threats, I do not approve or condone of the dishing out of death threats to NHS staff or anybody else for that matter. Firstly these threats are wrong in and of themselves, but also they achieve nothing apart from giving those who get them something to moan about and give the Government extra propaganda opportunities.

Here’s the BBC article. As usual for this blog the original text from the BBC is in italics whereas this blogger’s comments are in plain text.

The test and trace system in England has come in for a lot of flak, not only for being slow to get started, but also for failing to trace a large proportion of the contacts of people who receive a positive Covid test. As many have noted, the system turned out not to be “world-beating” after all. But one contact tracer argues here that the public has so far escaped its share of the blame.

Note well here the tone of this article. There is the obvious placing of blame on the public for the failures of test and trace, which was a pretty piss poor idea in the first place in my view and not on the system and its organisation itself where blame should lie.

I want to speak out about NHS Test and Trace due to my increasing frustration with the public’s lack of co-operation with the system.

Maybe the reason for the lack of cooperation with the Test and Trace (T&T) system is that the public are far more aware they you may imagine of its failings and the possibly adverse ways that the data from T&T could be used?

There is much media criticism and while a lot of it may be justified, it isn’t particularly helpful as it deflects attention from the very real problem of lack of public engagement – the negative narrative around Test and Trace simply enables people to justify their selfish behaviour.

The criticism of T&T is wholly justified. Also the reason that the public may not be engaging with it is that they perceive that T&T data is just being used to manufacture more lockdowns and therefore more economic and social damage. Someone should remind this NHS apparatchik that what she calls ‘selfishness’ is what the rest of us would call liberty and the defence of liberty.

I would say 70% of calls I have made go unanswered. It shocks and angers me that so many people just don’t care.

Good! I’m glad that 70% of those contacted by T&T are not answering the calls. It seems like a lot of Britons realise that cooperating with T&T is creating lockdowns and creating more opportunities for the government to remove the liberties of Britons over an illness that has a significantly lower death rate than many other diseases, ones that we should be worried about. In my view the Government’s over the top response to Covid should have been reserved for something really dangerous like a new and potentially lethal flu mutation or Marburg hemorrhagic fever or Ebola. I’d like to remind this nurse that it’s not that Britons don’t care about Covid but that many Britons are aware that it is not the Black Death and doesn’t carry the same lethality as the Black Death in most people.

In my normal day job I’m a front-line NHS nurse in an acute hospital but since July I’ve also been working as a clinical case worker for NHS Test and Trace, to earn extra money because my partner’s business had to close.

So her partner’s business had to close, presumably due to lockdowns, yet she works for an organisation that is helping to create more infection reports, which could be either true or erroneous, that will end up creating more business destroying lockdowns. Seems to me that she has a logic failure as well as it being quite ironic.

My role is to call people who have tested positive for Covid to collect information, offer support and advice, and identify other individuals at risk of catching and spreading the virus.

An activity that I’m afraid people are increasingly and probably correctly, suspicious of. After all why crap on your own life and those of those that you love by creating more infection reports that could end up with the loss of employment for either the individual contacted or those around them?

In all honesty, I have been shocked and disgusted by my experience.

Is she disgusted by the response she is getting or is she disgusted by Britons quite rightly not jumping when the NHS tells them to?

The most common negative experiences include frustration at unanswered calls, calls going to voicemail repeatedly, calls being blocked, phones being slammed down when you introduce yourself, and sometimes an unpleasant attitude when the call does get answered. People are called 10 or even 15 times before they are marked as a failed follow-up. Every unsuccessful call has to be documented, further wasting our time.

Sounds like Britons are quite rightly and actively suspicious of T&T and are taking non violent direct action steps, such as refusal to engage with T&T and blocking their calls.

Very few people could genuinely think it’s a scam. When a call goes to voicemail we leave a message explaining that we are from Test and Trace, giving the number we are calling from and asking the individual to look out for calls from that number. They are also invited to check this information on the gov.uk website.

What she is saying is that few people given messages by T&T are treating it as some sort of telephone scam but a vast number of people are choosing not to engage with T&T for their own reasons.

When someone has actually answered the phone, I’ve had a few shocking exchanges.

I bet you’ve had some ‘shocking exchanges’ bearing in mind how completely pissed off many Britons are becoming not just with covid but more the government’s response to it.

For example, when I asked one person to go through the questions with me, the answer was: “Oh I can’t just now – because I’m in Starbucks.” Now, this person has had a positive test and should be isolating. They’ve had a text telling them they are Covid-positive, yet they are still out in Starbucks infecting other people!

I must admit that this is a pretty nonchalant way to tell T&T to piss off.

Some downright refuse to give details of their contacts. Others are unavailable because, despite their positive test result, they have gone to work. One person I spoke to had tested positive after losing her sense of smell and taste, and she carried on going to work anyway, as she felt OK. She worked as a hairdresser… Let that sink in.

Not surprised at this one either. Of course people are going to refuse to give details of their contacts, especially when these contacts may be friends, relatives or work colleagues who may end up being forced into penury by being told to self isolate. Similarly those who refuse to engage are more frightened of ending up financially worse off than contracting a disease with a 99.5% survival rate.

A middle-aged man who should have been isolating at home was out several times when I called. A young girl pretended, rather badly, to be him.

I must admit that this one made me smile.

More disturbing has been the abuse I have received down the phone: people shouting, “How dare you call me? This is all a scam!” Some people have objected, for some reason, to the “tone” of the voicemail messages they have received, or expressed anger about the number of calls. Worse still are threats, such as, “I’m going to come and find you and sort you out.” No-one deserves abuse for trying to do their job. It seems that more and more people are denying the seriousness of the current situation – just because they weren’t very ill they decide it’s a hoax.

Personally, bearing in mind how much Britons have had to put up with from this tyrannical and incompetent government, I’m not at all surprised to hear that people are unhappy to hear from T&T drones or claim that ‘it’s all a scam’. After all, the constantly changing rules, messages and policies that have come out of this government regarding Covid are very reminiscent of the sort of evasive actions that a conman would take to avoid their victim finding out that they had been conned. Again I have to reiterate that threatening these T&T drones is not the way to go, as I said earlier it’s both wrong in and of itself and also hands the Govt a propaganda victory. But it needs to be remembered that to many people a call from a T&T drone is the very last thing that they want to have, especially if interacting with them could cost them dearly with regards employment for example. I also have to take issue with this nurse’s claim that Britons are ‘denying the seriousness of Covid’. On the contrary I believe that they took things very seriously when Covid first appeared but now that we know that Covid is not as dangerous as at first supposed, people are voting with their feet and choosing not to engage with T&T drones.

Such responses are disheartening and also frightening. People seem so utterly selfish and entitled – so much so that I sometimes feel I no longer want to work as a case worker, and maybe not even as a nurse. I think I’ve had enough of people. I have, it’s true, spoken to a small number of lovely, helpful people but these have sadly been few and far between.

People are not, as this nurse says, ‘selfish and entitled’. Instead they are individuals who have made intelligent assessments of the current situation and decided that the government is promulgating bullshit about Covid and has also got itself in feedback loop that they are unwilling or unable to get themselves out of. It heartens me greatly, as a supporter of liberty, to hear that the number of people that this nurse says are going along with the BS are few and far between. As for her wanting to give up nursing then all I can say to that is please do so. This is because the very last person I would want treating either myself or my loved ones is a person who takes on trust what the Govt says about Covid or any other healthcare issue for that matter.

I’m not trying to suggest that Test and Trace is perfect. The training for my role could certainly have been better; when you train for NHS 111 you get an opportunity to practise with mock and scenario calls, which would have been very useful with Test and Trace, to get to grips with the various software programs. I find that every week brings changes to the systems and procedures and it can be difficult to keep up – but this is a constantly changing situation so it is hard to know whether this criticism is justifiable.

That’s not the public’s fault, that is the fault of both the Government and the NHS, an organisation that is best described as ‘appalling’ and described as such on a regular basis.

I have a low opinion of the government’s handling of this pandemic – some terrible decisions have been taken. And when it comes to test and trace the lack of public engagement has not been helped by the likes of Dominic Cummings, Stanley Johnson and Margaret Ferrier. But the public has a huge role to play in making this work.

I doubt that this nurse’s opinion of the government’s handling of Covid is as low as mine. Instead of continuing with these useless and counterproductive lockdowns the government should have opened the country as soon as it was realised that the death toll was much less than it was at first assumed. I don’t think that public disengagement or removal of trust in the government has anything to do with Cummings etc and has more to do with the public perceiving, probably quite correctly that the government is overreacting to a disease that has turned out to be less serious than many originally supposed.

I’d like to know why an individual goes to the trouble and discomfort of getting tested, if they are not going to engage with the follow-up? Test and Trace needed the public to work with and support it for it to have real impact. It doesn’t matter how effective a system is if people won’t pick up the phone.

I can give some speculative explanation for this question. I believe that some people are getting tested because they are curious to see if they’ve come into contact with it. Once they’ve been tested they then start to realise that getting tested may not have been the best thing to do as it then opens them up to being monitored by the NHS and having their movements and maybe their earning potential restricted. These people could be said to have ‘buyers remorse’ about getting tested once they realise the implications of being tested and therefore do all that they can to evade the T&T drones.

A Department of Health and Social Care representative said: “In five months we have built the largest diagnostics network in UK history from scratch, informing millions of people whether they have Covid-19 and whether they should self-isolate. More than 43 million tests have been carried out and more than three million people in England have been contacted and notified to self-isolate.

This paragraph is little more than bland ‘press release’ bollocks from the DHSC and should be treated as such.

“Turnaround times have been steadily improving over recent weeks and improvements to the contact tracing website, and to the process for contacting household members, have led to substantial improvements in the number of contacts reached.”

Again yet more bland press release bollocks that says little and informs even less.

That was the entirety of the BBC article that I have commented on and the whole thrust of it was to blame the public and let Britain’s secular religion the NHS and the politicians off scot free. It’s a quite obvious bit of propaganda and although I feel somewhat sorry for the nurse having to get an earful from angry members of the public, she volunteered for this job and wasn’t forced into it. She chose to be a mindless order follower spouting for the government, nobody else made her do this. The fact that she took the job because her partner’s business closed, presumably due to covid lockdown bollocks is a matter of the most supreme irony.

The public are not to blame for the failures by the government over the way that they’ve handled covid, only the government are to blame for both the approach they’ve taken towards covid and the economic destruction that their policies have wrought. It’s expected but also shameful that the BBC could put this sort of propaganda out because propaganda this piece most surely is.