Beer without Fear. Travel in the time of Covid from poorly governed Britain
I have recently travelled to the Ukraine for medical and dental treatment as most of the routine procedures that I used to have from the NHS have been denied to me. Has anyone tried to use the NHS app lately to get a checkup ? Unless you have a previously diagnosed condition you might as well expire and die trying to access the care needed to stay healthy. If you want treatment, pretend to be ill, if you cannot find physical symptoms then you can now say you suffer from “mental health” problems which will get you pills. All power to the drugs companies.
So I went to Ukraine to get a couple of health problems diagnosed and treated and to get dental treatment. I now have Xrays and a treatment plan for my knee which 20 years ago began developing arthritis following a goat related industrial accident. And a treatment for a deep burn on my forearm due to a domestic accident trying to cook during a period of single life. Do you know that domestic ovens are not designed for persons over 1.8 m in height (aka men). I was able to get a proper tooth cleanup, last year I had to pay hundreds of pounds for serious peridontal work due to lack of maintenance.
Let me just state up front that I am not in denial about the seriousness of the disease. I believe Covid-19 to be a serious viral condition caused by a mutating bat/pig interaction which largely spreads through aerosolised breath particles. It is not particularly lethal but generates enough patients with co-morbidities needing hospital treatment to overwhelm most health services. With 20 years of co-working at the BBSRC Institute for Animal Health and having studied Applied Biology at MSc level I have a good grasp of the science and the issues involved in vaccine programs for animals of which humans are a subset.
But to access routine health treatment in Ukraine I had to get myself tested for Covid before departure and pay a monopoly provider to get tested on my return and self-isolate despite being vaccinated. I was tested for free as part of my treatment at a former Soviet sanatorium in the foothills of the Carpathians in Ukraine. The mandatory tests cost us over two hundreds pounds each in total, the most expensive being the tests mandated to a monopoly of CTM by the Scottish government (twice the price of tests in England). In fact the largest cost of travel was the testing. I understand the need for this but there are huge flaws in the system.
The test certificate is checked by a busy boarding clerk who looks at a piece of paper to see name and negative test and then waves you through to board the plane. The Expresstest at Edinburgh produces a nice .pdf without a QR code. Print it yourself and hope the ink doesn’t smudge. At Heathrow on the way out this was the least important document they check. On the way back through Borispol airport Kiev I had a certificate from the Universum clinic with a QR code which includes the URL of the data output of the Quiagen machine. But no-one scans that to automatically cross-check the data. I suspect that, particularly in the corrupt Ukraine, many of the certificates are fake. A huge opportunity to log and track data about individuals with the disease is being missed, which brings us to the interesting issues of how politics is interacting with policy.
I have been reading Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy and experiencing that mix of confusion and revulsion that many of us feel about the current governance of the UK. Daily we hear that the close advisers of our prime minister do not think he is up to the job and that the health minister is a serial liar. Our right wing nationalistic governments are conflicted. They want to declare our freedom from government controls whilst at the same time imposing the most draconian rhetoric about the need to enforce national boundaries and show the power of the state. Then they give us confusing messages about advice on travel and the law. Boris plays the liberal internationalist (his Dad has a house in Greece so its OK to travel to ones foreign property) who wants to set us free but appoints a Home Secretary who has taken the hostile environment policy of Theresa May to new levels of nastiness. The Border Controls on arrival in Edinburgh took as long as those of the USA for this returning citizen with two persons at each desk , checking each others work I guess.
The mismatch of rhetoric and action is shocking, there is a “woke” desire not to scapegoat Asian minorities for not getting vaccinated but then list Leicester, Bradford, Bolton, Burnley and South Glasgow as hotspots as if we don’t know our own countries Asian ghettoes. And then they keep flight arrivals open from India and have people arriving from Red list countries queue up at Heathrow with those from green list countries. The media repeat government statements uncritically for example quoting Nicola Sturgeon telling us not to travel to Bolton, an edict that has no validity in law even if it could be enforced at non-existent border controls.
Scottish government says it is against the law to visit a few parts of England no-one wants to go to any way. But it has no power to enforce or to prosecute this non-existent law. Are there roadblocks on the A1 where coppers ask if you have visited Bradford ? It is all fantasy. Meanwhile the BBC and others promote a culture of fear and stay at home which is largely unnecessary and has clearly scared huge numbers of people. The sort of people who walk along windy coast paths in Hazmat gear and who jump into the sea at the approach of a healthy looking jogger.
Politics and the cultural mindset also impose their own restrictions. On Austrian airlines they insisted that we buy and wear masks that conform to an ISO standard but efficiently serve you with drinks which mean you only wear it for a few minutes in the flight. We were told at Heathrow that we we would not be able to leave the Vienna airport terminal while we waited overnight for our connecting flight to Lviv but when we arrived we were ushered out of the terminal without any questions and stayed at the comfortable hotel opposite the terminal.
The UK now has some of the lowest Covid case rates in the Western world but imposes severe restrictions on how its previously free citizens live and travel. Ukraine (a similarly low incidence place) a country previously enslaved by Russian/Soviet/Nazi empires allows a free choice to wear a mask except in enclosed spaces and you can go to the ballet, drink in a bar and travel abroad . It was just pleasant to walk around without that end of days zombie atmosphere our deserted high streets have had for a year. To go into a pub and have a meal and beer without fear of censure is just such fun.
It is easy for the nutters on the internet to see this whole episode in our communal lives as a conspiracy of a supreme intelligence plotting the downfall of humanity into an end of days scenario. It is more like a conspiracy of dunces. Countries on a down cycle of quality government such as the UK where the press and politicians attack the institutions of state, promote stupidity (statutes for statues, unlimited flights from red zone countries, protect the overweight from the consequences of gluttony, splitting up the UK with their daft Brexit deal). Countries where things are on an upswing such as Ukraine trying to control corruption and fight the Russian land grab tend to do things better. That is a sad reflection on our once well governed country.