According to official data released by the ONS, 60% of those dying from COVID19, are disabled. Of course, this doesn't change the main characteristic of COVID19 as being a virus that almost exclusively targets the elderly. It is still the case that more than 90% of people dying, or suffering serious illness, from COVID19 are aged over 60, and the majority of them being over 80. In other words, of the 60% of deaths that are people who are disabled, 90% of them too will be aged over 60, and a large proportion of those over 80.
Disability is, of course, often a concomitant of being elderly, as older people are more likely to suffer some form of debilitation and incapacity. In that respect, the figure is merely a reconfirmation of the basic characteristic of COVID19 as being a virus that exclusively targets the elderly. If we divided the 60% figure accordingly, it would show, at least, 54% being disabled and aged over 60, and 6% disabled but aged under 60%. The proportion is probably even more stark than that.
However, what is interesting from this data is another aspect of it. What all of these disabled people have in common, and the same is true of the elderly people, particularly those over 80, amongst whom by far the largest cohort of deaths and serious illness occurs, is that they will be in regular, and often prolonged, contact with health and social care workers. For many of the over 80s, particularly, they will be in hospital or care homes. For others, they will receive regular home visits from health and social care workers. That will be true for a large proportion of the disabled who have died, whether they are over 60, or under 60.
In other words, this is further confirmation of what was known from early on in the pandemic, from what happened in Italy, which is that not only is COVID19 a virus that more or less exclusively affects the elderly, but it is a virus whose main vector of transmission is the public health and social care system. In Italy, the rapid increase in infections and deaths occurred because the virus had got into its public hospital system, where it then proceeded to run rampage amongst these elderly and vulnerable and confined populations.
That is exactly what has happened in Britain. Around 40% of deaths have come from elderly people confined in care homes. Some of that was caused by the fact that the NHS, with criminal negligence, sent old people it knew were suffering with COVID19 back to those care home, where they then infected other residents and staff. But, the single biggest source of COVID infections is the NHS itself. More than 25% of the people it is treating for the disease, are people that it has infected after they came into hospital for treatment for some other condition. High profile instances of that are the comedian Eddie Large, who died last year, after going into hospital for treatment for a heart condition, and more recently Captain Tom, who was being treated for pneumonia. In a six week period over Christmas and January alone, 11,000 people being treated for COVID, in hospital, had contracted it after they went into hospital.
The actual numbers infected with COVID by the NHS will be much larger than this, because the number of deaths and serious illness, as well as the reported cases, form only the tip of a much larger iceberg. Around 80% of people who contract COVID19 never show any, or only very slight symptoms. In other words, if 11,000 people are known to have been infected, as a result of requiring treatment, the actual number infected by the NHS over that period will have been more like 55,000, with 44,000 having been infected, but not showing any symptoms. Multiply that up across all of the people going to Outpatient clinics, or as I wrote recently, going to GP surgeries, even in the process of getting a COVID vaccination, and you get a picture of just how large the number of people being infected with COVID by the NHS is likely to be.
This is a repetition of the NHS scandals we have seen in previous years. We have had the scandals of baby deaths at Shrewsbury Hospital, the scandal at Stafford Hospital, the scandals of elderly people left in unfed, and suffering dehydration, lying in their own excrement across a range of hospitals, and so on. We have also had the scandals of the thousands of people who went into hospital for minor complaints, but who, identical now with COVID, were then infected with MRSA, or C-Dif.
What this demonstrates is that public health and social care provision lacks any kind of constraint over the quality of provision. There is no financial constraint, which exists with market based provision - there were no instances of MRSA in non-NHS hospitals - but also no democratic constraint, which would require that the workers themselves, as well as the patients who pay for the service, had real day to day control over the provision.
If this was happening in private hospitals or facilities, the Left would be screaming from the rooftops, and the media would be forced to run endless stories about the scandal. But, because it is the NHS, not a peep is being made. Why? For the Left, its because they suffer from their own virus. It is the political virus of statism and bourgeois reformism, which also stems from the infection of the labour movement with Stalinism. As a result of this debility they see, like the animals in Animal Farm, a simple dichotomy of "state provision good, private provision bad", even though the state provision is, of course, simply capitalist provision by a capitalist state, a state which, as Marx and Engels described, is the concentrated essence of the capitalist class itself.
The bourgeoisie, of course, will not criticise the NHS, because the NHS, like the rest of the welfare state, represents a massive ideological victory, and weapon for them. On the one hand, the welfare state represents its victory in depriving the working-class of the one thing Marx said it had to strive for - workers' self government. It denies to workers the ability to create their own health and welfare institutions, organised under their control, and run to meet their needs. Instead, like a huge 19th century Truck System, it takes money directly from the workers pockets to pay for this welfare system, but only ever runs it to meet the needs of capital, and so systematically deprives the workers of any democratic control over it. At the same time, because the Left, debilitated by that virus of statism and bourgeois reformism, is led to praise this welfarism to the rooftops, and avoid any criticism of it, portraying it as some kind of victory for workers, or even some kind of Socialism, it fulfils a huge ideological role for capital, because it gives the impression that its most powerful weapon - the capitalist state - is somehow class neutral, and there to act in the benefit of the whole of society, rather than simply to further the interests of the ruling class.
What the data on deaths amongst the disabled confirms is that COVID19 is a virus that almost exclusively affects the elderly, and it is spread via the public health and social care system. The lesson is, if you are elderly, do all you can to avoid reliance upon that system, or contact with it.
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