No country for old people

The Dutch Safety Board (OVV) has just published its report into the way the Dutch government handled the first phase of the corona pandemic in 2020.

If you want to assess the success or failure of actions, you first have to clarify what the goals of the actions were. There is usually a discussion of these goals in a report, at least in the preamble.

How do we remember earlier pandemics?
We conclude that the flu pandemic in 1918 was the worst pandemic in recent history because it killed the most people worldwide. The 2009 swine flu pandemic resulted in less than 300,000 deaths globally and is considered relatively mild.

Therefore, in my opinion, preventing excess deaths is a major goal of preventive measures during a pandemic. There are of course other goals and the different goals should be weighed before choosing a course of action.

A discussion of goals with the emphasis on saving lives cannot be found in the OVV report. The reason is simple: saving lives was/is not a relevant goal in the Dutch corona policy.
There are three illustrations for this lack of interest in mortality during the pandemic.

1. It is not compulsory to report deaths from corona in the Netherlands.
A policy directed towards preventing deaths from the virus would want to know how many people were dying from the virus.

2. The infected elderly were not given the necessary treatment that could have saved them.

No smiling photos of old people leaving hospital after a long fight against the corona virus in the Netherlands, as they would not have been admitted to hospital.
This also happens in other countries, but there is a difference.
In the UK it was exposed in a Sunday Times article: “Revealed: how elderly paid price of protecting NHS from Covid-19”.
In the Netherlands it is the accepted norm.

3. Lack of priority for vaccinating the elderly.

Remember the smiling photos of the old people who received the first corona vaccines. They were a signal of hope.

Not in the Netherlands. The first photo was of a happy nurse, the second was of a beaming television doctor. 

I remember an uplifting photo in German newspapers; it took another three weeks before the first old person was vaccinated in the Netherlands.

The German nurse who vaccinated the first person in Germany said he was happy that Germany had started to vaccinate. It was important to start as soon as possible because every day people were dying.
The Dutch Minister of Health when confronted with a question about the Dutch tardiness with vaccinations replied: it was not important when you started as the Dutch would eventually catch up with the rest of Europe.

My back burner

We lived behind and above my parents’ shop in the Elephant & Castle. When I was 6, my parents sent me to a Jewish boarding school in Hove. I stayed there until I was 12.

One of the problems of the boarding school was that other children only stayed one or a few terms. It was quite usual for me to return from a school holiday and find that some of my friends had left the school.

I unconsciously developed a defence mechanism for this recurring form of loss.
When I went home, I put all my school friends on a back burner. If they were gone when I returned, I left them there and eventually forgot about them.

Since then I have always used my back burner for events and people. It has enabled me to hide traumatic events and move from people and countries more easily.
For me, it is literally: out of sight, out of mind.

When I was 18, I left England to go and live on a kibbutz in the northern part of the Negev desert. I was the only member of the kibbutz from an English-speaking country. 

The Romanian Holocaust survivors who founded the kibbutz did all speak a foreign language, but that was German.
I put my family and old friends out of my mind and concentrated on the present and the future.

Fast forward 3 years. The 6 day war is over and I have been demobbed. I was back on the kibbutz but that was difficult. 

The relentless routine of work, eat, work, sleep was eroding my motivation.

I had a relationship with a South African tourist. She was pleasant company and I found her attractive.
For me, she was a diversion. For her, I was an experience she could relate to her girlfriends when she returned home.

We were together in my room. A knock on the door: telephone for you. Where is the telephone? In the office.
I went down to the office that was in a wooden hut. There was a telephone there that I had never seen before.

I picked it up. It was my mother.
She knew I was in the paratroopers because she had been to the Israeli Embassy about my father’s illness.
She was phoning to find out if I was still alive. I had not contacted her since the war.

That’s the problem with back burners.