“Lots of you think that ‘tampons on the NHS’ is the direction we’re going. I think it’s going to look more like ‘buy your own insulin’.”
Covid-19
Exactly six months today since full lockdown, Scotland is back in a mini-lockdown again. This time, only other people’s homes are off-limits. As in England, pubs will shut at 10pm. There are good reasons to be sceptical that these measures will be sufficient to contain the spread of covid-19. They appear suspiciously like applying maximum […]
Six months since lockdown, is ‘Test and Protect’ ready?
“Scotland is now fighting Covid with precisely as much testing capacity as the UK will permit us… What it means is more than that Scotland isn’t taking a distinctive approach – it means it can’t.”
Analysis: Scotland is now locked into a Four Nations Covid strategy
“We’re taking one step forward, five steps back,” Devi Sridhar, professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and on the Scottish Government’s covid-19 advisory group, wrote yesterday, in summing up her exasperation about the covid-19 situation in the UK. She’s not wrong. Lockdown was a big social sacrifice, one where the vulnerable suffered […]
‘One step forward, five steps back’
“Regulation of the care home market is very weak, with almost no attention is given to issues like sector consolidation, let alone questions about whether the owner of a care home is prepared to put care before profit.”
Nick Kempe: Why we should be concerned that Real Estate Investment Trusts are expanding into the care home market
“Those few interesting questions which might have emerged from the controversy have been almost entirely overlooked. The first is not whether Nicola Sturgeon has used her briefings for political purposes, but rather: should we care?”
Sean Bell: Everything is political, and it is futile to pretend otherwise
“What are the costs of little or no governance, scrutiny and understanding of multiple health data initiatives when governments, academics, public sector organisations and businesses can avoid the normal controls and transparency?”
Covid-19 and questions of data
“This experience is an opportunity to reach out to those forgotten by the system and allow an essential feeling to resurface: human dignity.”
‘Things should always be like this’: Inside the European Parliament’s shelter for women
The “sex, gender and covid-19 project” launches this morning, which describes itself as “the world’s most comprehensive dashboard for covid-19 data broken down by sex and gender”. The dashboard allows you to look at the specifics of different countries and compare across countries, and across time. It makes for some interesting reading. Of the 173 countries in […]
Between infected and affected: the impact of covid-19 on women
How do we stop the resurgence of covid-19 in Scotland? Everyone is agreed that it is resurgent, and that we need to stop it, so let’s try to focus on the ‘how’. Common Weal today publishes a new report by head of policy & research Craig Dalzell which looks at exactly that. It proposes a change in […]