IN the 1960s Sir Michael Jagger and his combo the Rolling Stones sang It’s All Over Now. If I had the wit and the wisdom, I would compose a song titled It’s All Covid Now because that, indeed, is what it seems to be from the recently updated list of symptoms from the NHS. Almost anything can now be classified as Covid, from ‘feeling a bit icky’, ‘a touch of the sniffles’ or ‘having a pain on the end of your winkie’. I made that last one up but do check the list in a few months as it is bound to make an appearance. Quoting from Sky News: ‘According to the NHS the signs of Covid-19 that people should look out for also include: shortness of breath; feeling tired or exhausted; an aching body; a headache; a sore throat; a blocked or runny nose; loss of appetite; diarrhoea, and feeling sick or being sick.’
Note that these have been added to the extant list of vague and largely subjective symptoms. Helpfully, those geniuses at the NHS tell us: ‘The symptoms are very similar to symptoms of other illnesses, such as colds and flu.’ No kidding.
It could be worse, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry but, also according to Sky News: ‘Both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US have had longer symptom lists for some time.’ This execrable nonsense is also apparent in the Far East. In Hong Kong, where the anti-epidemic team is handing out packets of an untested traditional Chinese medicine as a remedy for Covid, the symptoms to look out for are: ‘Patterns of heat toxin assailing the lung, manifested as fever, aversion to cold, muscle soreness, stuffy and runny nose, cough, headache, dry and sore throat, reddish tongue, and yellow or yellow and greasy tongue coating.’
I have already alluded to the idea in these pages that ‘Long Covid’ was going to be a skiver’s charter but these extensive lists are a gift to the indolent and the disaffected, at least until employers get wise to it. How do you distinguish between a genuine case of Covid, a heavy night out or that Monday morning feeling? Easy: a Covid test and these are no longer free. And how, according to the official Covid narrative, do we protect ourselves and our loved ones from the nasty virus? Of course, we get a vaccine, and the expanding list of Covid symptoms is simply another battering ram in the Covid vaccine campaign. Thus, the Covid gravy train keeps chugging along the line, taking money from the pockets of the poor and the dispossessed and unloading it into the pockets of Big Pharma and a host of fat cat shareholders who have already swindled the country out of billions over Covid.
It seems that the bureaucratic centralists of the NHS live in a world completely detached from the lives of the ordinary people of Britain. We are facing a massive financial crisis with inflation likely to rise to double figures. On top of rising prices, due to the war in Ukraine that nobody seems to be making a genuine effort to stop, we are facing fuel shortages and extortionate prices at the pumps with the possibility of running out of wheat flour and bread prices rising. The country is still stumbling back from the insanity of economic lockdown; civil service offices are empty, teaching unions seem wedded to masks and other forms of PPE, and the NHS provides yet more reasons for those who have fallen for the Covid narrative to remain cautious and frightened and to take a week off work at the first sneeze. The NHS also continues its cruel visiting restrictions and mask-wearing within its premises. The pandemic, which never delivered the dreadful outcomes that the boffins predicted, may be over but the campaign of fearmongering continues. I think some people miss Covid-19.
