Stealthy Standards

Chart by the Resolution Foundation

Some countries have already finished their official enquiries into how they’ve handled this pandemic so far. The UK’s enquiry, chaired by former appeal court judge Lady Heather Hallett, has barely scratched the surface so far. Its first public hearing began yesterday and it isn’t expected to complete its work until 2026.

While public attention has been drawn to anticipatory news about the enquiry’s first hearings and then the start of the hearings, guess what has begun to happen without fanfare, quietly, as though by stealth?

NHS England got around to issuing guidance and standards for using HEPA filters to clean the air in health care spaces where natural ventilation is not good enough. NHS England also issued guidance and standards for using UVC radiation (ultraviolet light in a particular range of wavelengths) to clean the air in the same types of health care spaces. Both documents were issued 9 May.

I didn’t know about this until today even though I’m the type of person who tries to keep an eye open for news along such lines. We’ve needed clean air in health care facilities, especially now that masking is scarce. Now we have the policy to make it happen.

Funding for it will be hard to find after so many years of having the NHS budget strangled. One step at a time. We couldn’t pursue money for a policy that didn’t exist yet.

Has this been in the news? No.

What Elephant in the Room?

The new policy documents barely mention the pandemic, instead saying more about airborne pathogens in general terms.

The government put considerable effort into convincing people that handwashing and sanitizing surfaces are the ways to keep SARS-CoV-2 from spreading, low-quality face masks are enough to fend off airborne illnesses, there’s no need to test any more, hardly anyone needs vaccination any more, the pandemic is over and everyone should behave like everything is normal again. The way British politics is conducted, it is better to stick with a mistake than to be seen as making a U-turn when the error becomes evident.

New policies about clean air in health care spaces have nothing to do with the elephant in the room.

Data Smells Like the Elephant

The mistake is increasingly evident. It’s showing up in what the government now highlights as rising levels economic inactivity. That’s basically people not working when they are in core working years (ages 16-64). The main driver behind that is long term illness, which started to blossom after the day in July 2021 when most pandemic restrictions were lifted by the government. The Resolution Foundation provided the especially clear chart of it at the top of this post.

The mistake is also evident in low productivity. The UK’s worker productivity was second-worst in the G7 before Brexit. Government and big business make noise about needing to improve our productivity, but we’re slipping instead of climbing.

We have high rates of absence from work and high rates of absence from school.

Kids in particular get sick over and over again. Government didn’t vaccinate them. Authorities make them go to school in person, where we still mostly have poor ventilation, no air filters and no face masks. The kids get sick and then the adults they live with or visit get sick too.

Illness isn’t the usual stuff or the usual severity. We have weird outbreaks of all manner of sickness, and it’s often more severe than it used to be.

We have significant excess deaths, but that is now being disguised (even by the Office for National Statistics) by using the elevated death rates from 2020 onward as though they are normal rates when calculating what our death rates should be. (I discussed this in my post about Moving Averages.)

Stealth Progress is Better than No Progress

Perhaps the stealth publications of new guidance and standards by NHS England are small steps toward taking our situation seriously. Perhaps, as a society, we can only do the right thing if hardly anyone notices.

Progress by stealth is better than no progress at all. It’s the best offer on the table so I’ll take it.