Its important to put 'Death in Service' into a context. Having worked in social care and the NHS for much of my career, I recall many cases of people of working age who died in service - and of course these are always a shock and upsetting.
e.g. In one hospital where I worked, we employed two porters who had learning difficulties - this was not unusual in the 1970's and 1980' - actually we even employed one head porter who was functionally illiterate - but very effective. One of the porters with a learning disability died of a strangulated hernia of some kind - very unexpected and sad. He was 35 or so.
Every year many tens of thousands of people of working age die in service - for all the usual reasons - mainly in my experience a brain haemorrhage or heart attack, or cancer - but suicides and road accidents are also not that unusual. I've lost colleagues to all of these, some very young indeed.
So, the new question is not how many NHS colleagues died OF covid, but how many WITH covid, and also, how different was this from a normal year's mortality in service?
Also, were deaths rates in the NHS in 2020/21 any different from the general population? As a former NHS Unison steward, these are the questions at the top of my mind, because obviously we all wish to see key staff protected as best as we can. If as I suspect the answer is 'no statistically significant difference' then we can rest assured that there was really no exceptional occupational risk.
Yes, the NHS became obsessed with one thing to the exclusion of all else. I was deeply concerned about the 'exceptionalism' and in late March/early April 2020 wrote to every politician I could to complain that this approach would cause massive harm through denial of normal service.
Case in point - my next door neighbour is paraplegic and employers his own care and support team. One of them - a rather overweight & jolly lady in her 40's, died during the pandemic of a normal heart attack - no Covid detected. I also lost a few fairly close friends over the past few years - MND, Cancer x 2, Heart attacks, Sepsis - none of them with Covid - and despite my extensive contacts in health & social care, I don't know a single person who died or was hospitalised with or of Covid., in England or Scotland.
I do know two previously healthy women in their 80's both of whom have recently developed dementia - both would have been vaxxed - they were usually out riding their bikes or gardening - and this might either be a total coincidence, or the thin end of a wedge.
Thats the key point: many people do not associate their injury or illness with the jab. Because nobody allowed them to. I do social research - for a living, have done for over a decade.
I was interviewing some young people from a randomly selected long-term cohort study - one of them was a teenager who is/was an outstanding top class athlete.
Her life fell apart in 2022 due to a mysterious and debilitating malaise - she had it checked out by many medics, but none of them could identify it. I did my interview with her, and it was a bit traumatic.
At the end, I asked about the vaccine. Her jaw, and that of her mum, dropped to the floor. They simply had not considered it as a possible cause.
Its important to put 'Death in Service' into a context. Having worked in social care and the NHS for much of my career, I recall many cases of people of working age who died in service - and of course these are always a shock and upsetting.
e.g. In one hospital where I worked, we employed two porters who had learning difficulties - this was not unusual in the 1970's and 1980' - actually we even employed one head porter who was functionally illiterate - but very effective. One of the porters with a learning disability died of a strangulated hernia of some kind - very unexpected and sad. He was 35 or so.
Every year many tens of thousands of people of working age die in service - for all the usual reasons - mainly in my experience a brain haemorrhage or heart attack, or cancer - but suicides and road accidents are also not that unusual. I've lost colleagues to all of these, some very young indeed.
So, the new question is not how many NHS colleagues died OF covid, but how many WITH covid, and also, how different was this from a normal year's mortality in service?
Also, were deaths rates in the NHS in 2020/21 any different from the general population? As a former NHS Unison steward, these are the questions at the top of my mind, because obviously we all wish to see key staff protected as best as we can. If as I suspect the answer is 'no statistically significant difference' then we can rest assured that there was really no exceptional occupational risk.
Yes, the NHS became obsessed with one thing to the exclusion of all else. I was deeply concerned about the 'exceptionalism' and in late March/early April 2020 wrote to every politician I could to complain that this approach would cause massive harm through denial of normal service.
Case in point - my next door neighbour is paraplegic and employers his own care and support team. One of them - a rather overweight & jolly lady in her 40's, died during the pandemic of a normal heart attack - no Covid detected. I also lost a few fairly close friends over the past few years - MND, Cancer x 2, Heart attacks, Sepsis - none of them with Covid - and despite my extensive contacts in health & social care, I don't know a single person who died or was hospitalised with or of Covid., in England or Scotland.
I do know two previously healthy women in their 80's both of whom have recently developed dementia - both would have been vaxxed - they were usually out riding their bikes or gardening - and this might either be a total coincidence, or the thin end of a wedge.
Thats the key point: many people do not associate their injury or illness with the jab. Because nobody allowed them to. I do social research - for a living, have done for over a decade.
I was interviewing some young people from a randomly selected long-term cohort study - one of them was a teenager who is/was an outstanding top class athlete.
Her life fell apart in 2022 due to a mysterious and debilitating malaise - she had it checked out by many medics, but none of them could identify it. I did my interview with her, and it was a bit traumatic.
At the end, I asked about the vaccine. Her jaw, and that of her mum, dropped to the floor. They simply had not considered it as a possible cause.
Yup, all sounds too familiar at my end.