Convenience Big Store: The virtual GP service is costing lives

13 May, 2021

In the headlines

Israel is moving troops towards the Gaza border to prepare for "all eventualities and an escalation". At least 3,000 army reservists have been called up, a military spokesman told the BBC. Boris Johnson has backed an independent inquiry into the government's handling of the pandemic, but it won't start until next spring. Sage scientists are holding an "emergency meeting" to assess the threat of the Indian Covid variant – UK cases involving this variant have more than tripled in a week. The US state of Ohio is offering five $1m lottery prizes to help overcome vaccine hesitancy. The money will come from federal coronavirus relief funds.

Comment of the day

Biden's Afghan pullout is bad news for us all

Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency/Getty

The Taliban can now boast that it has driven out "two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States", says Bill Roggio in the New York Post. No one in their right mind believes our "feckless" leaders have won the "phony peace process". Since President Biden announced that he would pull American troops out of Afganistan by 11 September, violence has skyrocketed. A vicious school bombing last week in Kabul killed more than 60 people and injured 150, most of them schoolgirls. Mullah Omar, the Taliban's founder, predicted the US would tire of the fight. "It took two decades, but he was right."

It's not only Afghans who will suffer. "The endless jihad will continue, unchecked." And China, Russia, Iran and others are taking note of our "defeat". America's exit is a PR boost for al-Qaeda and its terrorist training camps, which have never really left Afghanistan. I don't blame US voters for turning on "forever wars" – years of underfunding meant we could never win. But we must face the expensive mess we've made. Worse, we've seen what happens next. Just three years after the last US troops left Iraq in 2011, our troops had to go right back to deal with the Islamic State. "American leaders have yet to learn the lesson of that failure."

Read the full article here.

The virtual GP service is costing lives

I'm not alone in being scandalised by the NHS's pivot to a "virtual GP service", says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. Attempting to book an appointment with a doctor is like breaking into Fort Knox. Try to see someone and you have to get through online symptom-checking forms, "digital-first" Zoom consultations and yet more "eConsults". An 84-year-old reader was told to take "a selfie in the mirror" of the moles on her back. Joy Stokes, a 69-year-old breast-cancer survivor, was "fobbed off" for four months, denied an X-ray and told to self-refer her "excruciating pain" to a physio. Her husband buried her a fortnight ago.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock says the pandemic has taught us GP appointments "should be done remotely by default". That's a terrible outcome. Banks have already disappeared into a "maddening maze of Your Call is Important to Us". You can hang on a line for 40 minutes and never hear a human voice. The bobby on the beat is now more mythical than the unicorn. "We need more humanity, not less." Macmillan Cancer Support says up to 50,000 people are walking around with cancers undiagnosed in lockdown, and this could double by October if services aren't fully restored. "Let the public outcry begin now."

Read the full article here.

Inside politics

We're a "nation of obsessive animal lovers", and the government has clocked it, says Olivia Utley in the Telegraph. The Queen's Speech included legislation stopping live animal exports, banning families from keeping primates as pets and enshrining animal sentience in law. This will be "wildly popular": when I was an MP's researcher, we received 20 letters on animal rights for every one on Brexit. Support for animal welfare bridges the culture wars and the north-south divide – banning pet monkeys is a winning political formula.

Gone viral

Law enforcement officers in Uzbekistan played out a comedy of errors at a ceremony to mark the country's Day of Remembrance and Honour on Sunday. The local governor, Gofurjon Mirzaev, correctly put his hand on his heart while singing the national anthem, confusing the military brass behind him – a salute is the protocol for soldiers in uniform. They got there in the end.

Zeitgeist

The "infantilisation of Britain" has reached new heights, says Giles Coren in The Times. Celebrities from Justin Welby to Bear Grylls are suggesting that 4 July be declared National Thank You Day, to congratulate key workers, neighbours and myriad others for essentially "being human" during the pandemic. "It's pathetic. Are we still in primary school? Are we going to hand out badges and slices of cake?" I propose a rival event aimed at all those who made lockdown hell: the cyclists, "mask Nazis", dog-stealers and virtue-signallers. We could call it "National F*** Off Day".

Snapshot

Noted

Some European countries are more arrogant than others. When asked whether they agreed with the statement "Our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others", 89% of Greeks said yes – a reasonable figure for the cradle of western civilisation. Russia and Bulgaria came joint second on 69%. Other nations were less confident: 46% of Britons, 47% of Italians and 45% of Germans backed their culture, and in France the figure was only 36%. Bringing up the rear were the Spanish, on a measly 20%.

Snapshot answer

It's David Hockney. Commissioned for the £7m Let's Do London art project, his childlike logo now adorns Piccadilly Circus Tube station. The artist's paintings of sun-dappled Californian swimming pools go for tens of millions of dollars, but he did this free of charge. You can tell, says The Wall Street Journal's Mike Bird on Twitter: it looks like he forgot about it until "eight minutes before the deadline".