- Re: Tweet from London Ambulance Services Archived Message
Posted by margo
on January 13, 2021, 12:11 pm, in reply to "Re: Tweet from London Ambulance Services"
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really awful. I've heard from medical friends in France that psychological distress and suicide attempts are up in many areas there, too. The situation in South Africa - in terms of the lockdown fall-out - is truly heartbreaking. I stopped my car to deliver food and money to a man I found literally starving on the side of the road. He'd been begging at a traffic light for a couple of weeks, looking thinner and thinner, and one day crumpled to the verge. Ive never seen poverty this bad before: crowd of people (black and white) sleeping rough on verges outside police stations at night, I suppose for some measure of protection. Three million more people now unemployed over 2020/21, on top of our 30% unemployment rate. The lockdown - started for "3 weeks in order to allow hospitals to prepare" in April 2020 - continues until today (despite big white elephant field hospitals constructed then shut down) and is extended again. This lockdown is maintained by the ANC government under special draconian state of emergency laws, of the type last used by the apartheid government in the 1980s and early 1990s. Long queues snake outside Labour offices every day from 5am, with people sent from pillar to post and waiting weeks and months for paltry unemployment payouts and pension checks. Alcohol sales, restaurants and so on still banned. Curfew from 9pm to 5am: a man was handcuffed and jailed overnight for walking to a store at 11pm to pick up a tin of baby formula for his wife who was struggling to breastfeed a newborn.' A leaked out-take from a Zoom call with president Cyril Ramaphosa shows him laughing about lockdowns as he teases someone querying about the length of lockdown, saying he will only mention a month, but not the year. This has angered many people. It's high summer, but people are told to stay at home and indoors as much as possible, despite fresh air and Vitamin D being helpful. At the moment, hundreds of thousands of kilometres of beach are shut off, with police arresting the occasional lone swimmer and surfer who breaks the rules. Pictures of five policeman marching a lone swimmer off a beach anger people when there's so much more serious crime to deal with. Comic relief was provided to the nation when a police team driving their van down a long beach to arrest a lone kite surfer, got their vehicle stuck in sand and surf. They were filmed frantically digging the van out, with no-one else allowed on the beach to help them, at pain of being arrested! |