Tomorrow’s Yorkshire Post cartoon. Magnifico @GraemeBandeira pic.twitter.com/Q6SVWRlpj1
— Jack Blanchard (@Jack_Blanchard_) March 13, 2020
I saw this cartoon on Twitter. It depicts an NHS worker holding the whole coronavirus planet on her shoulder. I thought to myself “well, just another case of British megalomania, what else is new” and carried as usual. But today I have learned an interesting fact: Poland has more intensive care units per capita than Britain. Not significantly more, but still more.
I thought this is food for thought for those praising superiority of the NHS over those “wild countries of the East”.
Me and my girlfriend have families both in Poland and in Italy so we follow the news closely. Yesterday Poland has closed its borders. Apparently one can be in the EU, in Schengen even, and still be able to control its borders. This is food for thought for Brexiters (especially, that Brexit Britain is one of the few European countries that has NOT closed its borders so far).
Then I have read that the Polish healthcare system is already crumbling under the weight of the Pandemics. Poland calls for all health workers – retired doctors, doctors who left the trade and work elsewhere, medical students even – to come and help in the struggle. I also heard rumors that even British hospitals are already struggling: someone working in one of the British hospitals told us, that they lack basic items needed to tackle the pandemics. They have nothing – they have ran out of masks, they are low on gloves, hand sanitiser is gone: they are completely unprepared. I have also spoken with the warehouse staff in one of the biggest provider of such products: they run out of hand sanitiser weeks ago, and there is no chance they will have any in stock at least till April.
And I just thought: with the scale of the Pandemics, to which nobody could be prepared, the doctors and other health workers are going to risk their lives to help others. If I was a Brexiteer now, I would be praying, that all those “bloody foreigners” that work for NHS won’t take my advice and go home if they decide that they would rather risk their lives for their own country, not for the one that treated them like shit over recent few years…
