Rising ill-health and economic inactivity from long-term sickness: 2019 to 2023
ons.gov.uk
ons.gov.uk
So a trivial take away is that for above 15% increase in self reporting as long-term sick, pre- to post-covid, we've also scored increased needs for mental health treatment alongside debilitating multiple symptom diseases and musculo-skeletal pain.
Twice the cost burdens compared to simple illness increase because longterm.
This during a time of chronic under-funding of the NHS, backlogged waiting lists, staff leaving in droves, strikes.
Makes you laugh, eh?
I have Crohn's and Syringomyelia (won that lottery eh) and yeah, that fucking black dog is always sat at the end of the drive watching.
Edit: Sorry should have included: "and the brain"
No good long term prognosis, they can't be replaced and the only things to be done only postpone further problems (steroid injections) or cause critical ones later down the line (disc fusion).
Best of luck to you.
Stay safe out there. We have to work together to help each other out on this one and related matters.
You can still get it by taking any resultant symptom and exaggerating the hell out of it. Most of those qualify on their own right if bad enough.
I know someone who claims to have Crohn's and fibro and collects disability, but his credibility is extremely suspect.
Crohns is diagnosed via a biopsy iirc, it's not a diagnosis of exclusion like IBS is. Crohns is also horrific. so I wonder if you just view your friends poor health as a typical "no one wants to work anymore" way like most people do with disabled people. Fibromyalgia is somewhat a diagnosis of exclusion, but decent doctors can mostly figure it out these days. The hard thing is discerning whether it's ME CFS or not.
The public are being told that the UK can't afford to pay healthcare staff market rates, and so they are all leaving the NHS. The result is this dip in GDP, which IMO is more expensive.
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-w...
Not just because it's objectively ridiculous to minimise an illness which has a 10% chance of doing lasting damage with unknown long-term consequences.
But because so much of it is coming from doctors and health workers.
And it's active, aggressive, hostile, reality denial, which attacks simple and effective common sense measures like public/medical masking, air filtration, and so on.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2023/08...
It's sad how during the pandemic the public zeitgeist was all about public health, taking care of your mental health, and having more empathy for one another (once toilet roll was back on the shelves), and since we've returned to normality it's back to outright hostility for those who're struggling.
Yeah, it worked that way when we were all in it together. Life presents struggles for everybody, but it became apparent post-COVID that this concept is lost on the more-vocal elements of the disabled demographic. The struggle is only real for them.
You literally get free money from the government and special benefits as members of a protected class. Your wages can't be garnished. You can stall the eviction process. You get reserved, preferential parking. You can force businesses to make accommodations for just about anything. You optionally work 15 hours a week and have nothing but free time after that, but you don't have time to hear about anybody else's problems-- but we're expected to hear about how much worse your problems are, for hours, every time we cross paths. I'm living paycheck to paycheck and facing a layoff; I don't know what my family is going to do if that happens, because AI will be doing my job before I can recover, and I can't take out any more student loans to retrain. Tell me more about your chronic Lyme though.
The fucking best part--here's the real kicker--is when you stick your neck out by offering to help someone like this. "You're facing homelessness? Shit, that won't do...come live with me! Say, you're eating a lot of our food, incurring bandwidth overages and running the AC during peak hours-- do you think you could help pitch in for some of the bills?" That always goes over well. You're not allowed to ask anything of the disabled; god forbid anybody think they're able (pun intended) to do or help with anything.
It's like Seven Samurai come to life-- yeah, the marauders are bad guys, but there's an even worse villain in that story.
And then:
> God forbid you have something nice while on minimum wage or benefits
You're already getting something nice. It's called "a low-risk lifestyle and income you didn't have to work for." FFS. Assemble the Hague over the fact that people might get upset that you're driving a Lexus to your EEOC hearing for a part-time position at Ralph's while your neighbor was trying to resuscitate their 2002 Kia so they could race to get to work at the call center on time, get verbally abused by customers at some shit customer service job for 8+ hours and hopefully retain the privilege of doing it all over again tomorrow before she, too, is replaced by AI. Tell her how hard you have it with your fibromyalgia.
It's been said that high school bullies inevitably end up on the disability payroll after failing at everything else. In my experience, this checks out. The only people I know collecting it can only ever be described as abusive (in or out of high school), and the people I know with obvious disabilities (everything from amputation to PCOS to Downs) would be offended to be labeled as such. Makes one wonder what the goal of someone going out of their way to identify as vulnerable might be, since that tactic does not lend itself to survival in nature unless you're a predator feigning distress.
> Polio is a viral infection that used to be common in the UK but is now rare.
> Most people who had polio would have fought off the infection without even realising they were infected.
> Some people with polio would have had paralysis, muscle weakness and shrinking of the muscles. But usually these problems would have either gone away over the following weeks or months, or remained the same for years afterwards.
> Post-polio syndrome is where some of these symptoms develop or get worse many years or decades after the original polio infection.
> During 1951-1954, an average of 16,316 paralytic polio cases and 1879 deaths from polio were reported each year
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00056803.htm
> An estimated 1.3 to 4 million people around the world get cholera each year and 21,000 to 143,000 people die.
https://www.cdc.gov/cholera/general/index.html
> COVID-19 was associated with approximately 244,000 deaths in the United States during January–December 2022.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7218a4.htm
So no, not really.
I don't think you understand the cost of installing and maintaining that level of air filtration in every single public and office buildings on a world scale
Plus you'd have to do it for personal homes and flats too
But notnwe have hand sanitiser which is not even relevant.
What bothers me is that the co2 presence hardly impedes work. I think it's still useful to have one to say "hey, too much co2 is eating our attention span, let's open the windows a bit". But clearly they removed it as a performative act ("there is no covid anymore"). And I am also pretty sure they also removed it because the denial/minimalist crowd sees it as an "in-your-face" symbol that covid is real/still a problem and that crowd was the most vocal at my workplace and the people who took covid seriously were seen as trouble makers when asking for masking in office. Or something.
There are a huge number of people who due to short and long term conditions and disabilities need society to support them to some degree or another. This is the human condition and I think society as a whole hasn't ever grasped that.
Secondly, there are a many other factors that could affect this - the "cost of living crisis" could mean that people feel more pressure to work despite ill health (although this would pull the numbers in the other direction).
Also, if I use the working age population(ages 16-64) of 42.1 million in 2021 as a denominator, and remove an increase of 40,000 that the article says should be expected from changing demographics, I get 0.422/42.1 = 1.0%
But if it's a given that the proportion of working people is going down, it's not clear to me why UBI would be any help with "the remaining workers being worked harder and longer than ever before and taxed more heavily". UBI has to come from somewhere. And by removing the "moralistic approach", it's likely that some people who work tough jobs making a pittance would probably just stop.
And second, when that crappy job ceases to exist, they'd have something to fall back on (the UK where I am has basically no benefits for people who lose their jobs).
If they quit, I am content for the free market to increase wages or otherwise make those jobs better.
Separately if like to see shorter working hours (and so more people working). But that's not a ubi change.
Sure, but the value proposition of the shitty job would be lower, which would help decide in favor of stopping it altogether.
But this doesn't show how those still working would be under any less pressure, and especially less taxation.
The only way this could be improved I can imagine is by n-order effects. Some of the people who stop working would pick up some other activity that they enjoy, which would, directly or indirectly, produce some kind of riches, at least for them, at best that could be spread around society. But I don't think this can be reliably approximated beforehand.
The average 60 year old is inevitably sicker than the average 20 year old, and there's an increasing proportion of the former in the UK workforce.
Not to say there isn't a real problem here - the UK isn't doing a great job either on healthcare or, to my mind even more importantly, preventative medicine and public health, but you need to control variables to get a robust conclusion.
> Dr. Anthony Leonardi is a lightning rod for debate. If he’s right, this pandemic poses a greater threat than widely assumed.
Almost a year after this article, given what we see in the population, I'd say the results speak for themselves. Unless you're going to tell me that there is a massive coverup happening globally that is hiding the morgue trucks and cooling wagons we saw in the early pandemic.
And the conclusion he's drawing can't be dismissed after merely one year, we'll see what's up after a decade of infections. We're still very early in this shit actually and caution is warranted confidence is not.
The lack of age breakdown in these statistics is disappointing, its not clear how much of these trends can be attributed to an ageing population.
I understand, I also get mentally challenged when I cross Switzerland, especially in front of the Gothard tunnel.
There never was a reason to do this. Aside from politics, of course.
This, as this study shows has massive costs in the quality of life for many and affects the economy but no. We can't have mask mandates.
I am now wearing a Cleanspace Halo when on public transit or indoors. If y'all can't be bothered to keep the air clean I will make my own. fine But what of the many who can't afford one or find it ridiculous to wear one? Because it is ridiculous to basically constantly cosplay as Darth Vader (badly), no question about that. But what can one do?
Why are women's, and only women's, nipples banned on Facebook and in many cases in public? Usual answer is to protect minors, but the biological purpose of the milk-producing glands they're attached to and after which the taxonomic class of "mammal" is named… is to feed infants. Banning male nipples would be less weird.
When the first Labour MP went to Westminster, he was criticised for the wrong kind of hat.
Used to be illegal for women to wear men's clothes in France (until 2013 technically if not in practice); and Florida is apparently considering treating the opposite as an inherently sexual act.
While face masks do have non-zero impact in some cases, that impact is much rarer and smaller than the discourse around it would imply — fursuiters can dance in much more restricted facewear.
why? We have gotten accustomed to seatbelts despite cries about restricting freedoms, wrinkling clothes etc. "no shirt, no shoes, no service" is also common and extremely few people rally against it. At airports we absolutely debase ourselves despite it is known the current security measures are just security theatre. (Boycotting this would be trivial: if everyone opted out of full body scanners the entire system would collapse in hours.) Meanwhile N95 masks are proven to be effective against infecting others. In other words, you need to give some reason to this besides the emotional absolutely insane.
The health stuff isn't even so clear cut. Consider the psychological and social effects of mandating that people cover their faces. It's very valuable to be able to connect on the human level and to do so with a sense of freedom.
People should become disabled and some even die just so you can see the other person's mug on the bus? Is this what you are saying?
Also, the problem here is the generalization "any severe infection" -- many otherwise healthy, young people with a reasonably mild acute phase have developed debilitating long Covid symptoms.
Western people are tbe most propagandised people on earth, they attach sence of freedom to inanimate objects like cars and someone's hairy beard
If you visited India after the first wave, most people masked, enforced by the police - as they should have. Soon after the 2nd wave (which was bad but resulted in near-endemicity(?)) - after vaccines where widely available and well accepted in India -and to this day, you will see a vast vast majority in India don't mask. A visible minority mask everywhere and are not looked down upon or derided because of it. There is no meaningful propaganda either way right now.
In Europe, in some places, there is and it's sometimes more or less subtle. Local supermarket I go to has a sign "masking is no longer mandatory but it's okay to wear a mask if it makes you feel safer". Which is not how masks are supposed to work (we were told to mask to protect others) and it shouldn't be about feelings.
Meanwhile the cleaning cart station (that sprinkles cart bars with soap/disinfectant) is collecting dust in a corner. I think it would have been nice to keep that from the covid period. But no, we have to erase memories of it.
A well fitting N95 / FFP2, or better, respirator mask protects the wearer to a large extent, even if others don't mask. The "protect the others" message was in 2020, when mostly only surgical masks were available.
That's why even the country most dead set on their usage (China) is now giving up mask mandates.
I was fully expecting and not at all surprised that the mask mandate ended, as the same happened too soon a century ago with influenza.
I recognise my own near total comfort with masks is unusual.
But, despite recognising that other people don't find them entirely comfortable, I find that discomfort surprising and confusing — to me, masks are literally just a piece of clothing, no more of an issue than a hat or a shirt or trousers, and I've had more discomfort from ties and the necks of button-up shirts they go with.
In the late 90s the Netherlands had extremely generous disability benefits. It was so generous that a US president that visited wondered why anybody would work at all in this country?
All of a sudden, we had a full 1 million people of working age on permanent disability. And yes, the vast majority on claims of "back pain" and "depression" which both conveniently cannot be medically disproved.
You'd receive some 70-90% of your last/highest paycheck, and get this benefit for life. So you can basically retire at any age on a full work salary.
Everybody over here would know several people in their circles fully abusing this. It was widespread.
None of this is surprising. Getting money whilst not needing to work is attractive.
Anecdata from my parents peer group (born early 60s, working class) indicate that at least some of these people are faking it for a soft landing into retirement.
They had a taste of retirement with furlough and they simply don't want to work any more. They don't need to, either, because asset inflation (including property inflation in suburban London) has subsidised their lifestyle for years and will continue to subsidise their retirement.
I know quite a number of people doing exactly this for exactly this reason, but they are quite open about it and aren’t faking anything.
Same, I can think of several people I know that fit this category -- they've built enough wealth and WFH/furlough gave them a taste for what they were missing by not having retired early -- so they retired early
I just hope they actually spend some of that wealth rather than keeping it sat in savings account
I also hope they look at young people today and recognise the economic difficulties many are facing: getting on the house ladder, getting stable employment, getting above inflation pay rises
Edit: rereading your comment it seems that you have concerns about unemployment. It seems that in both UK and US we are looking at record-low unemployment numbers. At least in the US, I know that finding workers is a real challenge right now and many businesses are only open limited hours because they cannot find staff.
Your comment sounds eerily similar to the false "no one wants to work any more". It isn't like they are generally offering enough pay to cover basic things nor are they willing to actually treat people better to fill those jobs.
Not to mention that there are fake job ads out there - companies put ads out, but aren't hiring. Example article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/that-plum-job-listing-may-just-...
- ask yourself how people in similar situations would be categorized in other countries
- whether there are benefits to self selecting as economically disabled in the UK
Economic disability is hardly generously rewarded in the UK.
The UK has an order of magnitude more people it considers disable than neighboring France, last I checked (15years ago).