Health Matters By Dr Tim Allison: We can do much more than just wishful thinking
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Wouldn’t it be great if we could just wish for things and then they happened? Wouldn’t it be great if we forgot about things we didn’t like and then found that they had really vanished?
None of us has a genie and a magic lamp to grant us wishes and we know that life is not like that. However, it can be hard to avoid wishful thinking, believing that something is true because we want it to be true so much.
We all wish Covid would go away. It started in China in 2019 and it is now 2022 and everyone is heartily sick of the pandemic.
The disease has started to drop out of the news headlines and thanks largely to vaccination there are fewer people becoming seriously ill and going into hospital.
We can wish that Covid had gone, but sadly that would be wishful thinking since it is still here. Cases in schools remain high and the workforce in care homes, and care at home, has been especially badly hit by Covid infection and isolation.
The damage that Covid is inflicting on health has reduced and that means that restrictions have been able to be relaxed.
However, there are still people who are at risk of serious infection and since there are many millions of people around the world who have neither been infected or vaccinated there is still the risk of a new variant.
I don’t want to be a wishful thinker, but nor do I want to be a prophet of doom continually writing about the high risk of Covid while the numbers of infections drop. There is, though, another way that we can think about Covid.
As the restrictions are relaxed and numbers of infections fall, we need to recognise that it is up to each one of us to guard against Covid. It is our responsibility and not the job of rules and regulations.
Some rules are certainly helpful when it comes to tackling infectious diseases and we are all helped by vaccination, but rather than wishing Covid away we can work together in our behaviour to control the virus.
It is not likely to disappear, but we can all play our part to keep future infections at the lowest possible level.
What we need to do is not new and I have written about this on several previous occasions. Also, what we do can help protect us against many illnesses, not just Covid.
We should be kind and respect others and both respect and acknowledge the power of viruses like Covid to cause serious illness. This means among other things washing hands well, avoiding coughing and sneezing at others, ensuring good ventilation, and staying at home when ill.
These will all do much more than wishful thinking.
• Dr Tim Allison is NHS Highland’s director of public health and policy.
