Day 7. Last day!

So, my last day locked up in my flat! I can’t wait to go for a little walk around the block. I’ve decided to go and visit the New Islington Marina which is just a few hundred yards away. It was stupidly busy yesterday apparently, and I mean stupidly given the current restrictions in the UK, and the way they are being flouted by people. I’ll be visiting it before 6am tomorrow though, so there won’t be any millennials there guaranteed! And it’s predominantly millennials who live around here. I’ve got quite a stash of bread and stuff for the geese and ducks, and I’m sure they’ve missed me 😊.

I feel better today than I did yesterday. Symptoms-wise, it’s now pretty much just shortness of breath, and a spacy feeling in my head – dizzy after standing up, and never quite going away. I can live with that though. I guess it’ll clear up over the next few days.

Ventilators

I’m an engineer. An electronics engineer initially, although I’ve been producing embedded software for the last twenty years. The company I work for is in the industrial sector, and the quality and reliability of our products needs to be incredibly high. The product sits unattended for twenty years, so it’s really important that it doesn’t go wrong – there’s nobody there to fix it if there’s a problem. You can’t “turn it off and back on again” as so many other products are fixed!

Yet the reliability of medical products is required to be at least an order of magnitude better than ours. Development processes are much more tightly regulated, with much more checking, reviewing and testing at every step. Of course that’s what you’d expect. After all, medical products keep people alive. If they stop working people die. As non-engineers you can be confident that all medical devices in operation in the UK have gone through development cycles years in length, been tested and tested over and over and over again in all sorts of conditions, for years on end, and are only allowed to be used in hospitals after extensive certification and regulation.

Dyson’s prototype ventilator

So now the NHS is short of ventilators, what does the government do? It contacts a few of their old mates – JCB, Dyson, G-Tech, and asks them to come up with new ventilator designs in only a few days, so they can throw them into hospitals. No proper development processes. No testing. But here’s the contract anyway matey👍.

THIS IS GOING TO KILL PEOPLE!

The press thinks it’s marvellous, but they don’t have the tiniest clue how engineering works either. They’re selling it like it’s the plucky British pulling together to help the war effort, spiffing! But engineering is just not that simple! Boris studied Classics at Oxford. He has no idea. No-one in government has the slightest idea. No-one in the media has any idea. Wake up people!

Heath Robinson’s, sorry G-Tech’s ventilator.

The solution is really quite obvious. Get other manufacturers to make the same design of ventilator as is currently in use. This bypasses years of development and testing, but is still not without problems. Not just anyone can manufacture items with enough quality for medical use. Medical manufacture is a highly regulated industry, and those that are in that industry have vast experience of the highest quality standards. But it’s much much safer than using brand new prototype designs. This is what is happening with the Airbus-led Ventilator Challenge UK consortium. You’d like to think Airbus are a pretty high quality manufacture, but G-Tech? Dyson?

If your vacuum cleaner breaks, it’s quite annoying (and Dyson doesn’t exactly have the best quality record). If you mum’s ventilator breaks down because it’s a brand new prototype design thrown together by one of Boris’s favourite donors, then she is going to die. It’s tragic.

OK, rant over! 😊

Losing my flat

I love my flat. It’s on the 6th floor and overlooks the city centre, facing south west to get the sun most of the day. I’m very happy here.

When I moved in, the letting agent did warn me that the owner was trying to sell it, but it had been on the market for over a year, so no great worries. Then a couple of weeks after I moved in he told me that it had been sold. My tenancy was protected for 6 months, so I had until July. I was really upset about it, but it’s just one of those things, there’s nothing I could do about it.

So, come July we’re probably going to be in lock-down still. Estate agents won’t be showing people round flats. But I will have to move out and find somewhere else to live. I emailed the letting agent and told them of my concerns – that I’m likely to become homeless. They replied with an acknowledgement, but so far no advice as to what I might be able to do. Hopefully there will be some way of choosing a new flat, but it’s hard to imagine what that might be, especially if the lock-down is even tighter than we currently have.

We’ll just have to see.

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Right, well that was my last blog about Coronavirus. I’m sure you could tell I was scraping the barrel for subjects these last couple of days – it’s not easy blogging every day! One day I hope to resume my walk round the coast of Britain blog, but of course that depends on the lock-down rules relaxing a bit.

Seeya!