“It hasn’t gone away you know”

The vaccine roll out has been a lot more successful than any of us imagined. The effort by The NHS has been unreal and whether we like to admit it or not, the UK government has dealt with this part of the crisis extremely well. We didn’t fall into the EU, “let’s sue the vaccine manufacturers” debacle. We avoid and suppressed unnecessary, and counter productive health scares about the vaccines, we did not unnecessarily suspend, restart, suspend and restart again the vaccine rollout. Our leaders did not label any of the vaccines as “quasi-ineffective”, nor did we get involved in politicising the different vaccines. All the negativity of some other nations has now reflected on their vaccine take-up figures and now they must wonder if all political point scoring was worth it.

Despite the obvious success of the vaccine roll-out in the United Kingdom, the self-sacrificial efforts of our NHS and the less recognised, but equally important endeavours all the other essential workers, the virus is still here and more prolific than ever. In the slightly modified words of a famous/infamous politician (depending on your political allegiance) “it hasn’t gone away you know”. In truth it hasn’t and isn’t likely to have “gone away” for some time to come, we will have to learn to live with it, and realise it or not, we are already doing that.

Long before we had heard of the “Wuhan Flu “we had a seasonal flu which is believed to be responsible for the deaths of some 15,000 people each year. The Seasonal Flu did not totally disappear in 2020 with the arrival of covid but its impact was dramatically reduced. It is widely believed that the reduction was due to (a), face mask wearing and (b) increased hygiene in the form of hand washing and hand sanitisation. A less publicised fact is that incidents of “Food Poisoning” was dramatically reduced during Covid. Although food poisoning comes from a bacteria rather than a virus, the sanitising of hands has help stop the spread of the bacteria and our tummies have been the beneficiaries.

 We are a long way from defeating covid but we have already taken on board that hand sanitising is here to stay. Sanitise Plus, the leading UK company in providing hand sanitising stations, is also here to stay.