Doc Martin. Right diagnosis. Wrong solution. Just like for Covid-19.

Remember the series?  Or in particular do you remember the episode when Louisa went for interview for the head teacher post.  She was already a teacher in the school.   (Spoiler, she got it).     

There is an outbreak of a highly contagious skin infection at the school and Martin is initially confounded, until his brilliant diagnostic skills uncover the source.  And his solution?  Apart from the medical treatment, lockdown.  At the interview Louisa was accused of not following Doc Martins advice which was to stop the children coming to school.  She was encouraging people to break the lockdown as it were.  You can watch the whole episode here.    

I could not help thinking that this programme, recorded in 2005, should have been essential viewing for the prime minister, the Scottish first minister et al  before they took the mad decision to virtually bankrupt the UK by going into lockdown.   

Doc Martin (think of him as the current SAGE advisors to the government) said it had to be lockdown.     

Louisa, (think of her as the kind of people the establishment regard as a bit of a loose cannon), argued that half the children had their parents working, and they needed to work to put bread on the table.    

The establishment, (read that as most people working in the taxpayer funded public sector with the notable exception of those on the real front line: nurses, doctors, and all the other essential hospital staff), sniffed at that as an excuse to allow the children into the school to be taught when they really knew better as the establishment that the childen should be in lockdown.  

We ended up with an incandescent Louisa telling the interview panel that she wasn’t going to let her pupils suffer and had ensured that each child who was infected was securely isolated in the school and, in that isolation, continued to be taught.  It was quite a performance.    

So why, when it was obvious to a humble primary school teacher in a soap opera set in beautiful Cornwall in 2005 that lockdown of everyone is the wrong answer, have we arrived at the insane situation of billions of pounds being wasted and lives and businesses (yip, the ones that paid the taxes that pays for the public sector) ruined by doing the complete opposite to what Louisa did?