A need to live more healthily

The Covid pandemic has really brought home just how important good health is to everyone. Without good health, what else matters? You can have all the riches in the world but without health it counts for little. One of the constant calls over the period of the pandemic has concerned the need to protect the NHS. This has been to ensure the NHS will not be over run and can continue to serve the people. But how much more capacity would there be in the NHS to meet the need, if funding had not been cut for the past 10 years? The government did not take the threat of Covid seriously until it was too late. Then, there was the lack of Personal Protective Equipment, leading to unecessary deaths. The frankly criminal decision to send Covid patients into care homes. The test and trace debacle, with the work handed out to private sector 'connections' of those in government. They failed to deliver - still today we do not have the quality of data necessary to deal with Covid hotspots, This in turn leads to the incredibly damaging blanket lockdowns, so readily applied across the country. A system truly unfit for purpose. Coming out of Covid, never again must the NHS be starved of funding - it must be our first priority always. The overall health of the population also needs addressing. It has been pointed out that inequality and general low health and welfare have made the UK population particularly vulnerable to Covid. We all need to live better, eating healthy diets and getting more exercise. One of the few pluses of lockdown was people reconnecting with nature, getting their daily exercise. Also, people began to cook and eat healthier foods - there was the beginning of a something new. These developments need to be extended. We are living in a more sedentary world, with life increasingly revolving around phones and computer screens - this is not a healthy way to live. Not surprisingly there is an obesity epidemic. The Covid pandemic has taught us all many lessons but perhaps the most important is to live healthier lives and invest in those who can best help us when we are sick.