Wednesday, 6 September 2023
Great Swathes
Health heat warning: NHS braced for influx of patients during heatwave as officials urge public to be cautious
Britain could enjoy the hottest day of the year so far today as temperatures are expected to soar to 33C (91F) after some areas entered an official heatwave for the first time since June.
But health experts fear great swathes of the population, especially the elderly and those with dementia, will be hit by heat-related sickness — increasing demand for NHS services.
We had a warm and pleasant day here in our bit of Derbyshire. Not excessively hot, but warm enough to sit out in the garden. It's time health experts did learn to fear great swathes of the population, especially during the next general election. Not likely though.
As an aside, Great Swathes sounds as if it could be a village in Norfolk.
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11 comments:
This Sunday end of the Indian summer for another year?
Great swathes of the populations? One or two per hospital, a hundred per hospital, 100,000 per hospital? Great minds want to know *before the hot weather* so we can mock the experts 'fears' later.
Many experts make (or provide) big predictions early on, but then mysteriously add qualifications about what they really meant to say later on. I call shenanigans.
Unless we mock the experts and the journalists that exaggerate numbers to capture the attention we are never going to break out of the expert doom loop.
Lots of berries of all types on the bushes round here.
It reached a scorching 22C. For a few minutes today.
Some people ventured out, dodging from shade to shade.
No road tar melting or railway track rail buckling yet.
But we are still to reach scorching October. And then, November.
I had an afternoon nap. In a bedroom upstairs. Heroically, I survived. Simply by having a fan on; you know, one of those whirly things.
James - looks like it according to the Met Office, although it looks cloudier too.
DJ - anyone would think weather bods crank out some unattributable and implausible headlines for their media chums in return for keeping the weather game in the public eye.
Doonhamer - lots of berries round here too. A scorching 23C here eventually, but it took a while to get there. This morning a local cafe was crowded with oldies looking for a hot breakfast.
dearieme - not one of the new electric ones where you don't need a punkah-wallah?
"Great swathes of the population" = millions of people, a scarily high number with "swathes" invoking scythes, waves, and so on.
"The population of Great Swathes" = 632. (Surprisingly, Nether Swathes actually has a few more, since they built that big new Barratt development on the old flood plain. No Post Office or pub, though.)
Much of the dross written about 'the heat' weren't out of nappies in 1976, when our second daughter was born, so the generation of kidults are writing stuff they really don't understand, or they hear it on the BBC and think it's true!
That year, nodody took a lot of notice of the heat, it was just another hot summer, and the grass went brown! I still drove to London every day, and we'd go to the pub at lunchtime for a cooling ale or three, then carried on!
Great Swathes is the old plague-ridden village which doesn't exist now, except for a closed church and some sort of lord who lives in the derelict granary. Little Swathes is the key village to visit, as there's a threshing machine which we all watch instead of television... Swathes Minor was a small kid in Knuckleberry's School, and we always hated him. He later became Prime Minister of a small state in South America for some reason...
Sam - yes it's supposed to sound like a scarily high but vague number. I'm surprised it wasn't described as "Biblical". They should have worked that in somewhere.
Scrobs - that's it, kidults writing stuff they really don't understand. Maybe they think they don't have to because it's mostly a copy and paste job.
When he strutted around in his mother's sunglasses, everyone knew Swathes Minor was destined for a South American political career.
"Greats wathes" was a psychosomatic illness at Oxford, common among those about to sit their Finals in "Greats".
dearieme - ha ha, maybe it means a pervasive sense of doom.
"When he strutted around in his mother's sunglasses, everyone knew Swathes Minor was destined for a South American political career."
Wine sur keyboard...!
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