We will however have loads of folk available who are used to making beds in hotels, emptying bins, swabbing the deck and so on, which is not glamorous, but certainly needs to be done more often than normal now, and other folk who are used to making and serving food, many of whom will also have basic 1st aid training. For the less serious isolate and watch over cases they could be re-purposed to free up actual  nurses for actual nursing.

Similarly, as supermarkets struggle for delivery drivers, there must be loads of folk who can at least drive a 7,5 tonner who could, or if you do not like that, under employed taxi drivers.


Problem is we lack a national skills directory we do not know who can actually do what, so we assume it is nothing, though actually that is quite far from the truth.


Having had to design electronics to go into an NMR scanner, I am perhaps less scared than some by the N-word (the problem is you must not perturb the magnetic fields so no ferrite, no iron, no nickel plate..)  and indeed when looking at the RF fields that emanate from the thing, compared to the normal safe exposure limits, not afraid of a few other words either...


(As an example of less useful skills, as well as the 1st aid and dangerous wiring, and a license to drive steam rollers, I can abseil and  design certain types of military hardware, but I cannot see how either of those  last three fit in to the current emergency. )

We will however have loads of folk available who are used to making beds in hotels, emptying bins, swabbing the deck and so on, which is not glamorous, but certainly needs to be done more often than normal now, and other folk who are used to making and serving food, many of whom will also have basic 1st aid training. For the less serious isolate and watch over cases they could be re-purposed to free up actual  nurses for actual nursing.

Similarly, as supermarkets struggle for delivery drivers, there must be loads of folk who can at least drive a 7,5 tonner who could, or if you do not like that, under employed taxi drivers.


Problem is we lack a national skills directory we do not know who can actually do what, so we assume it is nothing, though actually that is quite far from the truth.


Having had to design electronics to go into an NMR scanner, I am perhaps less scared than some by the N-word (the problem is you must not perturb the magnetic fields so no ferrite, no iron, no nickel plate..)  and indeed when looking at the RF fields that emanate from the thing, compared to the normal safe exposure limits, not afraid of a few other words either...


(As an example of less useful skills, as well as the 1st aid and dangerous wiring, and a license to drive steam rollers, I can abseil and  design certain types of military hardware, but I cannot see how either of those  last three fit in to the current emergency. )