wessy wrote:Sluffy Just to clarify this bit - the 'R' number is the rate of infection - not the mortality rate.
I don't think i said it was the morality rate just that the rate would go up, i understand fully that R is the infection rate. Nat I almost agree with your hard line stance but if you think that the preparation for this virus is not at the governments door then your deluded.
They had warnings from the scientist that a pandemic at some point would hit the world, they made a political choice not to prepare for it. Bill Gates etc flagged this up as well.
Do i think this is easy for any government hell no, but when a government is in power for over 10 years and makes no provision or even worse runs down through political choice things like care homes because the care homes were an easy target.
This government are good at bragging about what they are going to do, like 20k new police men and 50k more doctors and nurse , when in reality all they are doing is replacing the cuts they have made another political choice. the result is even if they didn't double count 19k of nurses that they just assume won't leave the service, that's just dishonest.
The reality is they are replacing these jobs with rookie coppers and nurses who should have had 10 years more experience.
No, it was myself who mentioned the mortality rate, to attempt to show there is more than one dimension to what is going on, namely just because something is infecting many people very quickly, it doesn't necessarily mean that is such a bad thing - people catch colds from others for instance - but if you catch something that kills you, then it is!
It was that point I was trying to make people more aware of.
As for being prepared for the pandemic, we were not.
What you don't seem to acknowledge though was that no country in the world was apart from two exceptions - South Korea who had learned the lessons from the Sars epidemic that had effected them and Germany that had the massive pharmaceutical infra structure needed behind it.
Singapore deserves mention also but it only has a relatively small population to deal with.
China, Italy, France, ourselves and even the USA were all scrambling for ventilators and PPE's urgently and sourced the world for them - so even if we HAD invested stocks in those ten years it still would not have been anything like enough because nobody ever expected a pandemic to be so fast in spreading and so lethal to so many so quickly.
We even initially sent some of our PPE stocks to China because they couldn't handle it - and they make most of the world's PPE's!
New York was 'begging' for help at one stage too - probably the richest city/state in the world - and they hadn't enough kit to fight the tsunami that hit them!
The EU apologised to Italy for turning their backs on them and refusing to help them despite their pleas for help because Germany, France, etc, were looking out for themselves at that stage.
So if China, the USA and the EU were insufficiently prepared for coronavirus, I think it is a bit harsh (and totally politically biased) to blame the government of the day for not being prepared for it on the basis of 'political' decisions to underfund pandemic stock piles.
As for your comments about politically deciding to run down care homes I have no idea what you mean?
The majority of care homes are privately run with the person moving into the care home funding their stay.
If they can't fund the provision for themselves the council will pay up to a certain amount towards their costs but will recoup such fees from the estate of that person - remember all the who-ha a bit back about having to sell the family home to pay for the parents stay in care?
It's not the government that has somehow underfunded care homes (based on a political decision?) for the last decade as you seem to be saying?
The issue with care homes has been more to do with the government prioritising the NHS first and foremost over them in respect of PPE's and testing availability.
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