T.R.O.Y. wrote:It’s not as black and white as doing a good job and not doing a good job. Nobody has claimed we’d be fine if we hadn’t had a Tory gov for ten years - you’re putting words in people’s mouths again.
I see the below as failures of government:
- too late locking down
- abandoning track trace
- lack of PPE supply and failure to purchase
- horrendous communication throughout
It’s pretty clear to me the response hasn’t been close to adequate and has worsened the crisis. Hypotheticals such as ‘nobody could do better’ are not valid arguments to the above.
I haven't qualified at anytime if the government is doing a 'good' job or a 'bad' job, all I've been saying is that they've had to do the job with the 'tools' they had at the time of the pandemic, the systems and resources in place in place when it appeared to fight it with and what 'knowledge' they had about the coronavirus at the time to plan and come up with a strategy to do their best to cope with it until they could put the infra structure and resources in place to deal with it properly.
That would have been the exact same position of any government anywhere in the world.
If you apply that to your four criticisms you state then -
- Too late to lockdown - the strategy they initially followed was that of herd immunity, which was derived from modelling based on the data from China in respect of their stated infection rates and mortality levels arising from the virus. We now widely acknowledge that data was deliberately under reported and once that was realised (just four days later) we moved into lockdown.
- Abandoned Trace tracking - Trace tracking is only effective if the number of cases of known positive tests for the virus is relatively low - as each case must have had numerous contacts with others whilst being infected.
The herd immunity strategy was for the virus to take hold in the community (the percentage quoted iirc, for herd immunity to become effective is for 60% of the population to catch the virus).
Once it was realised what the true mortality rate was from Italy's data and the R rate was estimated to be now somewhere around 3 in our country at that point and that virus was already now established in the community then there simply wasn't any point for Trace Tracking as the volume of people having been in contact with someone with the virus would have been in the millions.
To put that into some context iirc that when we moved into lockdown having abandoned the Chinese data as being false, then our 'best' scenario envisaged by the medical advisors based on the new model based on Italy's data was for 20,000 deaths. As the death rate was considered to be about 1% of those infected then that implied 2,000,000 catching the virus.
If we say each of the 2m had close contact with say just 5 people, then Trace tracking would have involved dealing with 10 million people - and that assuming that non of these 10m people hadn't caught the virus and thus creating more trace tracking need.
Once lockdown was commenced the need for trace tracking became irrelevant until the numbers of people infected fell to a level that Trace Tracking could once more become a relevant tool in fighting the pandemic.
- Lack of PPE and failure to purchase - I've answered this many times now - the world was not ready for the pandemic and had insufficient PPE and have since been battling each other to get supplies from anywhere in the world.
Hardly the fault of just the Conservative government to underestimate/poo poo the doom mongers to build up sufficient stocks to be ready just in case.
They were right though, and all the governments in the world (save perhaps S.Korea) had got it wrong.
(Germany had the pharmaceutical infra structure to fight the pandemic in terms of testing but didn't have sufficient PPE's as they have been buying stocks of it throughout the world like everybody else).
- Horrendous communication through out - Difficult/impossible to say what the outcome of the pandemic will be - last night the government were publicly acknowledging that there probably would never be a vaccine for Coronavirus...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/covid-coronavirus-vaccine-trials-latest-uk/...as after nearly 20 years there is still not one for Sars which is also from the Covid 'family'.
It's impossible to give simple 'one size fits all' advise that everyone will be happy with - let alone accept and adhere to.
Wrong advise has already been given (herd immunity) based on false information, that has initially 'dented' the credibility of the government from the outset and the current 'Be Aware' message is certainly not the clearest, I don't doubt many could say otherwise.
There is also what I suspect many still don't get (as I've tried to explain how inside government works) that sometimes you simply can not communicate the truth for it doing more damage than simply keeping it under wraps.
If the government had said (which I believe was the case) that we are sacrificing patients in care homes (being generally composed of old and frail, with a limited lifespan already) because otherwise we can't protect the NHS and consequently the community as a whole, then their would have been riots on the street.
Hence we got into all the palaver of insufficient PPE's for care home staff, why little testing was being done for them and their residents and all the media/political 'scrutiny/points scoring' that came with it and again damaged the image of how the government was communicating. Still the lesser of the two evils though.
Finally did I actually say 'nobody could do better', I don't believe I did, as what I've been trying to say all along is that nobody is perfect, mistakes will and have been made and that given what resources. infrastructure and knowledge each individual country had at the start of the pandemic that I don't doubt the vast majority of them acted in the best way they believed was right for them.
The simple truth is that we along with the rest of the world was unprepared with what has happened and what had only happened once before (in 1919) since 1665 - over 350 years previously.
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