Ajax Bay
Guru
- Location
- East Devon
First stage COVID Enquiry report due out today.
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raleighnut
Legendary Member
- Location
- One of the 'Elite'
Yep most people think it has 'gone away' but it hasn't.
No - it's just milder.
Alex321
Guru
- Location
- South Wales
Do they?
Most people I know are well aware it is still around, and probably always will be.
lazybloke
Priest of the cult of Chris Rea
- Location
- Leafy Surrey
Just about everyone in my family has one of two conditions; a consequence of which is that we tend to take statements at absolute face value.
I'm exactly the same (although undiagnosed) but even I smile when I see people on the internet taking statements literally and immediately stamping away on their keyboards to disagree. Chill !!!
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Ajax Bay
Guru
- Location
- East Devon
And here's a summary (my edit of others):
Covid was not a ‘black swan’ event
The pandemic was entirely predictable [ie it was likely to happen some time] given the previous outbreak of SARS, a coronavirus, in China in 2003. “The recent experiences of SARs and MERS meant that another coronavirus outbreak at pandemic scale was foreseeable.” The absence of such a scenario from the risk assessments was a fundamental error of the DHSC and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat.”
UK health inequalities meant the death toll was worse
The poor health of the nation beforehand aggravated the spread of the disease and the death toll: the disease “had a disproportionate impact on vulnerable people”: the poorer or from an ethnic minority, with a “higher likelihood of sickness and death”. But “there was too much focus on clinical vulnerability and not enough on wider social and economic factors.”
The Government did not have a national contingency plan for SARS
“No UK-wide contingency plan for SARS, MERS or any other high consequence [ie significantly worse than flu] infectious disease has been disclosed by the UK government. The Inquiry [doubts] such plans ever existed.”
The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic
UK planning assumed that the threat was a flu pandemic and “too much weight was placed on this single scenario.” This planning was “inadequate for a global pandemic” such as Covid, she wrote, and ministers should have planned for different infectious diseases. The plans focused on attempting to contain the fallout of the disease, rather than minimising transmission.
No contact tracing system was in place
A key failure was no contact tracing system capable of coping with a [widespread, multiple source outbreak]. The “entirety of the UK’s testing and contact tracing system was designed to deal with only small numbers of cases of emerging infectious diseases, as opposed to mass testing or contact tracing”.
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Whilst that's true, the Government also failed to fund and engage the PHE experts in contact tracing, instead farming the job out to a private provider.
Ajax Bay
Guru
- Location
- East Devon
I suggest they thought (and were given clear advice that) the established PHE contact tracing system was quite unable to cope with the levels of infection. Threw money at trying to do it another way, and then realised that for our country and freedoms and freedom of national and international movement, it was nugatory.
Must take care to realise that nations like Singapore and Taiwan can impose Orwellian intrusive surveillance and the population is used to discipline. In UK? I hope not.
The whole 'track&trace' line of action is fine for diseases of low infectivity (eg Ebola) and clear symptoms but will surely fail as R ^. IANAD
kingrollo
Guru
Funny I was sure we did an Orwellian lock down - too late but it did happen.
Sounds you're trying to dig Boris and his Nate's out of a hole.....which I find incredible.....once a Tory eh ????
In by doing so pilar 2 testing cut off the current tried and tested PH contact tracing. Leading to cutting out primary care from the testing , reporting and following up case management. It was always possible to scale up testing by redeploying current local PH HCP's who carry out contact tracing every day of the week. Eg TB nurses. It work in other counties South Africa as an example moved the HIV nurses over to testing and contact tracing. They are known locally and best placed to understand the health and social needs.
- Location
- Glasgow
Well, @Ajax Bay's post imo has nothing to do with defending Boris, even though (again imo) Boris didn't know if he was coming or going.
However, the rest of Europe was in the same boat.
Big mistake, imo, was that Boris did not heed the warning letter that the Italian prime minister sent to all heads of state in February 2020, outlining what was coming to them.
Imo, because we are an island, we could have reacted better and faster.
Of course, as @Ajax Bay said, we are not an authoritarian state, some measures were (are) just unthinkable.
I don't know if the draconian states had more or less pro-rata deaths than the UK during the pandemic.
Ajax Bay
Guru
- Location
- East Devon
Good to hear your reasoned analysis @kingrollo - please head over to NACA if you need a fix. Are you having a bad day? What's a "Nate" by the way?
The argument for lockdowns is a separate topic and one for the next phase of the enquiry, I believe.
Don't think 'lockdowns' featured in 1984 but please educate me.
I fail to see why you think the way the government prepared for and handled this is a party political issue, btw. Do you think that a government of a different hue would have made substantially different decisions and not taken the advice of health and science professionals? For example this new cross bench peer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance
Or do you think the government deliberately decided to go against advice and adopt a cunning plan all of their own.
I have to assume you have not worked in Whitehall if you reckon the latter.
Could the extant "tried and tested PH contact tracing" have coped? Not a chance, however enhanced by whatever means. And the extremely expensive effort of setting a system up was, in the event, a waste of time and money too. It should have been stopped quickly as soon as it was recognised that, given the nature of the pandemic, tracking and tracing was unworkable. Setting up a track and trace system with sufficient capacity would/will be an extraordinary and expensive 'stand-by' capability. I predict that this and future governments will (continue to) afford it a low priority within the health budget, and rightly so.
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Yes, and they didn't. Boris did what he wanted. See wine parties for more details.
Yes, it's documented.
We will never know. It would still have been a better choice to go with experts rather than make something up.
gbb
Squire
- Location
- Peterborough
Shame, while its inevitable politically linked...this is an interesting subject that's just been spoiled by excessive focus on the politics.
Do us all a favour mods, shut it down
Do us all a favour mods, shut it down
