RecordAceFromNew
Swinging Member
- Location
- West London
We clearly aren't being told the whole truth regarding testing.
Official figures today says "As of 9am on 17 March 2020, 50,442 people have been tested in the UK, of which 48,492 were confirmed negative and 1,950 were confirmed as positive."
Those numbers couldn't possibly correlate with 10,000 tests a day, let alone 25,000, because 29,764 tests were already conducted by 12th/13th March.
According to industrial sources, the government was not taking delivery of available test kits from suppliers. Then
"on March 11, NHS England said it intended to greatly expand testing capacity for Covid-19 – up to 10,000 tests per day. But the following day, the chief medical officer for England Chris Witty said at a Number 10 press conference: “We will pivot all of the testing capacity to identifying people in hospitals who have symptoms.” Some healthcare experts take this to mean that the 10,000-tests-per-day target is now irrelevant and that only a subset of cases, the most severe, will be identified. "
Given it is clear and the CMO/CSA admitted that they have been given the freedom to guide based on "science", the fundamental roadmap was determined by them to tackle this deadly outbreak, but it has been nothing but shambolic. As the editor of the Lancet wrote today:
"Indeed, it didn’t need this week’s predictions by Imperial College scientists to estimate the impact of the government’s complacent approach. Any numerate school student could make the calculation. With a mortality of 1% among 60% of a population of some 66 million people, the UK could expect almost 400,000 deaths. The huge wave of critically ill patients that would result from this strategy would quickly overwhelm the NHS.
The UK’s best scientists have known since that first report from China that Covid-19 was a lethal illness. Yet they did too little, too late.
...
Somehow there was a collective failure among politicians and perhaps even government experts to recognise the signals that Chinese and Italian scientists were sending. We had the opportunity and the time to learn from the experience of other countries. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the UK missed those signals. We missed those opportunities.
....
There will be deaths that were preventable. The system failed. I don’t know why. But, when we have suppressed this epidemic, when life returns to some semblance of normality, difficult questions will have to be asked and answered. Because we can’t afford to fail again. We may not have a second chance."
