COVID Vaccine !

[IaninSheffield]

See Iain in Sheffields post above, they stopped travel in and out !! Effectively starved the virus !! We could have, should have but well the rest is history now..... Incompetent and indefensible.

I agree, although also concede that closing our borders would perhaps have been more challenging than it proved for our Oceanic Commonwealth cousins. However, there is surely no doubt that we did too little, too late, then later compounded that by easing travel restrictions prematurely?

 

[winjim]

I wonder what this slate grey wet stuff is all around the borders of Great Britain?

Is it significant? I hadn't realised.

 

[PK99]

Yes but it was easy for them, being island nations and all.

Absent an effective vaccine all such isolation achieves is delaying the inevitable or committing to a permanent total isolation from the rest if the world.

 

[nickyboy]

I wonder what this slate grey wet stuff is all around the borders of Great Britain?

Australia and New Zealand has zero road freight access. Closing borders for them means closing ports and airports.
Closing borders for countries with road freight access (and economies fundamentally dependent on it) is impossible.
So you could allow access to lorries...but there are loads of commercial vans etc delivering product from mainland Europe to UK too. So you have to stop those too.
Comparing countries to Australia and NZ is a false equivalence due to the isolated nature of their geography

 

[MrGrumpy]

Australia and New Zealand has zero road freight access. Closing borders for them means closing ports and airports.
Closing borders for countries with road freight access (and economies fundamentally dependent on it) is impossible.
So you could allow access to lorries...but there are loads of commercial vans etc delivering product from mainland Europe to UK too. So you have to stop those too.
Comparing countries to Australia and NZ is a false equivalence due to the isolated nature of their geography

but going to the Med for your summer holidays was ok, or going skiing was ok as well ??? Encouraging people to mix, lets all relax everything for Christmas etc . That`s what boils my piss . So yep we could have should have but once again incompetence in Government.

 

[mjr]

Maybe this country is not full of people that will listen to advise, I am not a Boris fan but if he tells people to do something and they do not do it is it his fault.

If Boris hires someone to lead his team who says Whitehall departments are "useless as communication devices" and then leaves covid messaging to those departments, is people not listening Boris's fault? If he does not use any of the social media methods that won him a referendum, party leadership and a general election, is people not listening Boris's fault? Where the fark are the UK cat and dog memes or tiktok dances supporting the rules? Look at what government is putting out online - it's so dry, you wish you could stuff your rain-soaked shoes with it!

If Boris's failure to communicate effectively (and refusal to see this as important enough to use the sharp tools) isn't Boris's fault, then whose do you think it is?

Boris made his choice months ago. Bet everything on vaccines and try to hold his party together long enough to deploy them. Suppressing peaks was just a way to stop MPs taking so much heat over NHS collapses that too many would rebel.

 

[PK99]

but going to the Med for your summer holidays was ok, or going skiing was ok as well ??? Encouraging people to mix, lets all relax everything for Christmas etc . That`s what boils my piss . So yep we could have should have but once again incompetence in Government.

You are indulging in frustrated whataboutery.

Closing UK borders is both orders of magnitude a more complex problem and a world disrupting event.

Plus don't forget we had recently been given a choice of PM: Boris, Corbyn or Swinson. The public chose Boris big margin.

Plus another piece of data:

New Zealand has a food self-sufficiency rate of 185%,
Australia 207%.
UK 64%
Germany 80%

 

[pawl]

I agree, although also concede that closing our borders would perhaps have been more challenging than it proved for our Oceanic Commonwealth cousins. However, there is surely no doubt that we did too little, too late, then later compounded that by easing travel restrictions prematurely?

Horse and stab door springs to mind Heard Boris saying schools are safe He certainly looks after London Then he says he may after review the situation in a few weeks He’s going to wait to see what happens to the disease in schools As I said as he always waits Shuts the stable door after the horse has bolted

 

[MrGrumpy]

You are indulging in frustrated whataboutery.

Closing UK borders is both orders of magnitude a more complex problem and a world disrupting event.

Plus don't forget we had recently been given a choice of PM: Boris, Corbyn or Swinson. The public chose Boris big margin.

Plus another piece of data:

New Zealand has a food self-sufficiency rate of 185%,
Australia 207%.
UK 64%
Germany 80%

Goods importing/exporting I can understand , fair enough. However they did restrict travel within, is my understanding ? Its complex , but the stats for us look awful and that sits at Westminster. There should have been clear concise decisions made, but its a bloody mess

 

[screenman]

If Boris hires someone to lead his team who says Whitehall departments are "useless as communication devices" and then leaves covid messaging to those departments, is people not listening Boris's fault? If he does not use any of the social media methods that won him a referendum, party leadership and a general election, is people not listening Boris's fault? Where the fark are the UK cat and dog memes or tiktok dances supporting the rules? Look at what government is putting out online - it's so dry, you wish you could stuff your rain-soaked shoes with it!

If Boris's failure to communicate effectively (and refusal to see this as important enough to use the sharp tools) isn't Boris's fault, then whose do you think it is?

Boris made his choice months ago. Bet everything on vaccines and try to hold his party together long enough to deploy them. Suppressing peaks was just a way to stop MPs taking so much heat over NHS collapses that too many would rebel.

I think I need to re-write my post, I admit I had other things on my mind at the time. You are bang on correct in all you say, but I still feel there is a percentage of the population who would ignore the rules.

 

[srw]

Closing borders for countries with road freight access (and economies fundamentally dependent on it) is impossible.

Anything is possible - see the Isle of Man. It might be incredibly difficult, but it's not impossible.

 

[SpokeyDokey]

Goods importing/exporting I can understand , fair enough. However they did restrict travel within, is my understanding ? Its complex , but the stats for us look awful and that sits at Westminster. There should have been clear concise decisions made, but its a bloody mess

Although filtering this on deaths/million of population in descending order, puts a number of European countries ahead of us, and a few behind us that are pretty much in the same ball park:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Maybe wait until the dust settles before we hand out the plaudits & brickbats?

 

[nickyboy]

Goods importing/exporting I can understand , fair enough. However they did restrict travel within, is my understanding ? Its complex , but the stats for us look awful and that sits at Westminster. There should have been clear concise decisions made, but its a bloody mess

The restriction of travel within Australia is much more straightforward due to two things:

1) State governance system means that, for example, WA can legally close its borders with other states
2) Enormous distances mean that the routes from one state to another are very limited (except perhaps Victoria to NSW) so are easily controlled

I'm not saying that the UK isn't a shitshow, but to try to compare it with Australia or NZ isn't realistic. In reality the UK has as permeable border as all the other W European countries, all of whom are struggling to a degree

 

[mjr]

In reality the UK has as permeable border as all the other W European countries, all of whom are struggling to a degree

"all of whom are struggling to a degree" but the UK has lost control in a way apparently unlike any of them:

BBC Radio 4 "How to Vaccinate the World" is on now and being quite pessimistic about mass vaccination as a strategy, pointing out that the Smallpox vaccine existed for 200 years before bringing it under control, Polio 70 years. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qz3p

 

[nickyboy]

"all of whom are struggling to a degree" but the UK has lost control in a way apparently unlike any of them:
View attachment 567197

BBC Radio 4 "How to Vaccinate the World" is on now and being quite pessimistic about mass vaccination as a strategy, pointing out that the Smallpox vaccine existed for 200 years before bringing it under control, Polio 70 years. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qz3p

Had the new variant (which I understand has a level of transmissibility somewhere between 52% and 70% more than the more widely distributed strain) originated in, say, France, rather than UK what do you think the graphs would look like?

My take on this is that the measures and adherence to the measures in UK and most other W European countries are broadly the same with some finessing around the edges. You can see that at the beginning of December most were on a broadly similar trajectory. It's only in the past 4 weeks that things have changed. Small differences in restrictive measures don't explain this. New variant does. In that respect, UK has just been unlucky. I'm expecting most other countries to follow suit over the next couple of months as vaccination levels will be nowhere near enough to prevent its spread