I know that last time I moaned about a EU vaccine delays story not mentioning whether the same applied to the UK, someone pointed out that the UK was actually mentioned in the article.
Some cunt who got banned from this thread decided to contact me about this, claiming that I often make statements about the UK that only fairly apply to England. I\ve got shit all interest in having a conversation with them but it did remind me that there were a number of related subjects I'd been meaning to mention here.
There are all manner of details in the UK nations other than England that I've had reason to praise at times. Scotlands public health & political leadership communication is often much better than Englands, eg Sturgeoun is suited to that task in the same way Johnson is completely unsuited to it. Scotland and Wales have often made better noises about travel and border restrictions. Scotland, Wales and Northern Irelands sense of timing with new measures can be better than England/the UK governments, but sadly these differences are often still too marginal for my liking. And praise I would give Wales for having a circuit breaker was cancelled out by the way they utterly botched the exit from circuit breaker. And sometimes the timing in these countries is only better because they have even less wiggle room due to limited resources.
None of the UK nations looks good on paper when it comes to things like preventing there being more death in the second wave than there was in the first. In other key ways the failures are the same across all the four nations. But I cannot judge the administrations in isolation because they are not independent nations. There are distinct limits to what actions they can take and their overall approach because they are bound to the UK and the overall UK strategy to a great extent.
The implications of that pain me greatly, because in many ways the nations other than England are of the same sort of relatively small size to countries that we've seen pursue relatively successful strategies during the pandemic. The sort where, even if not going so far as to attempt a zero-covid type strategy, a lot of emphasis was on keeping viral prevalence down to very low levels, and being quite strong about travel and border restrictions. Making different choices about economic sacrifices and balances than the UK government has done.
I suppose its not even just a question of how shit the UK government is in this pandemic, or the physical realities of geography, borders and cross-border links across society and the economy. Its also about the complicated resources picture. Take for example a small, genuinely independent country with limited resources. When considering a pandemic response, the balance of risk equations include things like nature of economy, international supply ties, population demographics, ratio of hospital beds & intensive care beds to population size, etc. When presented with this pandemic, such factors can lead to some very clear decisions, eg very limited health system wiggle room to cope with a huge wave, so take the pain in a different way by doing more to keep levels of population infection as low as possible at every point. But I suspect the equation is more complicated when it comes to the likes of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They may share the lack of wiggle room with other small countries, but there is always that sense that some broader UK resources are available to them if deemed absolutely necessary. And this binds them to some aspects of 'large nation pandemic planning', which I tend to think is often hideously misguided for the large nations, let alone when applied to smaller ones.
This graph shows deaths within 28 days of a positive test, by date of death, split into deaths before September 2020 in blue, and those since in red. No region or nation of the UK manages to look good by this measure
There are caveats, not least that by this measure a lot of first wave deaths were missed. I will attempt to work around such limitations in some future chart, but I dont have the right data to do that properly yet.
www.theguardian.com
www.reuters.com
www.vettimes.co.uk
