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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Azrael said:
Screw up again and may be time to activate men in grey suits, "Boris" with greatest regret to step down for sake of health and family/ies, etc.
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In many ways he's served his purpose now. Thumping tory majority achieved, his only other purpose was to get as close to a no deal brexit as possible, but now they can sneak that through under the radar anyway. So he may get punted off to the lords to see out his days with a media career and more shagging. The only truth about the tory party is its constant sense of self preservation, no matter what politics they have to adopt.
 
Azrael said:
While some papers are out there, New Scientist reported that all "the science" (or "the magisterium" as I prefer to call the secretive SAGE cabal) won't be released until the pandemic's over. Draw conclusions as appropriate ...
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By which point the timeline of who was told what when will be much harder to unpick.
 
Thanks elbows
The numbers in post #16503568 show most deaths being reported within a week but a significant number take up to 10 to 14 days to arrive in the statistics, 15% take a couple of weeks more. So the 8th April total of 784 for England may rise because of the reporting lag by perhaps 15% over the next two weeks. So the England only hospital only number of deaths for the 8th April will probably be above 900.
How many deaths outside hospitals wil the ONS eventually add to this.

From being told to take it seriously from the 23rd March, that weekend before we knuckled down to proper social distancing and lock down, the virus must have spread far and wide. It appears for those for whom it is fatal, from infection to symptoms is up to 2 weeks, symptoms to hospitalisation another week, hospitalisation to death a final week. That is this week...
Hopefully next week there will start to be fewer deaths.

Among all the emergency planning officers, civil protection officers, civil contingencies officers, resilience officers, or risk manager did no one ever add up the amount of PPE needed for a virulent epidemic. Or did the Government always say you can't spend that much.
 
brogdale said:
This piece by Dominic Minghella seems to have the perfect title for a documentary about Johnson's criminal negligence.
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Hits like a punch to the gut, but it's even worse: according to Reuters, the government's advisors knew the likely death toll of pursuing controlled spread and "herd immunity" at least two weeks before the Imperial paper errupted onto the scene. All it did was let the public in on their dirty little secret.

Oh, and even better, according to the World Tonight (April 2 edition, 18 minutes in), the government tried to ban doctors from treating Covid patients with any drugs but paracetamol, in order to have an untreated data pool for clinical trials. They had no power to do interfere with the practice of medicine in this way, and conscientious doctors ignored them, but it's clear that many hospitals are relying on oxygen alone, despite the govt being forced to clarify that physicians have final say.

Yes, politicians must be held to account, but so too must those at the top of our scientific and medical establishments.
 
ricbake said:
Among all the emergency planning officers, civil protection officers, civil contingencies officers, resilience officers, or risk manager did no one ever add up the amount of PPE needed for a virulent epidemic.
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Yes they did this back in 2016. It then got parked on account of brexit and the 'threat' of no deal. All the emergency planning work went into preparing us for a crisis which, had it occurred, would have been created by the government on purpose. That seemed pretty stupid at the time, now it's starting to look more like the opening phase of a crime against humanity.
 
editor said:
Pretty much nailed it

www.theguardian.com

How did Britain get its coronavirus response so wrong?

As the warnings grew louder, the government was distracted by Brexit. On testing, contact tracing and equipment supply, there was a failure to prepare
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Devastating piece, from which emerges two striking conclusions:-
  • not only were the scientific advisors basing their responses on influenza modelling, they assumed a SARS virus would act like the flu. And
  • Two senior advisors were on the brink of resigning before Johnson finally changed tack
So, switching from "contain" to "mitigation" was inextricably tied to flu pandemics. Even in the U.K., there's no scientific consensus for applying it to a SARS virus. And government advisors are not mere spokespeople, nor at the mercy of ministers: they're experts who're highly influential in shaping policy, and can be expected to threaten resignation if they disagree. This goes far beyond ministers.
 
Azrael said:
we know they wanted to avoid a lockdown. Several strategies compatible with doing that, and if they chose the most politically costly one, must've come with strong backing from their scientific advisors.
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Seriously, why do you think this follows?
 
weltweit said:
He managed to get the affected party tested, (which irritated some) the test was negative and he was later photographed out running. So he hasn't been isolating for some time.
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Getting the affected party tested may not have been his idea.
 
Raheem said:
Seriously, why do you think this follows?
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Because if only for reasons of self-interest, not even the most evil elected politician wants hundreds of thousands of their own voters to die needlessly and indiscriminately from disease. As shown from the hostile reporting in their media allies, they can't hide this calamity as they have the horrific human cost of austerity.

The Times investigation reports that pandemic planning was modelled on influenza, and letting it spread to generate "herd immunity" was advocted by scientific advisors, not forced on them by ministers. It also notes the scientific divide between Asia, which treated SARS-CoV-2 as a deadly respiratory infection that must be suppressed at all cost, and the West, which treated it as the flu.

If evidence emerges that scientific advisors advocated aggressive quarantine to keep the virus from Britain's shores, followed by using all means necessary to stop, reverse and ultimately eradicate the disease, I'll of course change my mind. To date, their every plan, action and statement suggests the exact opposite.
 
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gawkrodger said:
The Times putting Johnson and crew on blast

t.co

Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster | News | …

archived 18 Apr 2020 18:20:37 UTC
t.co t.co
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Thank you for putting this up gawkrodger - it is a damning indictment of Hancock and Johnson, Whitty and Valance appear to have been useless as well.
The efforts of Devi Sridhar and Neil Ferguson on 16 & 17 of January, if heeded , could have made such a difference.

This disease hasn't affected Johnson enough yet

The Times article should be read by everyone.
 
Eurgh. I made the mistake of watching a couple of minutes of the Andrew Marr show, currently on.

"Well, perhaps a little less of the high politics, eh? Hindsight is a wonderful thing."

Really drilling down, there.
 
gawkrodger said:
The Times putting Johnson and crew on blast

t.co

Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster | News | …

archived 18 Apr 2020 18:20:37 UTC
t.co t.co
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Came over here to share this. The best, most forensic, analysis so far of the government’s response, planning and strategy to tackle the pandemic.

As such the article is absolutely damming. No doubt this piece has been assembled with insider commentary and as such we should ask why now? The answer is clearly that the government want to take the hit now before lockdown is eased and whilst people are understandably focussed on other issues - like their health and keeping a roof over their heads.

Let’s hope the media keep pursuing this because a) what is emerging is a story of criminal negligence and manslaughter. Avoidable deaths, a failure to command the economy to support the NHS and Social Care system, a failure to contact trace or secure borders and an abject and arrogant failure to even pay attention. But also b) the Labour Party are, supporting, the government and merely asking questions about the strategy for post lockdown.
 
This is where the ST report starts to go wrong, because it states that "a central part of any pandemic plan is to identify anyone who becomes ill, vigorously pursue all their recent contacts and put them into quarantine".

That, it says, "involves testing and the UK initially seemed to be ahead of the game". In early, it adds, "February Hancock proudly told the Commons the UK was one of the first countries to develop a new test for the coronavirus", declaring, "Testing worldwide is being done on equipment designed in Oxford".
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The error here is in asserting that the "test, track and trace" programme is a central part of a pandemic plan. It certainly should have been but, as we have seen by reference to the influenza plan on which the government relied, contact tracing was confined to the initial stages, with a view to demonstrating that community spread had become established.

At that point, it was always planned that contact tracing would be abandoned, as indeed it was, as the government ramped up the NHS "surge" capability to deal with the expected torrent of cases.
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But what seems to elude so many commenters is that, having established a faulty paradigm for dealing with a Sars pandemic, there was very little the government could do in the short-term to remedy matters.

To change strategy, the government would have had to call upon a resource to track down contacts which simply did not exist. While, even a decade ago, it could have relied on a network of 10,000 local authority environmental health staff for the purpose, operating from 342 local council offices, transfer of the function to Public Health England presaged a savage contraction of the service, now entrusted to 226 staff in public health protection teams operating out of nine offices.
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Thus, even if the government had decided to change tack and major on contact tracing, the infrastructure no longer existed and, even now, months into the epidemic, provision is still not in place and there are plans to develop a completely new and untried system.

And then, since there was going to be no systemic contract tracing, there was going to be only minimal testing, so it was never thought necessary to build up a capability for mass testing. And again, as we are seeing, it is not easy from a standing start, to ramp up testing from the low base with which we entered this crisis.
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In other words, trying to change the machinery for dealing with a pandemic is the classic example of trying to change the direction of a supertanker. You can spin the wheel, but it takes an awful long time before anything happens. Governments are unwieldy things and cannot turn on a sixpence.

While we can applaud the enthusiasm of the Sunday Times team for their work, like so many others they are missing the point. In looking at the sequence of failures that led to this current debacle, we cannot start in late January as this narrative does.
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EU Referendum

eureferendum.com eureferendum.com
 
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Yes, they repurposed the flu pandemic plan, more or less what they implemented in 2009. Difference was there were antivirals available from the start, infectivity wasn't the same, and a vaccine was available in a few months (although we may have that if the Oxford team pull it off, that'd just be a major stroke of luck).

I'm not defending the plan for flu, but to repurpose it for a damn SARS virus was negligent in the extreme.
 
purenarcotic said:
The COVID research app from KCL has been updated this morning asking further questions about how often you’ve left the house in the past week. Be interesting to see how this influences the outcomes.
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Bit apprehensive about that. Bit more snooping. But the qs seem fair. And yeah can see that the info could be really useful regarding working out the next stages of what to do. Be interesting to see the sickness numbers for those who tick the last category - leave the house regularly - compared to the rest.
 
belboid said:
it abso-fucking-lutely kills them!
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I don't think it does. It uses some of the language of hard-hitting piece whilst providing all of the excuses that will be used to let the government and Johnson off.

Unusual for the PM not to chair cobra; unprecedented flooding; work-life balance/pregnant partner; sending ppe aid abroad to a nation in crisis; issue bumped due to Brexit negotiations.

For every failing, an arguable reason given.
 
See I would expect the last group to be the most likely to report symptoms as we’re the group out and about more than anyone else. It’ll be interesting to see what it shows for sure.
 
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