Fucking NIck Triggle again. Typical mix of accurate reporting and distortion, with the usual fallacy that he has reeked of since the start of this pandemic.
Evidence from top scientists suggests problems with the politics and science.
www.bbc.co.uk
I dont want to spend part of my Sunday going through this and picking it apart, pointing out which bits are a fair reflection of the inquiry so far and which bits are dodgy. I will do it another day, although if anybody else wants to help me out by tackling parts of it in the meantime I would be grateful.
I dont think I've got the mental health reserves necessary to go through this article and pick on all the points in detail.
I'll just point out that the broad expert, scientific and government failings were all part of the first wave, blame is shared for that one. But when it came to the second wave, the inquiry evidence so far has confirmed that it was the governments fault that the balance was all wrong when it came to addressing the second wave. The experts and all sorts of other covid response groups within government knew what needed to be done the second time, it wasnt just SAGE.
But Johnson etc fucked it up by refusing to act at the right time with the right strength. And the likes of the Treasury did their own calculations about other effects, which fed into the 'balancing act', but they kept all their workings out secret. Triggle himself was responsible for writing some shit in September 2020 when these stupid delays and dangerous denials of the inevitable consequence were in full flow.
And his stuff is still riddled with the fallacy that you can save the economy and reduce the side-effects of measures by trying to avoid those measures by talking shit and delaying during crucial periods. Getting the balance right and reducing the harms mentioned in his article requires doing the right thing at the right time, having the right discussions about what our priorities are, etc.
And if you want to be sincere when it comes to issues like the mental health damage done to our young, you need to keep enough of a grip on the virus that you have room to impose measures for shorter periods of time, have wiggle room on schools by being tougher in other areas, etc. So the likes of Triggle and others in the media, Johnson, the Treasury etc were part of the problem whichever angle you come at it from, not just from the direct covid deaths angle.
Do not trust these people when they paint the balancing act in the way Triggle does in that article. Theres been nothing in the inquiry evidence that supports their stance. Nor has the inquiry discovered some magic alternative plan that could have worked in practice. It has heard from a few people that would have preferred an approach that just shielded the vulnerable and let others get on with life, which is understandable, except that nobody has been able to demonstrate a way to actually achieve that. And one or two witnesses last week pointed out that even identifying all of the vulnerable in the first place is a challenge, using Johnson as an example of someone who wouldnt have been classed as vulnerable but ended up seriously ill when they caught covid.
The only other way mentioned to avoid later lockdowns would be to have had a test & trace system that actually worked well enough to detect and isolate the required proportion of cases. But its also pointed out that even if you have that system, it only works up to a certain scale, it only works if you keep the number of infections within a certain range that doesnt challenge test & trace capacity. Countries that had those systems and success on that front needed to listen to the data from such systems, and impose timely restrictions in certain areas for certain periods of time when those systems indicated an outbreak that was growing too large. If the political will to make such decisions in a timely fashion doesnt exist, then even a decent test & trace system is no guarantee of permanent success on its own.
