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The Covid Inquiry

teqniq said:
Oh look!

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It's things like this and the government opposition to giving people an actual raise on salaries that have been at best stagnant for many years - and their willingness to force a recession - thar means things won't be right until there's an mp dangling from each of the first 651 lampposts on the a1, from little Britain up upper street, along Holloway and then archway roads, then at aylmer parade going off up the a1000 through north finchley and up to Barnet general
 
I am inclined to agree. It seems the only thing we can rely on the police to do regarding things of this nature is the square root of fuck all, They are hopelessly compromised.
 
teqniq said:
I am inclined to agree. It seems the only thing we can rely on the police to do regarding things of this nature is the square root of fuck all, They are hopelessly compromised.
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And a copper dangling from every lamppost of the a1 from aylmer parade to wherever it is the a1 finishes and then along the a5 from marble arch to the end of that road too. Other a roads might be similarly adorned and the rope industry's profits will go some way towards lifting the country out of its current economic doldrums
 
teqniq said:
More on Hancock at the enquiry:

threadreaderapp.com

Thread by @danielgoyal on Thread Reader App

@danielgoyal: So, Hancock's first appearance at the Covid Inquiry did not disappoint. I will share the critical moments below. But first, it is clear that his entire justification for the admitted calamitous respons...…
threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
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It is indeed reasonable to point out that many countries actually tried to follow the 'minimise infections' approach from a much earlier point than the UK.

However that thread professes ignorance as to why the UK did not, when actually Hancock was right in regards the UK doctrine on that - it was a very longstanding stance of the UK. It shows up in various ways over the decades, eg the official report into the 2009 swine flu pandemic criticised the UK for having a phase that was labelled a containment phase, despite this phase not actually involving a sincere attempt at containment of the outbreak. That sort of thinking was not limited to the fucking tories. It was my own prior knowledge of that stance that allowed me to be somewhat useful in February-March 2020, eg advising people not to believe the bullshit 'containment' reassurances of the time. The longstanding orthodox approach across our governmental medical experts and permanent sides of government offered a base upon which the terrible political stances and instincts of Johnson and Co could dig in and go for the 'do very little, let the virus rip' approach until it blew up in their face and became unsustainable by mid March 2020.

The international picture is a bit complicated. Aspects of the same doctrine were baked into some of the thinking of the WHO and European Centre for Disease Control, in that they advised against certain draconian measures. WHO recommendations included mitigation but didnt go anywhere near as far as what everyone actually ended up doing, and international health regulations had loads of stuff baked into them that argued against border closures rather than in favour of them. However the UKs version was more extreme, and we were slower to change.

The appearance of a key new paragraph in one of ECDCs situation reports will allow some of this to be explored. The simplified version is that Europe didnt really consider the most stringent measures, or change their own doctrines, until the shit hit the fan in Italy. At that point the unthinkable became thinkable for them, and lockdowns were on the table in Europe. The UK tried to resist that change for some days or weeks beyond that stage, leading to many more deaths.

This will not be explored properly until module 2 of the UK inquiry, since the current module only covers the period of time up to around January 21st 2020, and the period I describe above happened from late February through to mid March 2020.

My own stance is that the Western worlds orthodox approach to pandemics sucked, and aspects of the WHO very much reflected a neoliberal world order. But the UKs orthodoxy sucked even worse, and was more resistant to change even when doom was first staring them in the face.
 
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Also Johnson is a useful idiot when trying to separate the true bits of Hancocks claims from the bullshit excuse aspect.

Because there was the notorious Feb 2020 speech Johnson gave, where he tried to brag about the UKs approach in contrast to others:

www.gov.uk

PM speech in Greenwich: 3 February 2020

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's speech in Greenwich
www.gov.uk www.gov.uk

And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.

And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.
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It wil be module 2 where the excuses fail to shield him from his mistakes.

In terms of the pre-pandemic planning, the major guilt of the tories was in their resourcing and priorities, the disgusting austerity and agendas for public health and the NHS.

I'm very interested in that area but my primary interest remains in the general establishment failings, the cold calculations, the orthodoxy of very many decades. Tories play their part in that picture, but so do very many others, and Hancocks excuses do happen to shine a light on those grotesque failings, the shit assumptions and priorities of this country.

For this inquiry to be useful for the future of peoples lives when future pandemics arrive, they absolutely must not settle on the view that the pandemic plans were ok for flu but not for other viruses. Because our plans meant mass death in the event of a bad flu pandermic, and that must change.
 
I'm doing a very long-winded evidence thread in the covid forum.

Since I dont expect many people to wade through all of that, I will likely post the most sensational/political insider evidence in this thread too.

Here is the first of it. Messages from Cummings to Johnson, right as the shit really started to hit the fan (as far as us outsiders knew at the time, the next day after these messages, Friday March 13th 2020, through to Monday 16th was when the original shit approach to the pandemic died and the first giant u-turn then became visible)

Screenshot 2023-10-10 at 13.59.21.png
 
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Monkeygrinder's Organ said:
Johnson very much coming across as being the same blundering, bullshitting oaf in private as he is in public rather than some sort of Machiavelli.
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Yeah. They already mentioned a bunch of Vallance diary entries that repeatedly underline that point. Between his evidence and Cummings stuff they've already got Johnsons number, although there will be plenty more to come from other sources too.

So far this version of the pandemic fiasco story has been a tale of broader establishment and orthodox thinking/cold calculations failure in the first months, which then becomes a clearer story of specific institutional and personal failings once the broader establishment came to terms with the new reality and got a clue.

Johnson being a useless pile is going to be a large part of it, the 'shopping trolley' complaints from Cummings will be underlined many times. We'll hear a bit more about the ways that Hancock was useless and slippery (although I think he got a pandemic clue later despite ongoing personality flaws), and I'm going to end up branding our current PM 'second wave Sunak' for reasons that go far beyond eat out to help out. But I'm getting ahead of myself, and the inquiry will be extra critical of Johnson because his position meant he was supposed to show leadership and help overcome the failings of others, a task he was utterly unqualified for. He was an extra dollop of shit on top of an already awful UK establishment approach and set of priorities, but then that claim is nothing new for me, I've said it since the start.
 
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Copied from elbows' Inquiry thread:

www.independent.co.uk

Revealed: Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings’s secret Covid WhatsApp messages

In a WhatsApp message to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings described the Cabinet Office as ‘terrifyingly s***’
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk

www.urban75.net

UK Inquiry Module 2: Decision-making & political governance

The evidence sessions for this module start today, with remarks from the chair, another likely harrowing video, and then opening statements. The timetable of whose giving evidence is published one week at a time, and can be found here: Module 2 public hearings timetable - UK Covid-19 Inquiry...
www.urban75.net www.urban75.net
 
I don't quite get what's actually being said in that article. Civil servants & science advisors knew, but it wasn't discussed at the Sage meetings? Or it was discussed at the Sage meetings but not recorded in the minutes?
 
teuchter said:
I don't quite get what's actually being said in that article. Civil servants & science advisors knew, but it wasn't discussed at the Sage meetings? Or it was discussed at the Sage meetings but not recorded in the minutes?
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I watched that evidence session. The witness suggested that the basic calculation was obvious stuff once they had settled on a better idea of things like case fatality ratio, and also suggested that the meeting documents were written by civil servants for civil servants.

But these questions were not fully satisfied by this source alone. Once SAGE minutes were made public during the pandemic, I did mention several times that I didnt consider them to be full minutes, they were more like summaries and didnt get into proper detail about who said what. And I dont think I ever saw minutes from the SAGE modelling subgroup.

Whatever was actually said at the time, other evidence and what we could tell from the outside at the time still strongly suggests that the penny didnt really drop properly higher up in government until March 12th 2020 when Cummings really started shouting about stuff (just to give an example that has come up in evidence already), and there were broader complaints about how far behind the curve the likes of the cabinet office were at that point and in the subsequent days. However this still requires some unpicking. There are various different ways of trying to break it down but here is one example:

  • Theres basic back of an envelope calculations about likely death and hospitalisation burden, and what was seen in a few other countries during February.
  • Theres actually taking the implications of that and using it to destory the previous 'do little' generic pandemic plans and all the orethodoxy and dogma surrounding them.
  • Theres actually doing formal modelling of timing of waves and hospitalisations and their scale.
  • Theres the complication of overly downplayed and obfuscated official language.
  • There was a now infamous gap and lag between key health data and the timing of the data that the modellers thought they were dealing with, which spoilt the quality of timing estimates during a key period. Laggy/incomplete data was fed into models and this led to things like the faulty claims about how many weeks behind Italy we were.
  • Theres were also issues which meant these various advisory groups not only operated within the confines of the orthodoxy of the time, but also tended to only consider and produce stuff along the lines of what other areas of government were specifically asking for at the time.

Take all those things together and it still seems that whatever that witness said, we still ended up with a situation where the detailed modelling that could properly justify lockdown etc was not produced and presented until the penny had already dropped at the top, not until the original plan had already been torn up. ie plan A died on Thursday 12th - Friday 13th March and then the new modelling work (or at the very least a new presentation of it) was done that subsequent weekend.

Probably the best indicators I saw during the questioning of that witness that some horrors were clear earlier on, was some very dry official language in SAGE minutes about the modellers meeting with the NHS to figure out some numbers for NHS operational reasons. I will get back to you with an example of this and its timing when I get a chance to review the transcript of the evidence session. Unfortunately what I dont think I've seen is any evidence of what picture that work actually generated, or when. Well probably I did see something in later SAGE minutes when I read them back in 2020, but I dont have time to check that now.
 
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Here are some transcript quotes for you that indicate the extent to which that witness was probed on this and gave an unsatisfactory response. I cant quote it all, cherrypicked a bit:


Pages 131-133:

Q: Now, we may hear from those, for example, in Number 10 that this prospect of the NHS being overwhelmed wasn't something that at the very least they adverted to until a couple of weeks later than the end of February, in mid-March.
But are we to take it from this that -- not the possibility but the certainty of NHS capacity being overwhelmed was something that was clear to you and to SPI-M-O during February?

A: So the extent of the epidemic became very clear during February and so I think at that point we were, you know, the -- we'd essentially established the infection fatality rates, so that's the proportion of people who are -- die following infection, at about 1%, big variation with -- especially with age, but -- and if 80% of the population becomes infected in a single wave, then you can calculate the numbers of people who would die.
The question, then, of hospitalisation is slightly more complicated, because of course it depends on who goes to hospital under those kind of circumstances. So it needed a meeting with the NHS and with clinical colleagues for them to say what symptoms would justify admission into hospital, because that is a variable, it's a clinical variable that if somebody goes to hospital then they might not be admitted, and that -- those kind of clinical questions determine the extent to which the epidemic results in hospitalisations, for example.
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Q: Well, Professor, just looking at this statement, and maybe you want to qualify or change it, looking at the statement, what you say is it became increasingly clear that capacity would be overwhelmed, and all you were doing with the NHS was talking about the extent of the overwhelm?

A: I think that's right. I mean, throughout -- I mean, yes, I stand by the statement, throughout February. What I mean is that, in terms of being able to make a clear statement, it was absolutely clear the expected deaths. Hospitalisations are slightly, you know, more uncertain because it requires more clinical input.
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Then a question relating to a February 25th SAGE meeting, page 134:

Q: Then this: "NHS needs must be considered in any decisions to alter the epidemic curve."
Is that consistent with a view that you'd reached that NHS overwhelm was at that stage inevitable?
A: I think so, yes. Remember these documents are written by civil servants for civil servants --
Q: Well, just pausing there, Professor, we may hear that SAGE minutes are written for policymakers.
A: Who are civil servants.
Q: Well, they are politicians, Professor.
A: Well, I always think of them as decision-makers.
Q: I'm not going to quibble with you about language, Professor, but I want to press you on the rather more important point, which is whether the sentence "NHS needs must be considered in any decisions to alter the epidemic curve", does that really mean, does that sentence signal a conclusion that it is inevitable that the NHS will be overwhelmed in the approaching epidemic?
A: It certainly indicates that the NHS is a major factor.
Q: Well, that's not the same thing, Professor, is it?
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Then from a SAGE meeting a few days later. Pages 136-137 of yesterdays transcript:

A: "UK academic modelling groups ... and NHS planners to organise a working group in the week starting 2 March [so the next week] to analyse key clinical variables for reasonable worst-case scenario planning for the NHS, for review by SPI-M and then discussion at SAGE."
So on the one hand, Professor, we have your statement which says that during February it became clear that the NHS would be overwhelmed, and then we have these two sets of minutes at the end of February, neither of which refer to an overwhelming of the NHS. Here what is referred to is reasonable worst-case planning. So, as we've already discussed, it's a scenario, it's not a prediction. How can we reconcile those two things, Professor?
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A: So at the beginning of February it wasn't clear at all. By the end of February SAGE was asking for quantitative details. So that meeting happened on 1 March, I think.
It was asked for in SAGE, so by 1 March we had the --a good understanding of what the impact would likely be on the NHS. So that's, you know, that's throughout February.
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Pages 136-137:

Q: Professor, from a lay perspective, and of course with hindsight, but if you and your colleagues had already realised during February that the NHS was going to be overwhelmed by the pandemic that was developing, why didn't you just say so?
A: Well, we -- I mean, we -- the secretariat that we were talking to completely understood. The SAGE secretariat were taking the minutes. I didn't write these documents, the documents were written by somebody else for somebody else, they're not written for my benefit, and it's really the writers and the readers that you need to question. I was -- at the end -- by the end of February it was clear, I think, that the NHS would be overwhelmed, and I don't think that was being kept a secret.
Q: So the situation you're describing is a meeting, a SAGE meeting, where everyone round the table is discussing the fact that the NHS is going to be overwhelmed --
A: Yes.
Q: -- but the minutes record simply that there needs to be some reasonable worst-case planning for the NHS?
A: Yes.
Q: I see, thank you.
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By the way, dodgy triage decisions have come up in the inquiry a number of times already, and I think theres another inquiry module that will look at things like that in even more detail. Just mentioning that now because I think its worth pointing out that triage decisions can be used to manage demand and alter the extent to which the NHS is actually overwhelmed under various scenarios.
 
Just listening to today evidence in the background and the phrase 'superhero bunfight' has come up in the context of someone within government reviewing government dysfunction with a view to improving things at the time.
 
We already heard some of Johnsons attitude towards Long Covid in the opening statements for this inquiry module, but here it is in his own handwriting scrawled on an October 2020 document:

Screenshot 2023-10-13 at 14.40.50.png

And on a list of points he raised in Feb 2021:

Screenshot 2023-10-13 at 14.43.32.png
 
As is Johnson is an ignorant buffoon who believes what its convenient for him to believe syndrome.

A 'fit as a butchers dog' wanker who then ended up hospitalised within days of such bravado. Who then appeared to have some enduring symptoms himself for months afterwards.
 
In a discussion about introducing regional circuit breakers, Mr Case writes: "Am not sure I can cope with today. Might just go home."

Lee Cain - Mr Johnson's head of communications - asks what "are we talking about".

"Whatever Carrie cares about, I guess," replies Mr Case.

He later adds: "I was always told that Dom [Cummings] was the secret PM. How wrong they are. I look forward to telling select [committee] tomorrow... don't worry about Dom, the real person in charge is Carrie."
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"So true," Mr Cummings replies along with a laughing emoji.

Mr Cain agrees and adds that "she doesn't know [what] she is talking about either".
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Mr Case goes on to say: "This government doesn't have the credibility needed to be imposing stuff within only days of deciding not too [sic]. We look like a terrible, tragic joke.

"If we were going hard, that decision was needed weeks ago. I cannot cope with this."
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Mr Johnson also describes Mark Sedwill, the head of the civil service until September 2020, as "miles off pace".

Mr Cummings replies that "the problem is CabOff [the Cabinet Office] and DHSC [the health department] haven't listened and absorbed what the models truly mean."

Separately, in an email sent to Mr Johnson in July 2020, Mr Cummings writes: "Current CABOFF [Cabinet Office] doesn't work for anyone - it is high friction, low trust, and obv many good parts but overall low performance."
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Mr Keith suggested that: "In the early part of the pandemic, the early months, the dysfunctionality... was reflective of the system, the structures, that were in place.

"Latterly the dysfunctionality lay more in the personalities and their working relationships and indeed the people who were in government."
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www.bbc.co.uk

Covid inquiry texts show No 10 staff complaining about Carrie Johnson

The Covid inquiry releases messages between civil servant Simon Case and No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings.
www.bbc.co.uk
 
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