UK Inquiry Module 1: Resilience and preparedness

[elbows]

An example of the triage concept that I was going on about earlier coming up in evidence today. Note the lack of detail, but the passing reference to the fact that this area required a 'medical and ethical group' which is a clue.

Todays transcript: https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/w...57/C-19-Inquiry-20-June-23-Module-1-Day-6.pdf

Page 165, former CMO Sally Davies.

Q: The conclusion from Exercise Cygnus -- and my Lady has heard this conclusion stated a number of times -- is that the United Kingdom's preparedness and response in terms of its plans, policies and capability were not sufficient to cope with extreme demands of a severe pandemic that would have a United Kingdom-wide impact.
This was an exercise which, at least indirectly, you had called for, which you promoted and you supported and you wanted such exercises to take place more regularly.
Were you extremely concerned by that conclusion, the conclusion of the process to which you had lent your support?

A: I thought it was a correct conclusion, and I hoped that it would spur more work. It did set off some streams of work that I was concerned about, one being how, if our NHS is overwhelmed, should we triage the work, and that piece of work went through and it was in fact that which set -- which precipitated or pushed for the need to have a medical and ethical group that you referred to earlier.

 

[elbows]

These next posts will all be more quotes from the questioning of Sally Davies until I say otherwise.

On the behavioural subgroup of SAGE:

(page 168 of the transcript I already linked to)

MR KEITH: You have been good enough to provide my Lady with a number of observations and thoughts and suggestions in relation to how this system could be made better. Are there any other general recommendations or suggestions that you'd like to make that we've not touched upon yet?
A: I -- I think there were two issues, as we went through Covid, that I saw that I worried about, and the first was that SAGE is by definition a biomedical model
Q:-- Could you explain what you mean by that?
A: So it is about science and about health and very practical and evidence-based, and where the behaviour groups by B came in on behaviour, which is much more societal, which is where I'm going. They just opined based on no evidence that the public wouldn't like lockdowns so they wouldn't do it. There was no evidence, and what they should have said was, "There is no evidence, you will want to consider ..."

 

[elbows]

On the focus on flu to the exclusion of other diseases with pandemic potential, pages 145-147, my bold:

Q: In your witness statement, you say -- you express your belief that the UK's preparations for a pandemic of influenza reflected a long-standing bias in our preparations in favour of influenza and diseases that had already occurred with, we now know, an underestimation of the impact of novel and particularly zoonotic disease.
Part of that underestimation or an explanation for that underestimation may in part be found in that risk assessment process, which focused on pandemic influenza as you know, and arguably failed to give sufficient attention to the risks of other pandemic pathogens and of their varying characteristics, which may include different incubation periods, asymptomatic transmission, higher transmissions, greater severity and so on.
You're familiar with the issues. Why do you think that long-standing bias occurred, and/or was allowed to continue?

A: So, I've said previously something about groupthink, and there was groupthink, but it wasn't just us; this was the whole global north, the western world thought that flu was the thing to focus on. Let me be quite clear: we've had, in just over a century, four flu pandemics. We will have more, it's only a question of when. So for me the issue is not: should we not prepare for flu; we must prepare for flu. The question is what else we do over and above that, and clearly we could have done more thinking. So we needed -- the system, which included me in that way, needed more challenge.

A: I tried, I -- following a visit to Hong Kong where I learnt a lot about SARS, I did ask unofficially: what about doing a SARS review? And was told, "Oh, no, it won't come here".

A: And I found in a document that is -- you have -- someone's given me in an evidence pack, INQ000056256, the national research register -- national risk assessment from January 2016, that it actually says about SARS, more recently MERS and Ebola, that they were unlikely to present a wider threat to the UK through sustained spread. So I -- I mean, that was what I was being told.
I went to Korea, I came back, and I asked for a MERS practice, and we did Exercise Alice that you may come to.

Q: Yes.
A: So I did put some challenge into it, but maybe this is the moment to say how sorry I am to the relatives who lost their families. It wasn't just the deaths, it was the way they died. It was horrible, and I heard a lot about it from my daughter on the frontline as a young doctor in Scotland. It was harrowing, and it remains horrible.

 

[elbows]

On SAGE, the start of her CMO role, and the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic, pages 128-129, my bold:

Q: No one in this country could be unfamiliar now with SAGE, the scientific advisory group connected with emergencies. What is the role of the Chief Medical Officer when it comes to SAGE, where SAGE is dealing with a major health emergency?

A: So when I started in 2010, the pandemic 9/10 of flu was declared over. In fact, in that first winter of Christmas 2010/2011, I realised I was in wave 3 of the flu pandemic. We've also reviewed how things had gone in the 9/10 pandemic, and one of the things that came out of it was that the SAGE had been chaired by the government's Chief Scientific Adviser, and though our Chief Scientific Adviser -- me at that time -- had gone to SAGE, this wasn't a very good way of knitting together all the different bits of advice and trying to make it as effective as it should be.
I would sit there and listen in SAGE to people talking about, "Well, is it safe to transfuse blood" or something, and I'd say, "But we have an expert committee, SaBTO, we have to ask them because they know what they're talking about".
So we then discussed it and over the next couple of years came to an agreement that when there was a medical emergency or an emergency with health impact, that the CMO would co-chair.

 

[elbows]

On masks and the WHO, page 173. Not the first witness who was less than impressed with the WHO's original stance on masks:

I would say as came out of both SARS and MERS in Asia was the desire when there's a respiratory risk to wear a mask, and WHO would not recommend masks because there were no randomised controlled trials. Well, blow me, you can't do a randomised controlled trial properly because you don't know whether someone's infected or not, you don't know whether they're wearing them properly or not. But common sense says that wearing masks will give some protection, and actually I think that's where the science has ended up.

 

[elbows]

One last bit from her for now, page 150, my bold:

A: The second part of the answer is: yes, we did not have -- the government didn't do the plans, but we didn't have resilience either and, as I said earlier, you can't get a good outcome if you don't have
resilience in the public's health, resilience in the public health system -- it had been disinvested in -- resilience in the NHS, and by comparator data compared to similar countries, per 100,000 population we were at the bottom of the table on number of doctors, number of nurses, number of beds, number of ITUs, number of respirators, ventilators. We needed resilience in social care, that was clearly missing, resilience in the life sciences, about manufacturing, we didn't have that.
The only thing we had resilience in, and I'm very proud of, and it did save millions of lives across the world, was R&D. But if we don't build those, no plan will work.

 

[Thesaint]

The detail matters. The inquiry will not please everyone. All the same, various lessons will be learnt as a result of this pandemic. Some of them will even be acted upon in a way that leaves us better prepared in some areas.

And where stuff is not acted upon, the next generation of smart arses like me will still be able to use that information to understand in advance where we will fuck up next time, and be in a position to explain various things to people and warn people when the shit starts hitting the fan next time.

Much of the evidence in recent days has revealed the very picture some of you are going on about, that all manner of exercises and investigations came up with useful recommendations that were then not acted upon.

If you arent interested in that level of detail then fine, you can still be a positive influence in broader ways such as heckling the shit priorities of governments. But others need to operate with detail and these inquiries are still useful for that.

You're probably right that the little detail may make it into future plans. The overall macro management though is harder to learn from as covid, much like 9/11, can be classified a what I believe is called 'black swan' event.

 

[kalmatthew]

I know I dont have a very large audience here for this level of detail these days so I have to cherrypick what I highlight each day, but as we've already seen that still results in lots of posts.

Honestly I've found this and your nerdy amounts of detail thread really intresting and really useful. I havent posted before because I didn't have any insight to add. It's threads like this that make me miss vBullitins view/post count. I suspect I'm not the only one who finds these intresting but doesn't post.

On the other hand I recognise these are a lot of effort to put together so do what works for you

 

[elbows]

Letwins evidence, pages 3-6:

Q: Well, I was going to ask you, may we take it from the fact that, whilst you were focusing on resilience as part of a wider portfolio of obligations, there was no minister and there has never been at any time a minister whose sole responsibility is emergency preparedness, resilience, response, civil emergencies?

A: There hasn't, as far as I'm aware, and I think that that is an error. I came to that view very gradually, but by the end of my time I was pretty convinced that we ought to move, and had I remained in situ I would have tried, therefore, to move to a model where somebody took that position.
If you'll allow me, I think I should add three other points. One, there was a tendency to learn that lesson in the wrong way. The appointment of a junior minister will achieve nothing, I think, in this domain. It would have to be somebody who's senior and who's close to the Prime Minister, in order to get things done. Because this, in the end, is not about elegant committee minutes and discussions, it's about pursuing things to the end and trying to find out whether things have actually happened and whether they're going to work. That requires someone senior and close to the centre of government to get Prime Ministerial authority behind things, because that's the way things happen in government.

Plenty of his evidence was concerned with the fact that officials told him they were well prepared for flu so he didnt focus on that, but rather other stuff.

Other bits and bobs, which will be too long if I put them all in full context so apologies:

Page 9:

It was when I actually sat in the COBR room and discovered that we were not properly prepared to deal with a fuel tanker crisis or to avert it, discovered that the Civil Contingencies Act emergency powers were powers for having an emergency rather than preventing one, and discovered that it was only through the army that I could actually get someone to organise for the tankers to arrive at the petrol stations in order to
prevent the strike being effective and thereby, ultimately, prevent the strike, that I discovered that there was a whole set of problems here I knew nothing about, and that's when I began to learn about them.

Pages 13-14:

Well, I think that I should have said to myself, in retrospect, not, "Are all these experts wrong?" but, "Have they asked the right questions?" Because that is something an amateur can do. Perhaps only an amateur can do that. In a sense you have to be outside to the system, I think, to a degree, to be able to ask that question.
That's why I came to the conclusion gradually that we needed a sort of RED team that was going to ask the right questions, because I didn't even know enough to ask the right questions or to know whether they'd asked the right questions.
I think, in the case of the critical national infrastructure, by the end I got close enough to the subjects -- although, obviously, I can't run the electricity system and I don't know how the telecommunications systems operate as an engineer does, I did know what questions to ask by the end because I had asked so many questions and seen so many answers that I had begun to suspect the things I wasn't being told. You can't do that for areas that you're not deeply involved in.

Pages 33-35:

A: I think it's very clear, if you look at the results of Exercise Alice, which went on the very end of my time and was implemented, or perhaps not very well implemented, after my time, actually it had looked at
the question of the scaling of testing, which Matt Hancock refers to in his evidence, or of a lack of ability to scale testing, and it also looks at the question of the roll-out of tracking data.
So these things were known, but they were not being attended to because people were not thinking about impacts in general, they were monomaniacally focused on pandemic flu. This is exactly why I think a RED team is needed.

Q: What do you mean by a RED team? How, in future, can orthodoxy be challenged effectively within the confines of a bureaucracy, in the confines of a government system?

A: It can't be challenged within the confines of the normal bureaucratic system, because officials are just like the rest of us, they would like their careers to progress, and if you're a member of a team and you start being a frightful nuisance, it is not a career-enhancing move. So they need to be separate, they need to be accountable to a different person than the person who is responsible for the thing that they're meant to be enquiring about. Whether, as I refer, they be completely outside government, or whether they be within government but somehow sufficiently insulated so that their careers can progress notwithstanding causing trouble for colleagues in government, is, I suppose, a matter for choice.

But the crucial thing is that there be -- this is not expensive, certainly -- just a smallish number, 20 or 30 people with the relevant expertise -- because one of my problems in all of this, obviously, was, as you rightly described, that I was an amateur. This should be done by professionals. So you want someone in the RED team who, all right, may not be as expert as the Government Chief Scientist, but nevertheless is a plausible, credible scientist, a credible medic, a credible industrialist and so on. And if they're sitting there and they're saying, "Well, hold on, you haven't asked this question", it becomes very difficult not to start thinking about it. And at the moment there is no such mechanism in place.

 

[kalmatthew]

Letwins evidence, pages 3-6:



Plenty of his evidence was concerned with the fact that officials told him they were well prepared for flu so he didnt focus on that, but rather other stuff.

Other bits and bobs, which will be too long if I put them all in full context so apologies:

Page 9:



Pages 13-14:



Pages 33-35:

Having said I don't normally post, I think this is a really intresting set of evidence. Red teaming is something we see at work and let's face it it's just a "wanky work speak" way of saying devil's advocate, but for a long term emergency I can really see how one could be valuable.

 

[elbows]

Having said I don't normally post, I think this is a really intresting set of evidence. Red teaming is something we see at work and let's face it it's just a "wanky work speak" way of saying devil's advocate, but for a long term emergency I can really see how one could be valuable.

Yes. I have sometimes used the term gadfly, because I am on team gadfly myself. So in some respects I found myself in a similar position to Letwin in terms of being an amateur who ended up learning enough to know what questions to ask, and in my case that happened to be about pandemics years before this one arrived. Not that I was in a position to make a difference to the response, and there was no proper testing of how many of the right questions I would really have come up with in advance. I just knew what the orthodox appraoch was, some of what was going to be found wanting, and how hollow some of the reassuring messages to the public were going to be.

I'm often critical of journalists but I still think some of them ended up performing useful service during the first half of March 2020 - they ended up, often because of different decisions being made by other countries, coming up with some of the right questions to ask in press conferences about our original approach in early March 2020. And their skepticism made it harder for the government to stick with plan a for as long as they might otherwise have done. Some experts also helped during this time in a similar way.

 

[elbows]

Mark Walports evidence this morning was fine, but I probably wont be drawing attention to it because it covers a lot of ground that has already been covered. I did note that he invited us to imagine what the pandemic would have been like if the internet had gone off, and other stuff that could have broken that didnt. When it came to the use of behavioural science input in pandemic matters, he pointed out that a rational response to being told not to panic buy is to panic buy.

Deputy PM Oliver Dowden is being grilled at the moment about the impact that yellowhammer brexit planning had on various forms of pandemic flu preparation. He is a tedious, repetitive cunt who is determined to paint a rosier picture. Part of this involves him clinging to things he says were core priorities and responsibilities of the cabinet office in this respect: excess deaths guidance and a draft pandemic flu bill, and how work on these continued despite yellowhammer (no deal brexit planning). He brushes away all the other flu work as being the responsibilities of other government departments.

 

[elbows]

Ooh, Hunts evidence went straight to the heart of 'population triage' and I will be quoting that bit extensively when the transcript is available. I was only on about triage here yesterday and though I found Hunts evidence on this distressing, I am glad it came up so quickly.

It should generate headlines. Its in the context of exercise Cygnus which was testing the UKs ability to respond to a severe flu pandemic.

 

[elbows]

Basically during the exercise they asked him to take the decision to remove all patients from intensive care wards to free up nurses, consigning many people to their deaths. He 'let the side down' by freaking out, refusing to press that button, and paused the exercise instead.

And that sort of decision comes under the euphemism 'population triage'.

 

[elbows]

I had to go and do something else so need time to catch up with the second half of his evidence.

I see the BBC has got Nick Triggle of all people reporting on todays inquiry updates on their live page. Its always a bit surreal seeing him reporting on these matters given the stuff I posted yesterday. ( #54 )

Indeed he has just reported on the very aspect that led to his awful stuff back in March 2020. I take issue with something he has said today, the bit at the end that I am putting in bold:

From the 17:13 entry of https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-65967979

Two ministers and one scientist have given evidence today across a broad range of issues, but one key topic is beginning to dominate these opening weeks of the inquiry: why didn’t the UK in its planning consider trying to stop a pandemic virus getting a hold.

The approach - and it was one much of the western world adopted too - was essentially to let the virus run through a population to build up herd immunity.

This was not just a ministerial decision, it was one adopted by the scientific community.

In fact, the UK was lauded by a leading research body in 2019 for its pandemic planning, judging the UK to be the second best prepared.

These plans were based on a flu pandemic - and one which was not so deadly.

Bullshit, the reasonable worst case pandemic flu assumptions upon which that approach was based involved scenarios such as 750,000 deaths, so 'one which was not so deadly' is just wrong.

 

[elbows]

Since I wont be quoting Dowden later, here is something from the BBC live updates coverage instead:

Just before lunch, there were some interesting exchanges between Oliver Dowden and Hugo Keith KC, counsel for the inquiry, about the work of the Pandemic Flu Readiness Board.

This was a cross-government group of civil servants and others tasked with making sure the country was well prepared for pandemic flu.

Mr Keith said documents showed its work was interrupted by planning for a no-deal Brexit. It did not meet for a year between November 2018 and November 2019.

Mr Dowden accepted that situation was a result of "the shifting of resourcing" to deal with the "major challenge" of a possible no-deal Brexit.

"That is not to say that activities didn't happen [within the board]; they clearly happened here and in other areas," he said.

Thats the 134:26 entry from the page I already linked to.

 

[elbows]

I havent seen the transcript yet or been able to watch the last part his evidence. So for now here is the population triage bit from Hunts written evidence that was submitted, I will quote from the verbal evidence on this subject in a later post. I may have to wait till another day before focussing on other parts of his evidence that were about other things.

Pages 5 and 6 of https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/21183842/INQ000177796-1.pdf

Between 18-20 October 2016, a pandemic flu preparation exercise was held, over three days and involving 950 officials from central and local government ("Exercise Cygnus"), Participants took part in a simulation of an H2N2 virus that had come from Thailand, affected 50% of the UK. popu!ation, and caused 400,000 deaths. My involvement in Exercise Cygnus was primarily on the last day when I chaired a meeting designed to test ministerial approaches to what is euphemistlca!!y called 'population triage' e,g. deciding who should live or die in resource~limited situations. l was asked whether I was willing to close all intensive care beds leading to the likely death of many patients in order to release intensive care doctors and nurses to the community where they could save more lives, something I declined to do. I don't believe there is a right or wrong answer to such decisions and the point of the exercise was to try and understand how ministers might think when such impossible choices had to be made.

The major lessons from this exercise were the need for emergency powers, and for better ways to manage population triage, not least because of the resistance I had shown to taking the kind of decision with which I was confronted.

 

[elbows]

I've got the transcript now. First this from Dowdens evidence earlier in the day. I believe the group in question was setup in great part as a result of how Hunt responded to the population triage stuff in Exercise Cygnus:

Page 116 of https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/w...14/C-19-Inquiry-21-June-23-Module-1-Day-7.pdf

Q: All right. Then we've got the "Moral and Ethical ... Advisory Group". Is that the group that was instituted in order to be able tackle the extremely difficult moral and ethical issues which might arise out of triage decisions having to be made by hospitals, in essence the turning away of patients for treatment?
A: Amongst other things, yes.
So this arose from a consideration that government would have to make difficult decisions and we would have to -- it would -- as, again, the title suggests, it would give rise to moral and ethical questions, and we
felt it was appropriate to have a body to help us with that. Indeed, I signed off the creation of the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group as a minister, and I believe, certainly in a previous pack, there was a sub that had details of that.
Q: Indeed. And it had had one introductory meeting, on 25 October of 2019, and there was a debate about its remit. So that structure, that committee was set up and they had one introductory meeting.

 

[elbows]

From Hunts verbal evidence, pages 146-149 of the document I linked to in my previous post.

Q: To what extent do you recall the significance of Exercise Cygnus or the recommendations that came from it?
A: Well, I recall taking part in the exercise extremely well --
Q: Why was that?
A: Because it was not just a significant chunk of time taken out of my diary but because something quite traumatic happened in the course of the exercise, even though it was only an exercise, which caused me to stop the exercise. I was basically asked in the course of the exercise to sanction the emptying of all the intensive care beds in the country, leading to the death of numerous people in those intensive care beds, on the grounds that the nursing requirement for those people in intensive care was so big, because each intensive care bed needed three or four nurses to look after one patient, that those nurses could spend -- save more lives if they operated in the community. So that was --

LADY HALLETT: To be clear, this was a hypothetical, just in case anyone is switching on at this stage.
A: Yes. And so effectively I was being asked to flick a switch which would have led to instant deaths, and I wasn't prepared to do that.
Rightly or wrongly, you could obviously argue it lots of different directions, but, you know, in Benthamite terms, the greatest good for the greatest number, perhaps I should have been prepared to do it, but I wasn't prepared to do it.

A: I think that for the people -- and that was, I think, for the participants quite a controversial moment, and thankfully it was only an exercise.
But my judgement was that it was -- that any pandemic scenario, if you were asking a human being -- and we politicians are of course human beings -- to make a decision like that, it was fraught with risk and danger, and I personally would have felt very, very difficult taking that decision. So we developed new protocols as a result of that, which meant that I think in that -- if that situation would happen in real life, the Secretary of State would not be asked to take that decision.

MR KEITH: You made it plain that that was an intolerable decision to have to take for any Secretary of State and there had to be an alternative course, and you directed that protocols be drawn up to deal with at that possibility?
A: Correct, and we have to be honest that you do have to take those decisions in one way or another when there is limited capacity. You know, when we saw the Covid scenes in Lombardy, there were absolutely heart wrenching scenes of Italian doctors saying that they're being asked to play God because the people they were depriving of a bed would inevitably die. So it isn't that -- you can't duck those decisions, but what I felt was inappropriate was those decisions, being taken at such a long way away from the front line, and I thought those decisions, if they have to be taken, need to be taken by people who are familiar with what's going on with individual patients and so I'm not at all suggesting that there aren't incredibly difficult things you have to decide in any pandemic, but it's just that it felt too clinical to me, that that should be surfaced in -- almost like a regular ministerial decision -- this is what you do at this point -- when the human consequences were so striking.

Q: Although it's not a matter for direct inquiry today, it's outwith the scope of the areas with which we've asked you to assist, but in part as a result of that terrible conundrum that you were faced with, was there put in place a body called the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group to deal with the worst types of moral and ethical decisions which might confront clinical staff and administrators in the event of a pandemic?
A: That may well have been what happened. I wasn't aware that was the consequence. But what I was aware of was this dreadful euphemism that was used to describe that decision. It was described as "population triage", which essentially was a nice way of saying making life or death decisions about large numbers of people in one go.

Please be sure to let me know if you spot examples of the media reporting on this properly.

 

[elbows]

And another reference to that stuff came up a little later, in a way that was quite telling.

Page 151-152:

Q: Do you recall prior to the report being published into Exercise Cygnus -- internally, I should say, it wasn't made publicly available -- in July 2017 whether you were briefed as to the general conclusions of Exercise Cygnus?
A: I don't recall any particular briefing, but I had a very close and productive working relationship with Dame Sally Davies, and I'm sure that she would have talked to me --
Q: My Lady has heard that evidence.
A: -- and would have kept me abreast of her thinking. I mean, in some ways I worried about the fact that I was not prepared to flick the switch, I had sort of let the side down in terms of this exercise, because I think there was, I felt, a sort of expectation that they would need someone to take those kinds of decisions. So I'm sure we would have had a dialogue about it.

 

[bluescreen]

It's a version of the trolley problem.

The trolley problem: would you kill one person to save many others?

A decades-old thought experiment reveals our inconsistent moral intuitions. What would you do?

www.theguardian.com

 

[elbows]

Other aspects of Hunts evidence covered by the BBC here, though not in sufficient detail. Triggle was involved with this article but the claim I moaned about earlier doesnt seem to be present.

They mention the triage stuff at the end but they really dont seem to want to draw attention to the term population triage, and described only that narrow example rather than the broader issue.

Covid inquiry: Quarantining people sooner 'might have avoided' first lockdown, says Hunt

The UK should have prepared to test and isolate more, the ex-health secretary tells the Covid inquiry.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[elbows]

It's a version of the trolley problem.

The trolley problem: would you kill one person to save many others?

A decades-old thought experiment reveals our inconsistent moral intuitions. What would you do?

www.theguardian.com

What particularly sucks when it comes to our traditional flu pandemic plans is that the 'population triage' stuff sits alongside the fact they didnt bother to ask whether they could stop the levels of infection reaching the levels that might make these sorts of decisions necessary in the first place.

I am reminded of the UKs reputation for cold calculations, as mentioned in this Guardian article from March 2020:

When it comes to national emergencies, Britain has a tradition of cold calculation | David Edgerton

The government’s reluctance to put the health of citizens first has echoes in the 1940s and 50s, says author David Edgerton

www.theguardian.com

 

[bluescreen]

What particularly sucks when it comes to our traditional flu pandemic plans is that the 'population triage' stuff sits alongside the fact they didnt bother to ask whether they could stop the levels of infection reaching the levels that might make these sorts of decisions necessary in the first place.

I am reminded of the UKs reputation for cold calculations, as mentioned in this Guardian article from March 2020:

When it comes to national emergencies, Britain has a tradition of cold calculation | David Edgerton

The government’s reluctance to put the health of citizens first has echoes in the 1940s and 50s, says author David Edgerton

www.theguardian.com

This was baffling. When my son returned from Milan in March 2020 (secondment ended early!) the contrast between the two countries couldn't have been greater. He said on arriving in Gatwick and travelling through London you'd have had no idea there was an epidemic.

 

[elbows]

Frankly they prioritised trying to keep as many people as possible carrying on life is normal, which is why there was such a shitstorm when this 'orthodox approach' started to become impossible to sustain by mid March 2020. This has been briefly touched upon in recent days, eg in the stuff I quoted in this post: #54

During a pandemic, the Government will encourage those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives for as long and as far as that is possible

This sort of thinking is also why they got so desperate to justify it by early-mid March that they started going on about herd immunity, which only made the backlash stronger.

 

[elbows]

Thanks fuck I'm not focussing on some of the structures and legislation, because Roger Hargreaves (COBR) is giving very tedious and slippery answers this morning.

I have only survived this session because at one point Roger Hargreaves said he had a lot of respect for Mr Mann, which allowed me to distract myself with unintended comedy.

They havent asked him about little miss topportunities.

 

[Thesaint]

Thanks fuck I'm not focussing on some of the structures and legislation, because Roger Hargreaves (COBR) is giving very tedious and slippery answers this morning.

It's time for this:

 

[elbows]

I get a break soon because they arent sitting on Friday. And whilst (todays second witness) Whittys evidence is not as interesting as it will be in module 2, because this first module only covers the pre-pandemic period, he is still much easier to listen to than a bunch of the other witnesses.

 

[elbows]

Next weeks witnesses include Jenny Harries and Hancock.

Also the Professional Lead Infection Prevention and Control at Royal College of Nursing who I shall pay attention to due to my interest in hospital transmission.

And then they move on to various witnesses from Scotland, including Sturgeon and their CMO who had to resign for breaking the rules.

 

[elbows]

There isnt a huge amount for me to quote from Whitty and Vallances evidence, so I will probably do that another day. The final witness today/this week is discussing Scottish structures etc and I may not have anything to quote from them either.