UK Inquiry Module 1: Resilience and preparedness
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elbows
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The report for this module is coming out at midday.
First Covid inquiry report to show UK planning failures
Austerity, Brexit and the quality of planning will be put under spotlight in the inquiry's first report.
www.bbc.co.uk
elbows
Well-Known Member
I'll be paying special attention to whether the report or media reporting of the report shy away from hospital infection control planning issues and ethical issues involving population triage. That BBC preview piece was not a promising start in this respect, but then again one of its authors was fucking Nick Triggle.
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elbows
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The recommendations will piss off the Sir Humphreys of this world, since they include having red teams, from outside the civil service, routinely scrutinise and challenge work.
I've read over half of the full report so far. It does make occasional reference to some of the stuff I like to focus on, but mostly in a way that doesnt then translate directly into one of their recommendations. All the same, its not awful. If the recommendations are adopted then it will fix a lot of the structural flaws in the planning, bureaucracy, scrutiny and expert advice side of things. It wont directly help issues of shit priorities, cold calculations and lack of resources and funding. But in theory it could help with some of those things over time by leaving less wiggle room for the shit political agendas to run roughshod over everything else, and a regular cycle of challenge that will at least make this stuff more visible.
If a lot of it gets implemented, and then we consider what else will be reccomended via later modules, and combine that with the fact the public and the politicians learnt a lot in the pandemic, there are reasons to think we might actually handle the next pandemic better. But my optimism levels cannot rise massively unless we sort out our priorities when it comes to funding of health and social care systems, and radically change the available capacity.
I've read over half of the full report so far. It does make occasional reference to some of the stuff I like to focus on, but mostly in a way that doesnt then translate directly into one of their recommendations. All the same, its not awful. If the recommendations are adopted then it will fix a lot of the structural flaws in the planning, bureaucracy, scrutiny and expert advice side of things. It wont directly help issues of shit priorities, cold calculations and lack of resources and funding. But in theory it could help with some of those things over time by leaving less wiggle room for the shit political agendas to run roughshod over everything else, and a regular cycle of challenge that will at least make this stuff more visible.
If a lot of it gets implemented, and then we consider what else will be reccomended via later modules, and combine that with the fact the public and the politicians learnt a lot in the pandemic, there are reasons to think we might actually handle the next pandemic better. But my optimism levels cannot rise massively unless we sort out our priorities when it comes to funding of health and social care systems, and radically change the available capacity.
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elbows
Well-Known Member
At the time of me writing this, the BBC completely mangled this bit of their story:
I didnt expect the BBC to deal with these sorts of issues that well, but I didnt expect them to completely butcher their sentences.
Here are some parts from the full report that actually deal with that sort of thing:
The 'let it happen' stuff at the heart of our traditional pandemic plans were a big chunk of the reason why I might have sounded like I knew something of how bad things could get, eg when I probably voiced my opinion in February and March 2020 that I expected we were badly placed to cope, and I probably also moaned that reassurances and language about 'containment' were bullshit given what the actual plan was back then.
UK 'failed citizens' with flawed pandemic plans
First report from Covid Inquiry says better planning would have saved lives and lessened economic costs.
www.bbc.co.uk
I didnt expect the BBC to deal with these sorts of issues that well, but I didnt expect them to completely butcher their sentences.
Here are some parts from the full report that actually deal with that sort of thing:
The 'let it happen' stuff at the heart of our traditional pandemic plans were a big chunk of the reason why I might have sounded like I knew something of how bad things could get, eg when I probably voiced my opinion in February and March 2020 that I expected we were badly placed to cope, and I probably also moaned that reassurances and language about 'containment' were bullshit given what the actual plan was back then.
elbows
Well-Known Member
If I overlook the wanky aspects (giving the political establishment & their priorities and public service aspirations too much credit) of the following from the official report, and focus mostly on the stuff in 6.95, I suppose I would feel a bit less pessimistic, or at least better informed about the likely response, if our society actually attempted to have a sensible discussion about what the appropriate balance should be. If we dont have those conversations and dont cement broadly what our priorities will be, then I have no confidence that the UK establishment will avoid the sort of cold calculations that have been taken behind closed doors in the past, even if improvements are made to planning structures etc.
elbows
Well-Known Member
The full report does mention some of the cold calculations that came up in evidence during module 1. So I can at least celebrate the fact they are mentioned. But they mostly dont lead anywhere, they dont really make it into the headline criticisms or the recommendations. And Im hardly going to be impressed that Hunts reaction to having to make fucking population triage decisions during an exercise is only mentioned as a supposed example of how ministerial challenge can do good. And I dont think any of the recommendations from this module can reassure me that the 'entirely new protocols' that arose after Hunt failed to simply agree to the triage during that exerceise, wont involve the same old deadly cold calculations in future. They just shuffled round who gets to make those decisions, presumably to people who are trained to make such cold calculations, as an extension to the sort of routine decisions they make during normal times when working in a health service with overstretched resources.
gosub
~#
Presumably printers were to busy printing election addresses for it to have been released a month or so agoThe report for this module is coming out at midday.
First Covid inquiry report to show UK planning failures
Austerity, Brexit and the quality of planning will be put under spotlight in the inquiry's first report.www.bbc.co.uk
Chart is interesting, similar UK deaths between 1918 and covid, but the population has increased by about 175%.
I've not read the report, it's the what if's that would be interesting, considering the frequency of bird flu in US cattle (and the limited amount of monitoring)
- What would have happened if the UK government could have provided every house hold with 1 N95 mask near the start of pandemic? One of the lessons from SARs, bbc talked to doctors in Taiwan a few years back, one of the problems with SARs is that a number of doctors died, so I lot effort was put into training staff in putting on and taking off protective clothing while minimising the risk of infection. Could wide spread N95 mask wearing work?
- What happens if the UK did nothing and let the virus go wild at the start in the uk? (looking at what happen to indian hospitals, I suspect the answer is pretty grim)
I see one of the risks next time is that people didn't see the point of lockdowns because covid wasn't a big deal for them, so less likely to follow a lockdown if required in the future.
The other area, I wonder if there are things UK should investigate.
- Oxygen shortage was a problem at one point, should other methods of getting hold of oxygen be considered in an emergency? Like oxygen concentrator's used in third world countires to accumulate enough oxygen which can then be used in a small hospital.
- Number of intensive care beds uk has. What to do in an emergency, so we had Nightingale hospitals but not enough staff to make them work, would we want to build tempary hospitals in the future, if we did, how we find the required number of staff?
elbows
Well-Known Member
This particular report only deals with the conclusions the inquiry has drawn in regards module 1. And module 1 only deals with planning, the period it covers ends in January 2020, several months before the shit really hit the fan. But Im still happy to try to engage with your comments and questions anyway.
I dont think we ever reached the stage where everyone in healthcare felt like they got the rights masks etc, let alone those in the borader care sector, let alone the general public. And this is one of the things that limits any sort of debate about broader public use of that sort of mask.
As for letting it go wild at the start, we did!!! The shitty 'let it happen without any proper mitigation' plan wasnt killed until mid March, and by that stage they had already let the number of infections grow to a stupidly large level that was going to cause an unpleasantly large wave of death even if the brakes had then been totally slammed on at that moment.
I dont think they could have let it go any further than they did without changing the plan because of things like:
Too many journalists not buying it because they could see what other countries were doing compared to our relative inaction.
The public were already growing so concerned that they started to take matters into their own hands and modify their own behaviour, travel patterns etc to reduce chances of coming into contact with the virus or spreading it.
The penny dropped for some influential expert advisors to government, and they were going to increasingly speak out against the original plan.
The estimates of NHS capacities of various kinds were figured out and they couldnt get the 'let it happen' estimates line up with capacity numbers at all, not even close.
London was a bit ahead on the epidemic curve and relatively high profile government people were starting to get infected, further amplifying the sense that things were spinning out of control.
When the penny dropped about how far into the first wave we were, they realised they were already weeks behind with what it was appropriate to do, so they had to u-turn pretty quickly, they didnt have any luxury to quibble and resist much longer.
So given that sort of thing, and how even the shit Johnson government with its obviously shit priorities and preferences for carrying on as normal could not resist a massive change of approach by mid March 2020, I really struggle to imagine scenarios where things were allowed to progress for longer in this country. The most obvious way I could imagine that happening is that if a politically less influential area part of the country than London had been far ahead in their epidemic, in which case the London-centric decision-makers could have put off their big u-turn for longer.
In terms of the extent to which our health system would have more obviously collapsed if we had somehow waited even longer before acting, facing an even bigger wave than we actually had, its important that we consider the wiggle room that authorities have when seeking to paint their own picture of just how much capacity we had left to 'give everyone the care they needed'. Because there are multiple ways to ration care, including via the admissions criteria that is imposed, and there were some signs of that shit being done in certain places at certain times. Some people were left to die at home, and not just the very elderly. It remains to be seen whether the inquiry will deal with that subject properly at all in later modules.
Fairly careful surveying of opinion throughout the first year of the pandemic showed that the majority of people did understand the need for things like lockdowns and broadly supported such things. Those who did not support them were very loud, and need to be taken into account, and public sentiments should not be taken for granted in future. But as far as the establishment will be concerned, the lesson they learnt was that actually there is such a thing as society, and you can rely on large numbers of people to do the right thing if the threat is understood, especially during the most critical moments.
So far only 2 modules of thei inquiry have had their public evidence sessions, and neither went into much detail on hospitals because that was outside their scope. One or more later modules offer the chance to explore some of these questions, though I offer no predictions as to how well they will do so.
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elbows
Well-Known Member
The 'prepared for the wrong pandemic' excuse made it into the report of module 1 and remains an angle that the media and the establishment were happy to comment on and even apologise for, eg:
It requires some careful unpicking to get to the actual truth of this matter. Theres a couple of strands of truth but a hell of a lot of absolute bullshit about this excuse too.
The shit orthodox approach was certain based on flu, but it didnt only apply to flu, and various magnitudes of flu pandemic would also have been badly failed by that orthodox approach.
Certain flu pandemics are more than capable of killing very large numbers of people and overwhelming healthcare facilities.
The fact you might get vaccines more quickly and be able to rely on certain existing treatments and antivirals is not a proper excuse for 'letting the virus rip' and failing to try to reduce the numbers of people infected in each wave.
Features like 'asymptomatic transmission' are not a differentiating factor between flu and coronaviruses, since the inquiries own chart of previous pandemics slows that asymptomatic stuff with flu was already well known.
Hunts suggestion that they 'over-prepared' for a flu pandemic is a disgusting lie, made worse by the fact that hollowing out capacity via austerity would inevitably lead to worse outcomes in any sort of significant pandemic.
If we take the above and other stuff that I cant be arsed to go on about right now, we can twist the story and the bullshit to offer an explanation about what this angle is really getting at. Here is my initial attempt:
"The establishment might have gotten away with handling a flu pandemic in this way, because there was less novelty/brand new fear and more stability to the entrenched orthodoxy surrounding that approach, potentially leading to less challenge from people unhappy with the resulting high death-toll, and more easily reassured by the government "being seen to be doing something in response" via existing pharmaceutical options.". But people would still have been failed and condemned to death via cold calculations.
Covid: Jeremy Hunt apologises for pandemic 'groupthink'
The ex health secretary says the government only prepared for a flu pandemic, which he "should have challenged".
www.bbc.co.uk
It requires some careful unpicking to get to the actual truth of this matter. Theres a couple of strands of truth but a hell of a lot of absolute bullshit about this excuse too.
The shit orthodox approach was certain based on flu, but it didnt only apply to flu, and various magnitudes of flu pandemic would also have been badly failed by that orthodox approach.
Certain flu pandemics are more than capable of killing very large numbers of people and overwhelming healthcare facilities.
The fact you might get vaccines more quickly and be able to rely on certain existing treatments and antivirals is not a proper excuse for 'letting the virus rip' and failing to try to reduce the numbers of people infected in each wave.
Features like 'asymptomatic transmission' are not a differentiating factor between flu and coronaviruses, since the inquiries own chart of previous pandemics slows that asymptomatic stuff with flu was already well known.
Hunts suggestion that they 'over-prepared' for a flu pandemic is a disgusting lie, made worse by the fact that hollowing out capacity via austerity would inevitably lead to worse outcomes in any sort of significant pandemic.
If we take the above and other stuff that I cant be arsed to go on about right now, we can twist the story and the bullshit to offer an explanation about what this angle is really getting at. Here is my initial attempt:
"The establishment might have gotten away with handling a flu pandemic in this way, because there was less novelty/brand new fear and more stability to the entrenched orthodoxy surrounding that approach, potentially leading to less challenge from people unhappy with the resulting high death-toll, and more easily reassured by the government "being seen to be doing something in response" via existing pharmaceutical options.". But people would still have been failed and condemned to death via cold calculations.
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