Would a Labour government have dealt better with the Covid 19 pandemic than the Tories have?

[nosos]

I think a lot of this depends on whether we're talking about a 2017 or 2019 Labour victory and the conversation risks getting confused by not making where we stand on this issue clear. I'll read back through the thread with this in mind

 

[The39thStep]

I think that if Corbyn had been in then somethings like the supply chain issue for ventilators ,possibly mask production and hospital capacity from the private sector would have been different rather than leave it mainly to the market to resolve . On a minor issue he wouldn’t have let the cowboy market for PCR tests arise either . Under Starmer fuck knows

 

[elbows]

I mean how would any government, as you referred to in your previous post, pre-emptively introduce a mass testing infrastructure for a virus which didn't exist yet or implement financial support for a pandemic which hadn't happened yet? You're framing this in a way which confuses the timeline and makes the question the thread is asking pretty much meaningless. Fwiw I don't think there would have been a huge difference for a 2019 Labour government but I do think there would have been a significant difference for a 2017 Labour government.

Actually having a proper mass diagnostics capacity and an industry to support such capacity is not something that required this virus to come along first. Countries like Germany had such a thing before this pandemic. Its also just the sort of useful capability that has been highlighted by exercises the state has conducted into pandemic preparedness in the past, well before this pandemic. I mention it because its one of the pieces of infrastructure that would have unlocked alternative, better, responses to the pandemic if it had been available. And its a great mistake to think that hindsight of this particular pandemic was required in order to establish such a system.

I can say that because it is relatively trivial to change what sort of viruses you are looking for with such a system, so you would build this capacity with different viruses and public health aims in mind, combined with knowing that such a system is there for use in emergency situations like a pandemic.

Just because you havent understood where I am coming from does not mean I am confused about timelines etc. Maybe I'm not making myself clear, maybe there are other reasons why we seem to be talking past each other. I'm not enjoying our interaction much and will probably not bother responding again since you think I'm detracting from the thread.

And my point about financial support was more about what they would have done later, how the financial support for self-isolation etc would have blended nicely with other existing agendas and rhetoric, a better natural fit than the awkwardness of watching the tories having to do the same in ways that do not come naturally to them.

 

[nosos]

I politely withdrew my remark because I'm not enjoying it either!

 

[elbows]

I think that if Corbyn had been in then somethings like the supply chain issue for ventilators ,possibly mask production and hospital capacity from the private sector would have been different rather than leave it mainly to the market to resolve . On a minor issue he wouldn’t have let the cowboy market for PCR tests arise either . Under Starmer fuck knows

I dont know that because Corbyn wasnt tested in power. I'm unable to drop all my cynicism about what the Labour party actually does when in power, based on previous experience. Contradictions seem inevitable, and sometimes regimes that indulge in rhetoric that winds up business actually end up wanting to be rather cozy with businesses in some ways in order to compensate. What shocking let downs and sickening compromises a Corbyn government would have made in power I shall never know.

 

[Sasaferrato]

No, you don't know that, do you?
But what that might or might not have to do with what's being discussed is another matter.
The minister(s) ultimately responsible for maintaining an adequate, safe and effective PPE pandemic stockpile failed in that role.
For the last decade those ministers had been tory scum.
What else is there to say?

Leaving aside your hideous bias, just how much resource are you prepared to put into the stockpile?

TBH you don't seem to have much clue about maintaining large stocks of perishables.

 

[nosos]

You keep it at the same value, rather than allowing a 40% depletion over six years, given the scientific consensus that a pandemic was inevitable?

In what sense is PPE a perishable? What's your expertise in "maintaining large stocks of perishables"?

 

[elbows]

I'll just clarify and broaden my point about proper mass diagnostic testing before I bow out of this discussion for at least a while.

This country has a long history of favouring diagnostic guesswork when it comes to a bunch of illnesses. The orthodox approach here is to rely largely on using small amounts of sampling of the population, and GP sentinel network stuff, for tracking epidemic waves at the overall population level. And when it comes to individual patients, we test for some things as a matter of routine, but other conditions that make a difference to public health are left to guesswork - get the GP to guess which illness is most likely, treat that, then think again if the patient doesnt respond.

A modern health system should aim to do better than that. Broaden the range of illnesses that are tested for properly when the patient first presents themselves. Enable that via a system of testing that is well funded with plentiful capacity. Then we can aim to do things like actually reduce the number of flu deaths we have every year, reduce the exposure of vulnerable people in hospitals and care homes to a range of potentially deadly diseases. An agenda where, when hearing figures about how many thousands of flu deaths are normal, the aim is to reduce those numbers, not use them to justify letting a similar number of covid deaths happen.

I became aware of some of our weaknesses on this front a long time before this pandemic. Partly because when looking for medical advice online about certain conditions and their possible cause, websites from some other countries would describe how the doctor will test you to see if you've got that infection. Which does tend to rather contrast with not untypical experiences here that involve the doctor guessing and prescribing antibiotics to match the guess, skipping the testing step.

If a government ever gets in with a decent health agenda, this is certainly one of the areas I'd like to see improved. Hopefully the mass testing systems we've now got will end up being put to good use even by governments with otherwise shitty health agendas, since this pandemic exposed some of these shortcomings in ways that may not quickly fade from the minds of decision makers.

 

[nosos]

How can you test for an virus that doesn't exist yet? You're implying that there could be a generic diagnostic infrastructure which just needs to be tweaked to take account of a new illness. I'm far from an expert but everything I've read about international responses to covid-19 suggests to me this isn't the case & that once you have a scientific apparatus to identify cases, you need to build an infrastructure adequate to it. These things aren't substitutable, as far as I can see.

 

[elbows]

How can you test for an virus that doesn't exist yet? You're implying that there could be a generic diagnostic infrastructure which just needs to be tweaked to take account of a new illness. I'm far from an expert but everything I've read about international responses to covid-19 suggests to me this isn't the case & that once you have a scientific apparatus to identify cases, you need to build an infrastructure adequate to it. These things aren't substitutable, as far as I can see.

You are wrong about that. PCR tests are not something that was invented in response to this virus. The technique isnt new, the ability to do it at scale isnt new.

There are the usual challenges with doing it at scale, that require investment in people, equipment and consumable supplies. All of that can be done at any stage, and then when a new virus arrives you just have to tweak the detail of what you are searching for using this technique. In the case of this virus, the laboratory assay required to detect this virus using standard PCR techniques was quickly developed in January 2020, it was not a major stumbling block at all. Individual nations capacity to perform PCR tests at scale was the issue. If we'd built mass capacity to perform this technique for other viruses in the past, for example influenza, then switching them to covid detection once the virus arrived is the trivial bit.

Dont get me wrong, there are limitations in the extent to which I imagine any nations would actually have bothered to scale up such systems in pre-pandemic times. It is reasonable to think that we could have had a much larger system than the one we actually had, and that we used it as a matter of routine, but that it would still not have been large enough to cope with the amount of testing required in this pandemic. But it would still have put us in a better position than the one we were actually in, especially since having such a system in place would have changed establishment attitudes about what options were actually open to us during some crucial early stages of the pandemic. There were all sorts of targets for testing in the early months that we didnt even consider because the lack of capacity drove decisions and established pandemic plans. Before our first wave exploded dramatically we set absurdly narrow definitions for who to test as a possible covid case not because the definitions made the most sense, but because they were compatible with our actual capacity of that period. Germany were able to study the early movement of the virus in their country, and to take steps to limit it, far more effectively than we were. Their capacity was still not large enough to deal with a later wave they faced, so they still ended up having to expand capacity later too. But their larger test capacity and the attitudes that went with it from the start, along with retaining a greater degree of spare hospital bed capacity than us, really helped their response at key moments in those first months.

 

[nosos]

Happy to be proved wrong! As I said I'm not an expert. But some authoritative links would be helpful, as what you're saying clashes with pretty much everything I've read over the last 18 months - not suggesting the testing apparatus was constructed out of nothing, only that it posed challenges specific to the virus, likewise the scaling of the testing as a national infrastructure

 

[brogdale]

Leaving aside your hideous bias, just how much resource are you prepared to put into the stockpile?

TBH you don't seem to have much clue about maintaining large stocks of perishables.

You don't have to take my ill-informed, biased view on the matter of the Tory stockpile fuck-up, the Commons Public accounts committee published their findings earlier this year; it was damning.

Haven't we been through all of this before?

In March 2020, officials from NHS England & NHS Improvement publicly assured the Health and Social Care Select Committee that these stockpiles meant the country was well placed to manage the COVID19 pandemic. However, the NAO report found that the stockpiles provided no more than two-weeks’ worth of most types of PPE needed by the NHS and social care during the pandemic and did not hold all the PPE they had been expected to hold (such as visors and gowns). Some of the stockpiled PPE had also passed its expiry date or did not meet current safety standards. Furthermore, government (and its contractors) struggled to distribute the stockpiled PPE as quickly as the situation required.28

 

[Puddy_Tat]

Obviously it's all a bit what-if, but

Would the anti-vax / anti-lockdown opinions merged in to a more mainstream anti-labour-nanny state thing?

Would the tories / capital / the press have raised merry hell about the public money that's been put in to the furlough scheme and the other forms of financial support to keep things going?

 

[elbows]

Happy to be proved wrong! As I said I'm not an expert. But some authoritative links would be helpful, as what you're saying clashes with pretty much everything I've read over the last 18 months - not suggesting the testing apparatus was constructed out of nothing, only that it posed challenges specific to the virus, likewise the scaling of the testing as a national infrastructure

I expect the challenges you've read about will mention are all to do with scaling things up and perhaps other details such as the time window when a particular infected person will be most likely to generate a sample that allows the virus to be detected. If you have one that describes other problems that make a mockery of what I've been saying, then I would very much like to read it.

It isnt easy for me to point to a single article which demonstrates to your satisfaction that other problems were not a big deal with this sort of testing. I will try to find something. My first attempt resulted in too many fragments of info from different articles and my reply became a giant mess which I have decided to throw away.

For example a proper guide would include the history of PCR stuff (over 35 years old now), the number of things its been used for historically with great results, and more recent applications of this technology, the estimated size of the market pre-pandemic (4.5 billion dollars by some accounts in 2019), some stories about how quickly the assays were created to enable the pandemic virus to be detected via this approach.

Since it is a well established and standardised form of testing, one which had a large and expending industry and range of uses behind it well before this pandemic, I really require some concrete example of what sort of other issue with it you think existed in regards this pandemic. I dont even know what sort of problems you mean, this is fairly mature technology and the current virus has more than enough in common with SARS and MERS that we knew some ways to detect it from the start. Once details of the virus were available, it was a pretty safe bet that suitable PCR assays could be developed very rapidly.

How quickly it was successfully adopted by nations should really be the main proof of what Im saying, humanity really hit the ground running in this respect, we didnt have to wait for any new advances in technology, we didnt get stuck for months waiting for some tricky technical problems to be solved. We did have to wait for all the logistics to fall into place. All the major challenges were in scaling capacity up, and there are an incredible number of uses for this sort of testing that could have given us reasons to scale up long before this pandemic arrived. In fact all the other uses of this sort of testing are one of the big reasons we did actually manage to scale up in the first year, because there was lots of capacity sitting around for use in other work, and it was more a question of organising these disparate resources into a cohesive network, and getting enough supply of consumables, than really starting from almost nothing.

 

[elbows]

Oh and assay regulatory approval inflexibilities and delays are one of the things I seem to recall got quite a lot of press. Especially in the USA where that factor got a big chunk of the blame for the USAs limited ability to offer tests at the start. I think only the assay that the CDC provided was initially approved there, until the bad press this resulted in caused them to change the rules towards the end of February 2020. A similar issue may have arisen in the UK, I cant remember right now.

But that issue still comes under the scaling problems category, and it was a regulatory rather than a technical problem, although the unhelpful state of affairs did have technical implications.

Thanks to the pandemic various innovations and things that deliver improvements to throughput have emerged, as well as a number of competing alternative forms of testing. And I'm not suggesting PCR is perfect, it would be better if we had tests that gave less false negatives. There are all sorts of limits as to quite how far I would stretch claims about what capacity previous governments could have ensured existed if only the will had been there, if the priorities and funding had been right. It wouldnt exactly have been the most eye-catching policy if delivered pre-pandemic. All the same, I think its reasonable to suggest that a government with a big health agenda would have had various reasons to invest more in that capacity and the industry that makes it happen, for a multitude of reasons that go well beyond proper pandemic planning.

edit - Oh I since found this rather long article from March 2020 which goes into some of the differences between the likes of the UK and Germany which affected early ability to bring together and harness PCR testing capacity. Priorities, structures, centralised control, domestic production of consumables and size of industries all feature, as does the possibility that large scale testing inadequacies were partly a consequence of the UK having a ridiculous 'herd immunity' plan in the first place, since that approach didnt require mass testing. And when it comes to that sort of shitty plan and priorities, I probably need to see a Labour government in power make a clean break from the 'cold calculations' that the UK establishment typically favours before I can go too far along the path of believing they would have delivered a better response to this pandemic. And such a change needs to be convincing and sustained, not the equivalent of Robin Cooks ethical foreign policy.

Why is Germany able to test for coronavirus so much more than the UK?

It is now well known that Germany is able to test for coronavirus on a far greater scale than the rest of Europe.

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