Bye Bye Boris!

[Nefarious]

Meh, hindsight makes everything wrong.

It's not hindsight when you conduct a full practice exercise, then ignore all the findings, citing financial constraints, even though you're in charge of the purse strings.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/0 ... overnment/

So in the three months that Boris was PM, in the midst of sorting out the disaster of the withdrawal agreement, you think it is likely that he would pivot towards preparations off the back of a 4 year old report commissioned by a predecessor for a impending crisis which their was no consensus of opinion by the medical professionals and WHO was going to happen?

I'm afraid you're a long way away from seeing the reality of what it must be like to run a government.

Really? You're going with that as the defence? That the government, led by a prime minister who has been in post since July 2019, leading a party that's been in power since 2010, is absolved of all responsibility for actions taken before the most recent election, and that previous promises made to enact key recommendations of national-security-critical reports are null and void?

Let's be clear about what happened - it's been clear for a long time that a pandemic of some kind would hit at some point - swine flu, bird flu, ebola were shots across the bow - but national preparedness for a major disease outbreak is a key function of a national health service, and in 2016, quite rightly and properly, an assessment was undertaken to evaluate that preparedness. Except that the findings of the report were in fundamental conflict with the Conservative ideology of running down all public services to a lowest-cost, minimum standard. So they buried the report, kicked the recommended actions into the long grass and decided to wing it. In a style we're now accustomed to, they decided to focus on preparing their "communication strategy" and how they would manage public perceptions, rather than actually preparing to deal with the problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost, the party (including its leader), through its ideology and modus operadi, can been seen to have been willfully negligent.

[McSwede]

What’s the source for that?

It sounds like the kind of nonsense racist aunties like to get frothy about on facebook

We do a lot of work in the educational sector with new school builds and upgrades and this is how you must refer to them. We've even been asked not to call them whiteboards during site visits at schools. Bonkers!!

Are you working in pauper schools that don't have SMARTBoards?

Lol. School budgets usually dictate whiteboard (who said that?) and projector for an interactive teaching wall.

[Broccers]

Unbelievable. Politics have nothing to do with this.

[Mito Man]

We do a lot of work in the educational sector with new school builds and upgrades and this is how you must refer to them. We've even been asked not to call them whiteboards during site visits at schools. Bonkers!!

Are you working in pauper schools that don't have SMARTBoards?

Lol. School budgets usually dictate whiteboard (who said that?) and projector for an interactive teaching wall.

If it weren’t for political correctness we’d still be on blackboards

[NotoriousREV]

Unbelievable. Politics have nothing to do with this.

Bullshit. Politics is in this up to its armpits.

[GG.]

It's not hindsight when you conduct a full practice exercise, then ignore all the findings, citing financial constraints, even though you're in charge of the purse strings.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/0 ... overnment/

So in the three months that Boris was PM, in the midst of sorting out the disaster of the withdrawal agreement, you think it is likely that he would pivot towards preparations off the back of a 4 year old report commissioned by a predecessor for a impending crisis which their was no consensus of opinion by the medical professionals and WHO was going to happen?

I'm afraid you're a long way away from seeing the reality of what it must be like to run a government.

Really? You're going with that as the defence? That the government, led by a prime minister who has been in post since July 2019, leading a party that's been in power since 2010, is absolved of all responsibility for actions taken before the most recent election, and that previous promises made to enact key recommendations of national-security-critical reports are null and void?

Let's be clear about what happened - it's been clear for a long time that a pandemic of some kind would hit at some point - swine flu, bird flu, ebola were shots across the bow - but national preparedness for a major disease outbreak is a key function of a national health service, and in 2016, quite rightly and properly, an assessment was undertaken to evaluate that preparedness. Except that the findings of the report were in fundamental conflict with the Conservative ideology of running down all public services to a lowest-cost, minimum standard. So they buried the report, kicked the recommended actions into the long grass and decided to wing it. In a style we're now accustomed to, they decided to focus on preparing their "communication strategy" and how they would manage public perceptions, rather than actually preparing to deal with the problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost, the party (including its leader), through its ideology and modus operadi, can been seen to have been willfully negligent.

Interesting twitter thread with a bit of perspective and which touches on a few of your points above:



TL;DR

- Most governments in the same boat re pandemic preparedness and we rated highly in some independent recent reviews;
- Pandemic plans that were in place focused on flu and herd immunity so ramping these up would not have been productive for a new disease which needed a different approach;
- You can't easily stockpile PPE as it has expiry dates so limited ability to hoard needed supplies (same point as to why you can't keep thousands of ventilators in a cupboard indefinitely);
- Re-treads the ground on even the WHO saying we shouldn't use the word pandemic carelessly as late as end of Feb;
- General summary was that the govt's response was flawed as in many other placed but the ST article simply lazy 'gotcha' journalism.

Unfortunately Nef, I think you have to step back and try to see dispassionately that the likelihood of us being significantly better prepared under any alternative government is precisely zero. It's not helpful even from the point of criticism to look at it solely through a lens of hatred of the Tories and Boris or to see this as a result of an austerity drive against the NHS (which Boris was vocal in wanting to reverse). You can't stockpile the PPE or ventilators we need easily, we didn't run out of beds or infrastructure when things were re-focused to dealing with Covid-19 (and the private sector (boo-hiss) provided their extra capacity) so I'm not clear how you think extra pre-pandemic spending would have helped, or more pertinently, why you think that spending would have been used for pandemic preparedness (or even for the 'right' pandemic).

If you want to criticise, better aim it at subsequent lack of sourcing, PPE, ventilators and failure to contact trace and test (like most of Europe, save perhaps Germany) rather than a utopia where some other government would have had us totally prepared for a novel virus of which only a small number of East Asian countries have had relevant experience.

Irrespective of all of the above, I totally agree with you that we (and most countries around the world) desperately need to learn from this to stop any possible recurrence or god-forbid something even more lethal that also transmits easily. The failure to significantly ramp up vaccination testing programmes for Coronaviruses after SARS (and MERS) was a massive missed opportunity - we're basically starting this work from near scratch.

[DeskJockey]

I think, irrespective of the colour of the government, that the lessons that are to be learnt should focus on ensuring that there is capacity to produce and store locally and be less dependent on (extended) global supply chains.

We can't stockpile PPE, but presumably keeping a higher level of "normal" stock and having the ability to start/ramp up local production is feasible.

[NotoriousREV]

We can't stockpile PPE

Why not?

[GG.]

If they have expiry dates you'd need to have a process of rolling obsolescence where you put all the expired stuff in the bin and order more. When you're talking about millions or tens of millions of items needed for a pandemnic I expect the figures on that kind of campaign would be quite eye opening.

I'm sure that as DJ says though that the base level will be increased from what they were pre-pandemic though.

[GG.]

I think, irrespective of the colour of the government, that the lessons that are to be learnt should focus on ensuring that there is capacity to produce and store locally and be less dependent on (extended) global supply chains.

Careful - you're sounding quite Trump-esque.

I don't disagree, joking aside. Some reasonable level of home grown capability should be retained for a scenario where every government is battling to obtain supplies for themselves. That has to be a corner stone of any preparedness strategy and takes some of the pressure off the stockpiling question.

[Swervin_Mervin]

I think, irrespective of the colour of the government, that the lessons that are to be learnt should focus on ensuring that there is capacity to produce and store locally and be less dependent on (extended) global supply chains.

We can't stockpile PPE, but presumably keeping a higher level of "normal" stock and having the ability to start/ramp up local production is feasible.

Totally agree. Agree with much of what GG says as well. I'd be just as guilty of having the same sort of response as many on here if it were a Labour party in Gov't, despite the logical side of my brain trying to keep a balanced view.

Regarding PPE - it's clear that there's a lot of suppliers out there in the UK that have stock and it's just a matter of getting it to the Trusts, care homes etc. Trusts should be better at doing more though imo - clearly there's a Gov't failing on this aspect, but Trusts are used to having to source goods and services and so it shouldn't be too hard to take matters into their own hands, and I understand many actually have.

[Nefarious]

If you want to criticise, better aim it at subsequent lack of sourcing, PPE, ventilators and failure to contact trace and test (like most of Europe, save perhaps Germany) rather than a utopia where some other government would have had us totally prepared for a novel virus of which only a small number of East Asian countries have had relevant experience.

Oh, I'm with you on that. The response to Excerise Cygnus is actually fairly far down my list of criticisms - the above post was only in response to your one about it not being Boris's fault because he's new in the job and was busy with other stuff. FWIW, I don't hate the tories, but I do have serious reservations about the suitability of certain current cabinet members, and I do object on a profound level to the economic philosophy of cutting costs and shifting responsibility to the private sector regardless of the impact on service delivery. And Cygnus exemplifies just that - the political equivalent of taking your car in for an MOT, being told it unsafe to the point of danger, but carrying on driving regardless because you're proud of how thin a shoestring you run it on. As you rightly say, as it turns out, shortage of ICU beds haven't been the breaking point, but they very well could have been the difference between deaths in the 20k range, and deaths in the 100k range. It still seems very wrong to me that we have less than a third of the ICU beds per capita than Germany, and perhaps if we weren't running it quite so close to the wire, we wouldn't have needed to convert EXcel and SECC to emergency hospitals. Also accept your point on stockpiling certain kinds of PPE, but preparedness doesn't just come in the form of filling warehouses with stuff, it also comes in the form of building flexibility into supply chains, stress testing them, and having alternatives in the case of emergencies.

I think my primary criticisms come more generally around the issue of how the current government goes about doing business. There's a gung-ho arrogance in policy making, fuelled by the confidence that the comms office is so adept at its strategies of misdirection and distraction to manipulate the narrative, that it can pretty much do whatever it likes, and sort out any consequences later with a bit of snazzy PR. And that's shown through in various of the mis-steps in the handling of this outbreak - Cherry-picking experts and appointing non-medical government officials to advisory boards is great when you just want back-up for the policies you've decided on anyway, but it works out less well in a rapidly evolving crisis situation (as demonstrated by the multiple "screeching u-turns" in the early phases).

I think at the core of our difference of opinion is your comment about "could any other party have done any better" - I'm not judging it in those terms. I'm judging it is terms of "what does the current government's behaviour reveal about their approach to the job of governance, and their attitudes to the general public". I don't have another candidate to put in the frame. But I would like to move closer to a "utopia" where a government was genuinely and competently acting in the country's best interest, rather than primarily pursuing its own ideological agenda, often motivated by the best interests of its members and a small number of interested parties, irrespective of whether that aligns with everyone else's interests.

[Nefarious]

Oh, and by-the-by, here's Richard Horton's response to the government's blog-post denials
https://twitter.com/richardhorton1/sta ... 5893884933

[Simon]

..lessons that are to be learnt..

Stop that. Stop that right now!

[NotoriousREV]

I’ve always felt that the Tories have a knack for identifying the problem and then delivering exactly the wrong solution. Rates were unfair, so how can we make local taxation fairer? Poll tax. We don’t have enough council house space for families due to a lack of housing stock and long term tenants sitting in larger houses, how do we fix that? Bedroom tax. The NHS is inefficient, how do we fix that? Capitalism.

[DeskJockey]

We can't stockpile PPE

Why not?

If there's an expiry date, stockpiling becomes costly and potentially wasteful. Ideally we'd carry higher levels of stock with a system in place to ensure that the oldest stock is used up.

[Simon]

Why do facemasks have an expiry date?

[Mito Man]

Doesn’t make sense how plastic items stored in a sealed container can expire does it.

[DeskJockey]

I'm guessing that the components break down/age and become less efficient. That seems to be the gist of what I can read online.

[Orange Cola]

Doesn’t make sense how plastic items stored in a sealed container can expire does it.

Because it’s medicine and everything has an extra zero on the end of the price tag. Even oxygen In sealed containers expires. It’s about being able to guarantee quality for an amount of time and use after that date puts the liability on the user to argue why they thought an item which had been sat for X amount of time past it’s use by date was still suitable to use in a medical environment. You wouldn’t initially think that using a sealed face mask from the back of the cupboard which has been there since WW2 is acceptable, just as an extreme example (but people have been known to do just that and worse!)

How do you know the fabric face masks have been stored correctly? Have they been compromised in some way by damaged packaging or being in the damp? Has the fabric deteriorated? For example will the elastic still hold after 12 months or is there a risk that after that period the failure rate moves from 1 in 500,000 to 1 in a 1000 that will snap and expose the wearer to unnecessary risk?

It’s not so simple