The same thing can be said for most of the major countries in the West. We were all too slow in implementing serious social distancing and have thousands and tens of thousands of avoidable dead as a resultQuote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
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The same thing can be said for most of the major countries in the West. We were all too slow in implementing serious social distancing and have thousands and tens of thousands of avoidable dead as a resultQuote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
Though ageism is pervasive in Sweden, I really did not expect to see such stupid expressions of ageism among young doctors. On average, an 80-year-old in Sweden can expect to live at least another 5 years—well, could anyway—yet young doctors are saying things about the merits of our pandemic response strategy that only make sense if you implicitly assume that very old = basically dead, eg. that it's better—or at least as good—for everyone who'd die of covid to die now, rather than implement policies that may spread those deaths out over a year and a half (presuming we don't get better at treating the disease long before a vaccine arrives). My octogenarian patients appreciate life; for them, dying now is a much worse deal than dying later. I remember some of these low-key geniuses from when they were students rotating through my clinic; seeing their remarks now, I can't help but think back on what I remember of their interactions with my patients, and see them in a new light. A person who does not realize—or care—that an 80-y-o might have a lot of life to live... should not study and practice medicine, and certainly not on the taxpayer's dime. Giving old people a few more years of decent life is 80% of modern medicine, in most specialties. These embarrassing mfers, smdh
Agreed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
From The Times:
Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster
Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears. Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives
On the third Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the world. Passing from person to person and borne on ships and planes, the coronavirus was already leaving a trail of bodies.
The virus had spread from China to six countries and was almost certainly in many others. Sensing the coming danger, the British government briefly went into wartime mode that day, holding a meeting of Cobra, its national crisis committee.
But it took just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus threat. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.
This was despite the publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese doctors in the medical journal The Lancet. It assessed the lethal potential of the virus, for the first time suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people.
Unusually, Boris Johnson had been absent from Cobra. The committee — which includes ministers, intelligence chiefs and military generals — gathers at moments of great peril such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other threats to the nation and is normally chaired by the prime minister.
Johnson had found time that day, however, to join in a lunar-new-year dragon eyes ritual as part of Downing Street’s reception for the Chinese community, led by the country’s ambassador.
It was a big day for Johnson and there was a triumphal mood in Downing Street because the withdrawal treaty from the European Union was being signed in the late afternoon. It could have been the defining moment of his premiership — but that was before the world changed.
That afternoon his spokesman played down the looming threat from the east and reassured the nation that we were “well prepared for any new diseases”. The confident, almost nonchalant, attitude displayed that day in January would continue for more than a month.
Johnson went on to miss four further Cobra meetings on the virus. As Britain was hit by unprecedented flooding, he completed the EU withdrawal, reshuffled his cabinet and then went away to the grace-and-favour country retreat at Chevening where he spent most of the two weeks over half-term with his pregnant fiancée, Carrie Symonds.
It would not be until March 2 — five weeks later — that Johnson would attend a Cobra meeting about the coronavirus. But by then it was almost certainly too late. The virus had sneaked into our airports, our trains, our workplaces and our homes. Britain was on course for one of the worst infections of the most insidious virus to have hit the world in a century.
Last week a senior adviser to Downing Street broke ranks and blamed the weeks of complacency on a failure of leadership in cabinet. The prime minister was singled out.
“There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there,” the adviser said. “And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”
One day there will be an inquiry into the lack of preparations during those “lost” five weeks from January 24. There will be questions about when politicians understood the severity of the threat, what the scientists told them and why so little was done to equip the National Health Service for the coming crisis. It will be the politicians who will face the most intense scrutiny.
Among the key points likely to be explored are why it took so long to recognise an urgent need for a massive boost in supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers; ventilators to treat acute respiratory symptoms; and tests to detect the infection.
Any inquiry may also ask whether the government’s failure to get to grips with the scale of the crisis in those early days had the knock-on effect of the national lockdown being introduced days or even weeks too late, causing many thousands more unnecessary deaths.
We have talked to scientists, academics, doctors, emergency planners, public officials and politicians about the root of the crisis and whether the government should have known sooner and acted more swiftly to kick-start the Whitehall machine and put the NHS onto a war footing.
They told us that, contrary to the official line, Britain was in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and gone out of date after becoming a low priority in the years of austerity cuts. The training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.
This made it doubly important that the government hit the ground running in late January and early February. Scientists said the threat from the coming storm was clear. Indeed, one of the government’s key advisory committees was given a dire warning a month earlier than has previously been admitted about the prospect of having to deal with mass casualties.
It was a message repeated throughout February, but the warnings appear to have fallen on deaf ears. The need, for example, to boost emergency supplies of protective masks and gowns for health workers was pressing, but little progress was made in obtaining the items from manufacturers, mainly in China.
Instead, the government sent supplies the other way — shipping 279,000 items of its depleted stockpile of protective equipment to China during this period in response to a request for help from the authorities there.
The prime minister had been sunning himself with his girlfriend in the millionaires’ Caribbean resort of Mustique when China alerted the World Health Organisation (WHO) on December 31 that several cases of an unusual pneumonia had been recorded in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in Hubei province.
In the days that followed, China at first claimed the virus could not be transmitted from human to human, which should have been reassuring. But this did not ring true to Britain’s public health academics and epidemiologists, who were texting one another, eager for more information, in early January.
Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, had predicted in a talk two years earlier that a virus might jump species from an animal in China and spread quickly to become a human pandemic. So the news from Wuhan set her on high alert.
“In early January a lot of my global health colleagues and I were kind of discussing ‘What’s going on?’” she recalled. “China still hadn’t confirmed the virus was human to human. A lot of us were suspecting it was because it was a respiratory pathogen and you wouldn’t see the numbers of cases that we were seeing out of China if it was not human to human. So that was disturbing.”
By as early as January 16 the professor was on Twitter calling for swift action to prepare for the virus. “Been asked by journalists how serious #WuhanPneumonia outbreak is,” she wrote. “My answer: take it seriously because of cross-border spread (planes means bugs travel far & fast), likely human-to-human transmission and previous outbreaks have taught overresponding is better than delaying action.”
Events were now moving fast. Four hundred miles away in London, on its campus next to the Royal Albert Hall, a team at Imperial College’s School of Public Health led by Professor Neil Ferguson produced its first modelling assessment of the impact of the virus. On Friday January 17 its report noted the “worrying” news that three cases of the virus had been discovered outside China — two in Thailand and one in Japan. While acknowledging many unknowns, researchers calculated that there could already be as many as 4,000 cases. The report warned: “The magnitude of these numbers suggests substantial human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out. Heightened surveillance, prompt information-sharing and enhanced preparedness are recommended.”
By now the mystery bug had been identified as a type of coronavirus — a large family of viruses that can cause infections ranging from the common cold to severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars). There had been two reported deaths from the virus and 41 patients had been taken ill.
The following Wednesday, January 22, the government convened the first meeting of its scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) to discuss the virus. Its membership is secret but it is usually chaired by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and chief medical adviser, Professor Chris Whitty. Downing Street advisers are also present.
There were new findings that day, with Chinese scientists warning that the virus had an unusually high infectivity rate of up to 3.0, which meant each person with the virus would typically infect up to three more people.
One of those present was Imperial’s Ferguson, who was already working on his own estimate — putting infectivity at 2.6 and possibly as high as 3.5 — which he sent to ministers and officials in a report on the day of the Cobra meeting on January 24. The Spanish flu had an estimated infectivity rate of between 2.0 and 3.0, whereas for most flu outbreaks it is about 1.3, so Ferguson’s finding was shocking.
The professor’s other bombshell in the report was that there needed to be a 60% cut in the transmission rate — which meant stopping contact between people. In layman’s terms it meant a lockdown, a move that would paralyse an economy already facing a battering from Brexit. At the time such a suggestion was unthinkable in the government and belonged to the world of post-apocalypse movies.
The growing alarm among scientists appears not to have been heard or heeded by policy-makers. After the January 25 Cobra meeting, the chorus of reassurance was not just from Hancock and the prime minister’s spokesman: Whitty was confident too.
“Cobra met today to discuss the situation in Wuhan, China,” said Whitty. “We have global experts monitoring the situation around the clock and have a strong track record of managing new forms of infectious disease . . . there are no confirmed cases in the UK to date.”
However, by then there had been 1,000 cases worldwide and 41 deaths, mostly in Wuhan. A Lancet report that day presented a study of 41 coronavirus patients admitted to hospital in Wuhan, which found that more than half had severe breathing problems, a third required intensive care and six had died.
And there was now little doubt that the UK would be hit by the virus. A study by Southampton University has shown that 190,000 people flew into the UK from Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities between January and March. The researchers estimated that up to 1,900 of these passengers would have been infected with the coronavirus — almost guaranteeing the UK would become a centre of the subsequent pandemic.
Sure enough, five days later, on Wednesday January 29, the first coronavirus cases on British soil were found when two Chinese nationals from the same family fell ill at a hotel in York. The next day the government raised the threat level from low to moderate.
On January 31 — or Brexit day, as it had become known — there was a rousing 11pm speech by the prime minister promising that withdrawal from the European Union would be the dawn of a new era, unleashing the British people, who would “grow in confidence” month by month.
By this time there was good reason for the government’s top scientific advisers to feel creeping unease about the virus. The WHO had declared the coronavirus a global emergency just the previous day, and scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine had confirmed to Whitty in a private meeting of the Nervtag advisory committee on respiratory illness that the virus’s infectivity could be as bad as Ferguson’s worst estimate several days earlier.
The official scientific advisers were willing to concede in public that there might be several cases of the coronavirus in the UK. But they had faith that the country’s plans for a pandemic would prove robust.
This was probably a big mistake. An adviser to Downing Street — speaking off the record — said their confidence in “the plan” was misplaced. While a possible pandemic had been listed as the No 1 threat to the nation for many years, the source said that in reality it had long since stopped being treated as such.
Several emergency planners and scientists said that the plans to protect the UK in a pandemic had once been a priority and had been well funded for the decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. But then austerity cuts struck. “We were the envy of the world,” the source said, “but pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years, when there were more pressing needs.”
The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus, which predicted the health service would collapse and highlighted a long list of shortcomings — including, presciently, a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators.
An equally lengthy list of recommendations to address the deficiencies was never implemented. The source said preparations for a no-deal Brexit “sucked all the blood out of pandemic planning” in the following years.
In the year leading up to the coronavirus outbreak key government committee meetings on pandemic planning were repeatedly “bumped” off the diary to make way for discussions about more pressing issues such as the beds crisis in the NHS. Training for NHS staff with protective equipment and respirators was also neglected, the source alleges.
Members of the government advisory group on pandemics are said to have felt powerless. “They would joke between themselves, ‘Ha-ha, let’s hope we don’t get a pandemic’, because there wasn’t a single area of practice that was being nurtured in order for us to meet basic requirements for a pandemic, never mind do it well,” said the source.
“If you were with senior NHS managers at all during the last two years, you were aware that their biggest fear, their sweatiest nightmare, was a pandemic, because they weren’t prepared for it.”
It meant that the government had much catching-up to do as it became clear that this “nightmare” was turning into a distinct possibility in February. But the source said there was still little urgency. “Almost every plan we had was not activated in February. Almost every government department has failed to properly implement their own pandemic plans,” the source said.
One deviation from the plan, for example, was a failure to give an early warning to firms that there might be a lockdown so they could start contingency planning. “There was a duty to get them to start thinking about their cashflow and their business continuity arrangements,” the source said.
A central part of any pandemic plan is to identify anyone who becomes ill, vigorously pursue all their recent contacts and put them into quarantine. That involves testing, and the UK seemed to be ahead of the game. In early February Hancock proudly told the Commons the UK was one of the first countries to develop a new test for the coronavirus. “Testing worldwide is being done on equipment designed in Oxford,” he said.
So when Steve Walsh, a 53-year-old businessman from Hove, East Sussex, was identified as the source of the second UK outbreak on February 6, all his contacts were followed up with tests. Walsh’s case was a warning of the rampant infectivity of the virus: he is believed to have passed it to five people in the UK after returning from a conference in Singapore, as well as six overseas.
But Public Health England failed to take advantage of our early breakthroughs with tests and lost early opportunities to step up production to the levels that would later be needed.
This was in part because the government was planning for the virus using its blueprint for fighting the flu. Once a flu pandemic has found its way into the population and there is no vaccine, the virus is allowed to take its course until “herd immunity” is acquired. Such a plan does not require mass testing.
A senior politician told this newspaper: “I had conversations with Chris Whitty at the end of January, and they were absolutely focused on herd immunity. The reason is that with flu, herd immunity is the right response if you haven’t got a vaccine.
“All of our planning was for pandemic flu. There has basically been a divide between scientists in Asia, who saw this as a horrible, deadly disease on the lines of Sars, which requires immediate lockdown, and those in the West, particularly in the US and UK, who saw this as flu.”
The prime minister’s top adviser, Dominic Cummings, is said to have had initial enthusiasm for the herd immunity concept, which may have played a part in the government’s early approach to managing the virus. The Department of Health firmly denies that “herd immunity” was ever its aim and rejects suggestions that Whitty supported it. Cummings also denies backing the concept.
The failure to obtain large amounts of testing equipment was another big error of judgment, according to the Downing Street source. It would later be one of the big scandals of the coronavirus crisis that the considerable capacity of Britain’s private laboratories to mass-produce tests was not harnessed during those crucial weeks of February.
“We should have communicated with every commercial testing laboratory that might volunteer to become part of the government’s testing regime, but that didn’t happen,” said the source.
The lack of action was confirmed by Doris-Ann Williams, chief executive of the British In Vitro Diagnostics Association, which represents 110 companies that make up most of the UK’s testing sector. Amazingly, she said her organisation did not receive a meaningful approach from the government asking for help until April 1 — the night before Hancock bowed to pressure and announced a belated and ambitious target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of this month.
There was also a failure to replenish supplies of gowns and masks for health and care workers in the early weeks of February — despite NHS England declaring the virus its first “level 4 critical incident” at the end of January.
It was a key part of the pandemic plan — the NHS’s Operating Framework for Managing the Response to Pandemic Influenza, dated December 2017 — that the NHS would be able to draw on “just in case” stockpiles of PPE.
But many of the “just in case” stockpiles had dwindled, and equipment was out of date. As not enough money was being spent on replenishing stockpiles, this shortfall was supposed to be filled by activating “just in time” contracts, which had been arranged with equipment suppliers in recent years to deal with an emergency. The first order for equipment under the “just in time” protocol was made on January 30.
However, the source said that attempts to call in these “just in time” contracts immediately ran into difficulties in February because they were mostly with Chinese manufacturers, which were facing unprecedented demand from the country’s own health service and elsewhere.
This was another nail in the coffin for the pandemic plan. “It was a massive spider’s web of failing; every domino has fallen,” said the source.
The NHS could have contacted UK-based suppliers. The British Healthcare Trades Association (BHTA) was ready to help supply PPE in February — and throughout March — but it was only on April 1 that its offer of help was accepted. Dr Simon Festing, the organisation’s chief executive, said: “Orders undoubtedly went overseas instead of to the NHS because of the missed opportunities in the procurement process.”
Downing Street admitted on February 24 — just five days before NHS chiefs warned a lack of PPE left the health service facing a “nightmare” — that the UK government had supplied 1,800 pairs of goggles and 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China.
A senior Department of Health insider described the sense of drift witnessed during those crucial weeks in February: “We missed the boat on testing and PPE . . . I remember being called into some of the meetings about this in February and thinking, ‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’
“I had watched Wuhan but I assumed we must have not been worried because we did nothing. We just watched. A pandemic was always at the top of our national risk register — always — but when it came we just slowly watched. We could have been Germany, but instead we were doomed by our incompetence, our hubris and our austerity.”
In the Far East the threat was being treated more seriously in the early weeks of February. Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was in a unique position to compare the UK’s response with Singapore, where he had advised in the past.
“Singapore realised, as soon as Wuhan reported it, that cases were going to turn up in Singapore. And so they prepared for that. I looked at the UK and I can see a different strategy and approach.
“The interesting thing for me is, I’ve worked with Singapore in 2003 and 2009 and basically they copied the UK pandemic preparedness plan. But the difference is they actually implemented it.”
Towards the end of the second week of February, the prime minister was demob happy. After sacking five cabinet ministers and saying everyone “should be confident and calm” about Britain’s response to the virus, Johnson vacated Downing Street after the half-term recess began on February 13.
He headed to the country for a “working” holiday at Chevening with Symonds and would be out of the public eye for 12 days. His aides were thankful for the rest, as they had been working flat-out since the summer as the Brexit power struggle had played out.
The Sunday newspapers that weekend would not have made comfortable reading. The Sunday Times reported on a briefing from a risk specialist that said Public Health England would be overrun during a pandemic as it could test only 1,000 people a day.
Johnson may well have been distracted by matters in his personal life during his stay in the countryside. Aides were told to keep their briefing papers short and cut the number of memos in his red box if they wanted them to be read.
His family needed to be prepared for the announcement that Symonds, who turned 32 in March, was pregnant and that they had been secretly engaged for some time. Relations with his children had been fraught since his separation from his estranged wife Marina Wheeler and the rift had deepened when she received a cancer diagnosis last year.
The divorce also had to be finalised. Midway through the break it was announced in the High Court that the couple had reached a settlement, leaving Wheeler free to apply for divorce.
There were murmurings of frustration from some ministers and their aides at the time that Johnson was not taking more of a lead. But Johnson’s aides are understood to have felt relaxed: he was getting updates and they claim the scientists were saying everything was under control.
By the time Johnson departed for the countryside, however, there was mounting unease among scientists about the exceptional nature of the threat. Sir Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease specialist who is a key government adviser, made this clear in a recent BBC interview.
“I think from the early days in February, if not in late January, it was obvious this infection was going to be very serious and it was going to affect more than just the region of Asia,” he said. “I think it was very clear that this was going to be an unprecedented event.”
By February 21 the virus had already infected 76,000 people, had caused 2,300 deaths in China and was taking a foothold in Europe, with Italy recording 51 cases and two deaths the following day. Nonetheless Nervtag, one of the key government advisory committees, decided to keep the threat level at “moderate”.
Its members may well regret that decision with hindsight, and it was certainly not unanimous. John Edmunds, one of the country’s top infectious disease modellers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was participating in the meeting by video link, but his technology failed him at the crucial moment.
Edmunds wanted the threat level to be increased to high but could not make his view known as the link was glitchy. He sent an email later making his view clear. “JE believes that the risk to the UK population [in the PHE risk assessment] should be high, as there is evidence of ongoing transmission in Korea, Japan and Singapore, as well as in China,” the meeting’s minutes state. But the decision had already been taken.
Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College, was in America at the time of the meeting but would also have recommended increasing the threat to high. Three days earlier he had given an address to a seminar in which he estimated that 60% of the world’s population would probably become infected if no action was taken and 400,000 people would die in the UK.
By February 26 there were 13 known cases in the UK. That day — almost four weeks before a full lockdown would be announced — ministers were warned through another advisory committee that the country was facing a catastrophic loss of life unless drastic action was taken. Having been thwarted from sounding the alarm, Edmunds and his team presented their latest “worst scenario” predictions to the scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling (SPI-M), which directly advises the country’s scientific decision-makers in Sage.
It warned that 27 million people could be infected and 220,000 intensive care beds would be needed if no action were taken to reduce infection rates. The predicted death toll was 380,000. Edmunds’s colleague Nick Davies, who led the research, says the report emphasised the urgent need for a lockdown almost four weeks before it was imposed.
The team modelled the effects of a 12-week lockdown involving school and work closures, shielding the elderly, social distancing and self-isolation. It estimated this would delay the impact of the pandemic but there still might be 280,000 deaths over the year.
The previous night Johnson had returned to London for the Conservatives’ big fundraising ball, the Winter Party, at which one donor pledged £60,000 for the privilege of playing a game of tennis with him.
By this time the prime minister had missed five Cobra meetings on the preparations to combat the looming pandemic, which he left to be chaired by Hancock. Johnson was an easy target for the opposition when he returned to the Commons the following day: the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, labelled him a “part-time” prime minister for his failure to lead on the virus crisis or visit the areas of the UK badly hit by floods.
By Friday February 28 the virus had taken root in the UK, with reported cases rising to 19, and the stock markets were plunging. It was finally time for Johnson to act. He summoned a TV reporter into Downing Street to say he was on top of the coronavirus crisis.
“The issue of coronavirus is something that is now the government’s top priority,” he said. “I have just had a meeting with the chief medical officer and secretary of state for health talking about the preparations that we need to make.”
It was finally announced that he would be attending a meeting of Cobra — after a weekend at Chequers with Symonds where the couple would publicly release news of the engagement and their baby.
On the Sunday there was a meeting between Sage committee members and officials from the Department of Health and the NHS that was a game-changer, according to a Whitehall source. The meeting was shown fresh modelling based on figures from Italy suggesting that 8% of infected people might need hospital treatment in a worst-case scenario. The previous estimate had been 4%-5%.
“The risk to the NHS had effectively doubled in an instant. It set alarm bells ringing across government,” said the Whitehall source. “I think that meeting focused minds. You realise it’s time to pull the trigger on the starting gun.”
At the Cobra meeting the next day, with Johnson in the chair, a full “battle plan” was finally signed off to contain, delay and mitigate the spread of the virus. This was on March 2 — five weeks after the first Cobra meeting on the virus.
The new push would have some positive benefits such as the creation of new Nightingale hospitals, which greatly increased the number of intensive care beds. But there was a further delay that month of nine days in introducing the lockdown as Johnson and his senior advisers debated what measures were required. Later the government would be left rudderless again after Johnson himself contracted the virus.
As the number of infections grew daily, some things were impossible to retrieve. There was a worldwide shortage of PPE, and the prime minister would have to personally ring manufacturers of ventilators and testing kits in a desperate effort to boost supplies.
The result was that the NHS and care home workers would be left without proper protection and insufficient numbers of tests to find out whether they had been infected. To date 50 doctors, nurses and NHS workers have died. More than 100,000 people have been confirmed as infected in Britain and 15,000 have died.
This weekend sources close to Hancock said that from late January he instituted a “prepare for the worst” approach to the virus, held daily meetings and started work on PPE supplies.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “Our response has ensured that the NHS has been given all the support it needs to ensure everyone requiring treatment has received it, as well as providing protection to businesses and reassurance to workers. The prime minister has been at the helm of the response to this, providing leadership during this hugely challenging period for the whole nation.”
I was just coming here to post that, absolutely damning. I knew they fucked up at the start by being too slow to act, but I had no idea it was that bad.
You seem more interested in the UK's response to the lockdown and delaying it by days/weeks than your own government's decision not to have one. How come?
The UK government followed the scientific advice it was given by Nervtag and Sage as you'd expect any government to do. Hindsight is 20/20 and stories about how Nervtag didn't upgrade its risk warning to the government though some scientists wanted it to do so does not make it the advice the government was given.
Wow, yeah, mate, that's definitely an accurate characterization of my views of the Swedish govt's decision to follow the UK's lead at the start of the outbreak :haha: :bored:Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
What's especially disappointing is Johnson's unexplained absence from important meetings at a critical stage of the pandemic.Quote:
The UK government followed the scientific advice it was given by Nervtag and Sage as you'd expect any government to do. Hindsight is 20/20 and stories about how Nervtag didn't upgrade its risk warning to the government though some scientists wanted it to do so does not make it the advice the government was given.
It was scientific advice to neglect pandemic planning for years before hand? It was scientific advice to do nothing to secure PPE for the NHS, all throughout February and March? It was scientific advice to not make any approach to the UK's testing industry until the start of April?
We have a Cabinet government system. While SAGE and Nervtag were calling the virus "low risk" to "moderate risk" the Health Secretary was chairing the meetings. Its not as if SAGE were calling it High Risk and the PM was absent :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
Shocked, absolutely shocked, that the Health Secretary rather than the Prime Minister would chair meetings to discuss a virus the government's scientific advisors were calling "low risk" or "moderate risk".
What kind of government is this in which the Health Secretary could chair a Health meeting? Do they think we have some sort of Cabinet style of government?
Twitter Link
Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Your reaction to this is extremely strange. Just so we're clear, it's not good that the govt received advice from scientists that the risk was low or even moderate; it was clear very early on that there was a high risk of this turning into a dangerous viral pandemic. The advisors' views, anchored in inappropriate analogies with pandemic flu, led to devastating mistakes that should absolutely be scrutinized. Your scientists telling your govt. something that isn't true isn't a great defense against criticism—it just invites stronger criticism, of more people. The failures of scientific advisors don't absolve your govt. however. Notwithstanding the issues with inadequate preparation that Steely highlighted, there's the issue of inadequate response once the looming crisis popped up on their radar. Amazingly, even you initially had a more appropriate reaction to the events that were unfolding than your govt. appears to have had; around the end of February, while your govt. was being inappropriately cavalier based on assessments that the situation was low risk, you zeroed in on the appropriate strategy—one that your govt. and its advisors were deliberately not pursuing. If you were able to see what might lie ahead, there is no excuse for your govt. not being at least as clear-sighted about the potential danger—irrespective of the current risk-assessments from their scientific advisors. You don't wait for a crisis to become fully established before showing up to crisis response meetings—you show up before, when the possibility of a situation developing into a crisis is first realized.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
The reason I'm so interested in the UK's response is that, as in so many other situations, our governments and our civil service—and our scientific culture—track one another. Our scientists made the same mistakes at around the same time, for the same reasons; unfortunately, ours chose to stick to their guns, whereas the UK's changed their views based on new analyses of existing data.
I am curious actually, since news here mostly focuses on our own country, the big ones like US, and ones where things are bad and/or nearby (UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium). How is Sweden doing?
Over here the peak has passed, but ICU still has more Covid patients than the pre-crisis total capacity. I guess some of the measures will slowly and in phases be reduced a little over the upcoming weeks/months. Looks like the measures (which were not extremely strict compared to other countries) were just enough to keep the hospitals just below their capacity. Unfortunately it looks like care homes for the elderly are hit hard. :(
Also, like the UK we apparently lacked good enough supplies as well and also sent some to China earlier this year. Looks like the plan involved being able to order supplies as normal - which turned out to be a fiasco with a global pandemic happening at the same time.
I think the ugly truth is that most governments were caught with their pants down. And that it took most of them too much time to get over their normalcy bias. Another ugly truth is that hardly any country was even remotely prepared for what we knew was going to happen. I remember the Dutch experts declaring at the beginning of the pandemic that we had a 'very good system in place to cope with the situation'. And then it turned out the system wasn't worth shit the moment things got real. We barely scraped through and are looking at thousands of deaths that maybe could have been prevented if we hadn't been so certain of being prepared.Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
At the end of this we may really have to have that talk about China; if we really can afford to have a country so dishonest and that callous with the wellbeing of the entire planet be so important to our way of life. We will be paying for their bad choices in hundreds of thousands of dead people and lives wrecked in the economic aftermath.
Timeline of Events with a UK Focus:
21st December: First cases appear in China
31st December: China announces "cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology"
11th January: First known death
13th January: NERVTAG: “no evidence of significant human to human transmission”, risk to UK "very low"
17th January: Imperial College Report says human to human transmission "cannot be ruled out". "Heightened surveillance, prompt information-sharing and enhanced preparedness are recommended."
Circa-Mid January: Virus now identified as type of coronavirus.
20th January: First cases outside China confirmed
22th January: NERVTAG moves threat level to low. First SAGE meeting to discuss virus. Warnings come from China that covid-19 is unusually infectious, one infected person infecting 3 people on average.
24th of January: Ferguson of Imperial College reports to the Cobra meeting today that the infectious rate is between 2.5 and 3.6. The same report says there needs to be a 60% cut in the transmission rate, i.e. a lockdown.
29th January: First UK cases
31st January: Threat level raised to moderate in UK
"End of January": Johnson receiving daily updates on cv19 according to Downing Street aide. UK stockpiles of PPE have been run down in previous years due to lack of spending, attempts to purchase more quickly run into problems due to unprecedented global demand.
2nd February: First death outside China
12th February: Exeter University report warns an unchecked outbreak could peak in 4 months and infect 45 million people.
13th February - March 30th: UK govt misses 8 conference calls with EU leaders to discuss a common strategy for the purchase of ventilators. Johnson vacates Downing Street and goes on holiday until 2th.
14th February: First death in Europe
21st February: NERVTAG conference call decides to keep the threat level at 'moderate' for some reason. Advisor John Edmunds couldn't join the call, but called for it to be raised to 'high' in an e-mail: “I just thought, are we still, we still thinking that it’s mild or something? It definitely isn’t, you know,”
24th February: Italy has a merge surge in cases and locks down parts of Northern Italy. Anecdotally, the public is beginning to realize shit is getting real around now. UK Government sends 650,000 items of PPE to China.
26th February: A "worst case scenario" report by SPI-M predicts 380,000 dead and stresses the urgent need for a lockdown
28th February: First UK death, WHO raise alert level to highest
Februray: Insider sources reflecting on the past month: "Almost every plan we had was not activated in February. Almost every government department has failed to properly implement their own pandemic plans" and “We missed the boat on testing and PPE . . . I remember being called into some of the meetings about this in February and thinking, ‘Well it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’ I had watched Wuhan but I assumed we must have not been worried because we did nothing. We just watched. A pandemic was always at the top of our national risk register — always — but when it came we just slowly watched."
1st March: New estimates from Italy show that 8% of infected people will require hospitalization, up from 4% to 5%.
2nd March: "If unconstrained and if the virus behaved as in China, up to four-fifths of Britons could be infected and one in a hundred might die" - official UK Govt report to model the spread of pandemic. Possibly the same report (?) warns that the virus is now transmitting freely in the UK. Johnson attends first Cobra meeting. A battle plan is "signed off".
4th March: The pandemic in the UK begins to gather pace, 34 new cases in one day.
Circa 9th of March: Sage still reluctant to recommend a full lockdown, citing risk of second wave after it ends
11th March: WHO declares covid-19 a pandemic, France, Spain and Italy all either order lockdowns, or prepare to.
12th March: UK threat level moved to 'high'. Johnson: “I must level with you, level with the British public - more families, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”
13th March: Major organisation postpone or cancel events in the UK, but the government is still avoiding "eye catching measures", still trying to reduce the "peak"
"Middle of March": UK Govt begins issuing requests to labs for assistance with testing
16th March: Publication of the report by Imperial College London that probably saved 10s of thousands of lives here in the UK and in the US, predicting half a million dead if the virus is unconstrained. However, it is basically the same as various reports two weeks earlier saying 1 in a 100 would die, or that 380,000 would die. The same day, Johnson starts daily press briefings, urges people to remain indoors and work from home if they can, Johnson launches appeal to industry to help with production of ventilators. Beginning of the pseudo-lockdown.
18th March: UK closes schools
20th March: UK orders all pubs, clubs, venues etc closed
23rd March: UK begins full lock down
27th March: Johnson and Hancock test positive
2nd April: 1 million cases world-wide
5th April: Johnson hospitalized, government is now proceeding more or less as it should from this point on
Sources:
https://archive.is/20200418182037/ht...ster-hq3b9tlgh
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-h...-idUSKBN21P1VF
https://bfpg.co.uk/2020/04/covid-19-timeline/
I think we can all agree the government has failed in three critical respects:
1) Failed to declare a lock-down anywhere near soon enough
2) Failed to secure adequate supplies of PPE
3) Failed to secure enough testing capacity.
Only question is whether to blame the scientific advisors for not communicating the scale of threat or the ministers for their cavalier attitude. All the information necessary was known in January. We knew how infectious it was thanks to the data coming out of China and Imperial College, and we knew how deadly it was (though I'm not sure when this information became apparent), all you have to do was put two and two together and realize any country that doesn't lockdown is in a world of shit.
1) Failure to declare a lockdown soon enough: This is probably the area where the scientific advisors have the most to answer for. It's clear they shied away from recommending a full lockdown based on what we now know incorrect assumptions about how the public would react, and they were too slow to raise the threat level. I have reason to believe some of them may have used the word "inconceivable" while raising their index finger (not really). However, it's clear that this is far from universal. Reports coming out of Imperial College and others warned in late January that covid-19 was unusually infectious and that this information was part of the Cobra meeting on the 24th of January. So, if ministers didn't know it's because the information wasn't there, it's because they chose not to listen to it.
By the beginning of March it was clear to everyone what was happening, yet still ministers and the scientific advisors are fucking around (we all know what happens when you do this: you find out). I think there is increasingly little excuse for ministers to just have been blithly accepting an advice they were getting to the effect that everything is fine, given everything else that was happening in the world at this time. There's also the matter of the week beginning the 16th. At this point, the scientific advice is basically that, yes, we need a lockdown and yet still the government didn't fully implement one until a week later, and didn't order pubs etc closed for another four days. There is no excuse for this, and given the exponential nature of the pandemic's spread the number of cases could have been doubling or more during this week. The people dying now, today, were probably infected during this period. So, yeah, 50/50.
And, no they can't hid behind and arbitrary and ill-defined 'threat level' when there's some much other information going around, this isn't Red Dwarf
2) Failure to secure adequate supplies of PPE. Yeah, they fucked around all throughout February with nothing much to show for it. You could make the argument that they'd have given it more priority had the scientific advice been clearer and more urgent, but even if you're going with the 'let the virus run through the population, actually' method you should still understand that you're going to need a lot of PPE. More, even, since there will be more hospitalizations without a lockdown. Entirely ministers fault. Plus, the fact that we were short in the first place is basically because of Tory austerity.
3) Failure to secure enough testing capacity. This is especially bad since it's just going to prolong the amount of time we're in this goddamn lock-down, and thus worsen the economic damage they were presumably worried enough about to delay the lockdown in the first place. I cannot fathom why they were so slow turn to the UK's biotech industry, nor why they felt it necessary to spend £20 million on hookey tests from China. They have promised 100,000 a day by the end of April but they're nowhere near that right now, so unless they're going to bring online a load of testing capacity in one go within the next 10 days, that's yet another failure.
TLDR: the UK Government has handled this crisis extremely badly. The fact that a few other countries have done as bad (wtf is going on in France? you never hear about them and their outbreak is even worse than here) or even worse (you know who I mean) does not excuse that.
14,385 cases so far—cumulatively—1,079 currently in ICU, 1540 confirmed covid+ deaths (~1000 over 80, 76 under 60, ~490 in the 60-79y span), probably hundreds who've died at nursing homes or in their own homes without being tested. The high number of deaths in relation to number of confirmed cases suggests continued restrictions on testing, but nursing homes are now ramping up testing and I believe there are confirmed covid+ patients at more than half of all nursing homes in sthlm at the moment.Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
Difficult to draw any conclusions about where we are in relation to peak cases/peak hospitalization, both because of inadequate testing and reporting as well as because we probably have multiple waves superimposed on one another. Most of the cases and deaths have occurred in the sthlm region and nearby towns; outbreaks in other cities started later and are developing much more slowly.
Hospital beds—including ICU beds—have not been a limiting factor, both because they've freed up so many beds by stopping admissions for non-acute care and because so many of the covid patients are so frail that they would not have been admitted to a hospital in the first place, let alone started on invasive ventilation. The only way to protect that group is to go back in time and contain the epidemic. That being said, an investigation has been launched due to reports of at least one hospital in sthlm being excessively restrictive with ICU admission; according to these reports, frail elderly patients may have been denied ICU care, despite availability of ICU beds, based on the expectation that those beds will soon be needed for younger, more robust patients—which would be unethical, misguided, and in violation of laws and regulations.
UK "experts" and scientists are not to blame. A completely useless, lazy and untrustworthy PM is to blame.
He is literally the worst MP I can think of to lead a country through such a crisis.
I do think though that given how infectious this disease is, stopping it altogether will not happen. Keeping the economy completely locked down will also have disastrous consequences, which in return will also cause a lot of deaths. Given people may be asymptomatic and still spread the disease, if the lockdown is reduced there will almost certainly be an increase in cases again. Given that tests at the moment aren't particularly reliable, plus privacy concerns, I'm not sure i see the current plan for Corona-apps working out well either.
So what is the way forward? Obviously the current measures where needed because the hospitals were being overwhelmed, and by what looks like sheer luck they just managed to stay on the right side. I'd say the only way forward is to find a balance between reducing measures as much as possible while keeping the pressure on the health system manageable (and i don't mean the way the currently manage to scrape by, since that's not sustainable). I just wonder if that's possible, and the impact it may have on the elderly is terrifying.
On a side note, I donated blood two weeks ago and it's used for the research on antibody presence in the population, it's nice to feel like i did something useful. This whole situation did also make me realise I want to change jobs to something that helps the world again. I previously worked on medical devices which helped kids with congenital heart disease, but moved to 'beauty' devices a year or so ago (I mean, technically they're still medical devices, but they have no medical benefits, really). This situation makes me feel useless, and put things in perspective, and I'd like to have a meaningful job again.
It is amusing how people's pre existing prejudices do seem to so 100% reflect opinions now on this too.
The reality is this was a quick moving virus that was underestimated by the experts and the situation has evolved following the scientific advice.
Any pretence we knew on 24 January what we know now is bullshit. Check the date on this from The Lancet's editor.
Twitter Link
People are being so revisionist about what people knew and when.
Pelosi: On Feb 24th
"Precautions have been taken by our city. We know that there is concern surrounding tourism, traveling all throughout the world, but we think it’s very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come. It’s lovely here. The food is delicious, the shops are prospering, the parade was great. Walking tours continue. Please come and visit and enjoy Chinatown."
So... yeah. Lots of people didn't think it was a danger. Between "hug a Chinese person" in Italy and Pelosi happy about a parade during a pandemic there were a lot of folks off base.
Now we all get that context is a foreign concept to you but here is some more from that same speech. A speech that was addressing the racism that Trump was fanning with his "Chinese Virus" remarks that your dumbass also uses.
"Prevention, prevention, prevention. We want people to be concerned and vigilant. However, we don’t want them to be afraid.”
“A new Chinese coronavirus, a cousin of the SARS virus, has infected hundreds since the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in December"Quote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
That was what CNN called it. :)
Randblade, do I really need to remind you of the fact that De Pfeffel was so ignorant as to boast about his disregard for even the most basic behavioral rules to combat covid-19.?You can't expect anyone to believe a man is on top of an issue if he proudly tells the general public he did things that were likely to infect him. It is obvious he didn't take covid-19 serious from his personal life. No excuse for being absent can improve this.
You mean he said he was shaking hands in a press conference where his Chief Scientist said it was OK to shake hands?
Interesting response, worth reading in full. Mentions 2 points I'd made plus much more.
Quote:
Response to Sunday Times Insight article
dhscpressoffice, Posted on: 19 April 2020 - Categories: Coronavirus (COVID-19)
A Government spokesman said: ‘This article contains a series of falsehoods and errors and actively misrepresents the enormous amount of work which was going on in government at the earliest stages of the Coronavirus outbreak.’
‘This is an unprecedented global pandemic and we have taken the right steps at the right time to combat it, guided at all times by the best scientific advice.
‘The Government has been working day and night to battle against coronavirus, delivering a strategy designed at all times to protect our NHS and save lives.
'Our response has ensured that the NHS has been given all the support it needs to ensure everyone requiring treatment has received it, as well as providing protection to businesses and reassurance to workers.
‘The Prime Minister has been at the helm of the response to this, providing leadership during this hugely challenging period for the whole nation.’
On the Sunday Times claims:
Claim – On the third Friday in January Coronavirus was already spreading around the world but the government ‘brushed aside’ the threat in an hour-long COBR meeting and said the risk to the UK public was ‘low’.
Response – At a very basic level, this is wrong. The meeting was on the fourth Friday in January. The article also misrepresents the Government’s awareness of Covid 19, and the action we took before this point. Health Secretary Matt Hancock was first alerted to Covid 19 on 3 January and spoke to Departmental officials on 6th Jan before receiving written advice from the UK Health Security Team.
He brought the issue to the attention of the Prime Minister and they discussed Covid 19 on 7 January. The government’s scientific advisory groups started to meet in mid-January and Mr Hancock instituted daily coronavirus meetings. He updated Parliament as soon as possible, on January 23rd.
The risk level was set to “Low” because at the time our scientific advice was that the risk level to the UK public at that point was low. The first UK case was not until 31 January. The specific meaning of “public health risk” refers to the risk there is to the public at precisely that point. The risk was also higher than it had been before - two days earlier it had been increased “Very Low” to “Low” in line with clinical guidance from the Chief Medical Officer.
The WHO did not formally declare that coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) until 30 January, and only characterised it as a global pandemic more than a month later, on 11 March. The UK was taking action and working to improve its preparedness from early January.
Claim - ‘This was despite the publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese doctors in the medical journal The Lancet. It assessed the lethal potential of the virus, for the first time suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people.'
Response - The editor of the Lancet, on exactly the same day – 23 January - called for “caution” and accused the media of ‘escalating anxiety by talking of a ‘killer virus’ and ‘growing fears’. He wrote: ‘In truth, from what we currently know, 2019-nCoV has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. There is no reason to foster panic with exaggerated language.’ The Sunday Times is suggesting that there was a scientific consensus around the fact that this was going to be a pandemic – that is plainly untrue.
https://twitter.com/richardhorton1/s...449072128?s=19
Claim - It was unusual for the Prime Minister to be absent from COBR and is normally chaired by the Prime Minister.
Response - This is wrong. It is entirely normal and proper for COBR to be chaired by the relevant Secretary of State. Then Health Secretary Alan Johnson chaired COBR in 2009 during H1N1. Michael Gove chaired COBR as part of No Deal planning. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps chaired COBR during the collapse of Thomas Cook. Mr Hancock was in constant communication with the PM throughout this period.
At this point the World Health Organisation had not declared COVID19 a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’, and only did so only 30 January. Indeed, they chose not to declare a PHEIC the day after the COBR meeting.
Examples of scientific commentary from the time:
Prof Martin Hibberd, Professor of Emerging Infectious Disease, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said:
“This announcement is not surprising as more evidence may be needed to make the case of announcing a PHEIC. WHO were criticised after announcing the pandemic strain of novel H1N1_2009, when the virus was eventually realised to have similar characteristics to seasonal influenza and is perhaps trying to avoid making the same mistake here with this novel coronavirus. To estimate the true severity of this new disease requires identifying mild or asymptomatic cases, if there are any, while determining the human to human transmission rate might require more evidence.”
Dr Adam Kamradt-Scott, Senior Lecturer in International Security Studies, University of Sydney, said: “Based on the information we have to date, the WHO Director-General’s decision to not declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern is not especially surprising. While we have seen international spread of the virus, which is one of the criteria for declaring a PHEIC, the cases in those countries do not appear to have seeded further local outbreaks. If that was to start to occur, it would constitute a greater concern but at the moment the outbreak is largely contained within China.”
Claim - 'Imperial’s Ferguson was already working on his own estimate — putting infectivity at 2.6 and possibly as high as 3.5 — which he sent to ministers and officials in a report on the day of the Cobra meeting on January 24. The Spanish flu had an estimated infectivity rate of between 2.0 and 3.0, so Ferguson’s finding was shocking.’
Response - Infectivity on its own simply reveals how quickly a disease spreads, and not its health impact. For that, it is necessary to know about data such as associated mortality/morbidity. It is sloppy and unscientific to use this number alone to compare to Spanish flu.
Claim - No10 ‘played down the looming threat’ from Coronavirus and displayed an ‘almost nonchalant attitude…for more than a month.’
Response - The suggestion that the government’s attitude was nonchalant is wrong. Extensive and detailed work was going on in government because of Coronavirus, as shown above.
Claim - By the time the Prime Minister chaired a COBR meeting on March 2 ‘the virus had sneaked into our airports, our trains, our workplaces and our homes. Britain was on course for one of the worst infections of the most insidious virus to have hit the world in a century.'
Response - This virus has hit countries across the world. It is ridiculous to suggest that coronavirus only reached the UK because the Health Secretary and not the PM chaired a COBR meeting.
Claim - 'Failure of leadership' by anonymous senior advisor to Downing Street.
Response - The Prime Minister has been at the helm of the Government response to Covid 19, providing the leadership to steer his Ministerial team through a hugely challenging period for the whole nation. This anonymous source is variously described as a ‘senior adviser to Downing Street’ and a ‘senior Downing Street adviser’. The two things are not the same. One suggests an adviser employed by the government in No10. The other someone who provides ad hoc advice. Which is it?
Claim - The government sent 279,000 items of its depleted stockpile of protective equipment to China during this period in response to a request for help from the authorities there.
Response - The equipment was not from the pandemic stockpile. We provided this equipment to China at the height of their need and China has since reciprocated our donation many times over. Between April 2-April 15 we have received over 12 million pieces of PPE in the UK from China.
Claim - Little was done to equip the National Health Service for the coming crisis in this period.
Response - This is wrong. The NHS has responded well to Coronavirus, and has provided treatment to everyone in critical need. We have constructed the new Nightingale hospitals and extended intensive care capacity in other hospitals.
Claim - Among the key points likely to be explored are why it took so long to recognise an urgent need for a massive boost in supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers; ventilators to treat acute respiratory symptoms; and tests to detect the infection.
Response - The Department for Health began work on boosting PPE stocks in January, before the first confirmed UK case.
- Discussions on PPE supply for COVID-19 began w/c 27 January (as part of Medical Devices and Clinical Consumables), with the first supply chain kick-off meeting on 31 January. The first additional orders of PPE was placed on 30 January via NHS Supply Chain’s ‘just-in-time contracts’. BAU orders of PPE were ramped up around the same date.
- Friday, 7 February, the department held a webinar for suppliers trading from or via China and the European Union. Over 700 delegates joined and heard the Department’s requests to carry out full supply chain risk assessments and hold onto EU exit stockpiles where they had been retained.
- Monday, 10 February, the department spoke with the major patient groups and charities to update them on the situation regarding the outbreak and to update them on the steps it was taking to protect supplies.
- Tuesday, 11 February, the department wrote to all suppliers in scope of the Covid 19 supply response work – those trading from or via China or the EU – repeating the messages from the webinar and updating suppliers on the current situation relating to novel coronavirus.
- The NHS has spare ventilator capacity and we are investing in further capacity.
Claim - Suggestion that ‘lack of grip’ had the knock-on effect of the national lockdown being introduced days or even weeks too late, causing many thousands more unnecessary deaths.
Response - The government started to act as soon as it was alerted to a potential outbreak. Mr Hancock was first alerted to Covid 19 on 3 January and spoke to Departmental officials on 6th Jan before receiving written advice from the UK Health Security Team. He brought the issue to the attention of the Prime Minister and they discussed Covid 19 on 7 January.
The government’s scientific advisory groups started to meet in mid-January and Hancock instituted daily meetings to grip the emerging threat. We have taken the right steps at the right time guided by the scientific evidence.
Claim - Scientists said the threat from the coming storm was clear and one of the government’s key advisory committees was given a dire warning a month earlier than has previously been admitted about the prospect of having to deal with mass casualties.
Response - The government followed scientific advice at all times. The WHO only determined that COVID 19 would be a global pandemic on 11 March. Claiming that there was scientific consensus on this is just wrong. Sage met on January 22 but the first NERVTAG meeting was held on 13 January (NERVTAG is the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group – see here https://www.gov.uk/government/groups...advisory-group ).
Claim - The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus, which predicted the health service would collapse and highlighted a long list of shortcomings — including, presciently, a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators.
Response - The Government has been extremely proactive in implementing lessons learnt around pandemic preparedness, including from Exercise Cygnus. This includes being ready with legislative proposals that could rapidly be tailored to what became the Coronavirus Act, plans to strengthen excess death planning, planning for recruitment and deployment of retired staff and volunteers, and guidance for stakeholders and sectors across government.
Claim - By February 21 the virus had already infected 76,000 people, had caused 2,300 deaths in China and was taking a foothold in Europe, with Italy recording 51 cases and two deaths the following day. Nonetheless NERVTAG, one of the key government advisory committees, decided to keep the threat level at “moderate”.
Response - This is a misrepresentation of what the threat level is. This is about the current public health danger – and on February 21, when the UK had about a dozen confirmed cases, out of a population of over 66 million, the actual threat to individuals was moderate. In terms of the potential threat, the government was clear – on 10 February the Secretary of State declared that “the incidence or transmission of novel Coronavirus constituted a serious and imminent threat to public health”.
And Randblade, how do you know if the person you shake hands with washed his hands before shaking your hands? Are you now going to tell us that probably he went around all day asking everyone including his 'prossible corona patients' if they washed their hands? How does that even work Randblade? Washing your hands when you're in a hospitalbed with covid-19?Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Do you have some mental defect that prevents you from seeing the man behaved more than averagely inept in dealing with this crisis for the simple reason he had already decided that it wasn't all that serious?
Why would you ask that? Why would it be relevant?Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazir
Whether the other party had or not simply didn't matter under the advice at the time. The point our scientists were making was that it didn't matter greatly even if the other party is positive for covid-19 when you shake hands since (and the Chief Scientist repeated this time and again) you can not acquire the disease through the skin. A handshake is insufficient to acquire the disease. You can (the advice at the time was) safely shake hands with someone who is positive so long as you don't touch your face before you have washed your own hands. You may get the virus on your hands but washing them will wash it off and you will not be infected so long as you wash your hands without touching your face.
The advice was changed a couple of days later as telling people not to touch their face between washing of hands doesn't really work but that was the scientific advice when the PM spoke. I have greater concern with governments that go against their scientific advice than those that follow it - and ours has not been afraid of conducting "u-turns" when the advice changes, as it did with handshaking. Have a go at the scientific advisors for calling it wrong early on if you wish, but I for one am glad that in a novel pandemic that our government follows their scientific advice right or wrong - better that than second-guessing them as Trump has done time and again.
You deserve a 'go fuck yourself' again. I'm not going to be drawn into one of your autistic pissing matches.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Its not a pissing match. If you didn't understand the advice at the time (and you clearly didn't given your worries as to whether the other party had washed their hands) then it explains your confusion completely. Quite happy to draw a line in the sand there and move on.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazir
Twitter Link
Looking to the future good news coming out of Sweden it seems. If Sweden can cope without a lockdown then we ought to be able to leave ours sooner than we'd thought hopefully. No doubt there will be debates in the future as to whether the lockdown was a mistake or not, but I think we were right to do it given the risks at the time whether it was necessary or not. It was probably premature for most of the country outside London (and I felt that at the time) but it would have been a TERRIBLE mistake to lockdown London but not the rest of the nation (would have just led to people fleeing London thus spreading the virus further as happened in Italy) so the rest of us simply have to accept that London got it worse sooner and roll with it.
Sweden doing what it is doing is a good test case. Their per capita Covid rate is middle of the road (though with inconsistent testing across countries hard to make much of it yet).
Though Sweden is different to other nations in other respects too. No two nations are the same and what will work for one will not necessarily work for another - Italy's healthcare system was overloaded even with a lockdown.
What seems the worst vector for this disease is a high population density and mass transit. Large cities with trains packed like sardines etc rather than rural or suburban with cars. I'm not sure what Stockholm or Sweden generally is like in that regard.
Check the replies to that tweet, including one citing a study that had just been done. Or better yet, check the numerous other studies being done at the time and throughout Februrary.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
https://www.thenational.scot/news/18...tific-adviser/Quote:
"And when Michael Gove says 'but prime ministers don't attend all Cobra meetings', I cannot recall a Cobra meeting when it was called with Blair or Brown as prime minister when the prime minister wasn't in the chair."
I made a thread on what we can learn form the pandemic - key items like moving away from public transit should be in the conversation when all this is over.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Do you get paid by the troll?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewkowski
So we should have governance by Twitter replies should we? Studies were not of a settled science, hence why the Lancet editor was advising people to calm down.Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
Of course the Lancet editor has a chequered past himself, especially standing by Dr Wakefield for far too long helping feed the antivax bullshit that has since developed. But he did belatedly renounce that it only took many years not days or weeks.
https://twitter.com/sajidjavid/statu...736644611?s=19Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
If there's doubt amongst scientists about how bad the pandemic could be, some people saying it could be very bad and others saying maybe not so much, do you think it's prudent to just assume the people saying it won't be so bad are right or do you think more of a 'hope for the best, prepare for the worst' approach would be better?Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Saying that previous Tory prime ministers were just as irresponsible cavalier as Johnson is perhaps not the defence that you and Javid seem to think it is.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
There is, however, a difference between missing a COBR meeting about the migrant crisis in Calais (as Cameron did in 2015) and one about a infectious disease which had the potential to shut down the UK economy and kill 10s of thousands.
There is also a difference between missing one such meeting and missing five of them.
I do, which is what was done. The science advisory group (SAGE) and Nervtag were called to prepare and regular meetings held to monitor the situation and prepare.Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
He didn't "miss" them if he wasn't due at them. Or are you grossly negligent for not attending meetings you're not due to go to?Quote:
Saying that previous Tory prime ministers were just as irresponsible cavalier as Johnson is perhaps not the defence that you and Javid seem to think it is.
There is, however, a difference between missing a COBR meeting about the migrant crisis in Calais (as Cameron did in 2015) and one about a infectious disease which had the potential to shut down the UK economy and kill 10s of thousands.
There is also a difference between missing one such meeting and missing five of them.
COBRA is just an acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. Or COBR is without the A. The PM doesn't attend most briefings, that is the Secretary of State's responsibility normally.
When did you decide we should abolish Cabinet governance and have one President responsible for everything?
Woah!
Twitter Link
The fuck it was. Why do we have a shortage of PPE or testing Apparatus? We didn't we have a lockdown till near the end of March?Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Probably if there was a meeting that is directly relevant to my responsibilities, like "Is [thing Steely is responsible for] going to be completely fucked next month?" and I was like "think I'll sit this one out, chief. not coming to the next four, either. let me know how it goes, though." that might be frowned upon, yes.Quote:
He didn't "miss" them if he wasn't due at them. Or are you grossly negligent for not attending meetings you're not due to go to?
https://66.media.tumblr.com/91bdb169...o1_r7_500.gifvQuote:
COBRA is just an acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. Or COBR is without the A.
Keyword: normally.Quote:
The PM doesn't attend most briefings, that is the Secretary of State's responsibility normally.
Might be nice to have a PM who was responsible for something.Quote:
When did you decide we should abolish Cabinet governance and have one President responsible for everything?