UKC

A new drama based on life on the NHS front line during the pandemic. Starts in a few weeks: ITV1 19th, 20th 21st February.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/29/i-detest-bullies-dr-rachel-cl...

The lies certainly led to many avoidable deaths and terrible pressure on and risks to NHS front line staff, so I hope you are right, but my guess is it will be comparatively a much lower impact.

It’s already been done in Holby City

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/oct/29/like-walking-into-hell...

I'll bet that if you watch this new show next to Holby/Casualty they will be like political chalk and cheese. The political influence of the BBC chair is even discussed in your link.

I will not be watching it as I barely watch any tv anyway. 

If I had been in charge during the pandemic, I don't see any way to significantly reduce the death toll. We had harsh lockdowns for months, which it could be argued saved lives at the time at too high a cost. 

Whoever was in charge would have had the same death toll laid at their feet.

The real liars are the conspiracy theorists touting every crackpot theory going.

Now that is a crackpot conspiracy theory.  Now conspiracy theorists have an answer for every objection, so why did we do so badly?

Short memories 

Several major things and lost of minor things could have been done better. Some were well known and some have became clearer in the covid inquiry. These include:

Tighter targeted earlier restrictions (expecially on border control from countries with infections) would have slowed initial spread in the UK. 

There were several preparedness exercises prior to 2020 that showed major weaknesses in our response to different types of pandemic and these led to recommendations to improve our readiness. Not only did the government ignore these, they effectively buried them. This included warnings of inadequate PPE stocks.

More experienced staff on SAGE who had been involved in actual outbreak measures would have added pressure to act faster.

Infected people were moved to care homes without testing, leading to an explosion of cases amongst the most vulnerable with in turn then added to pressure on hospitals.

By claiming acting earlier may have made have added 'cost', you misunderstand how pandemic control measures act on a pandemic that is showing initial exponential growth. Calling the lockdown a week earlier almost certainly would have halved first wave deaths and would have made the full lockdown shorter. First wave 'costs' would have reduced.

Reducing the peak, delaying growth and making the high infection level period shorter would have really helped: the NHS was having to change incredibly fast with inadequate PPE. It soon faced added pressure from infected staff: sadly many died, many more were off sick and more still had to self isolate. What the NHS needed most back then was time, staff and protective equipment.

As things were, the NHS limped through the first wave, with some terrible costs to staff. The whole point of the lockdown was ensuring the NHS didn't risk collapse: when risk of covid fatality would have increased somewhere up to ten times; plus many others would have died from unrelated serious illness, accidents etc., because the normal emergency systems would have been non-functioning.

Do you have any particular expertise or experience that would qualify you to lead a national pandemic response?

If not, I don’t think that “random person on the internet couldn’t do better” is the benchmark we should have been aiming for. 

That Mr Bates drama was incredible.  The Nation were stunned.  Just amazing all those lives could be needlessly destroyed like that.

Hundreds of NHS staff died, the big majority which would have been preventable from using good quality PPE.

Here is an analysis from April 2020:

https://www.hsj.co.uk/exclusive-deaths-of-nhs-staff-from-covid-19-analysed/...

...and there was a cover up of the deaths:

https://bylinetimes.com/2023/04/06/cover-up-allegations-as-most-nhs-trusts-...

Some of the actors were a bit robotic

Who had?

I thought my post might have been a refreshing change from all the random persons on the Internet who believe they could do everything better

Ironically positioning yourself as being able to do a better job of the inquiry and knowing better than all those actually involved who believe that things could have been done better. 

Since when is talking b*llocks refreshing? The way the first wave played out could have been handled way better and the best evidenced assertions made on UKC back then ( by UKC scientific trained 'randoms') are already confirmed in the covid inquiry. The mistakes made in or before the first wave range from terrible and obvious to unclear and forgivable (given the unknowns at the time in February and early March). The terrible government decisions in the second wave were way less forgivable.

Where did I say any of that except in your imagination?

In terms of talking bollocks on this forum, I have a long way to go to catch up with you.

Feel free to point out any factual errors in anything I say and I will (and do) apologise. Keeping up with covid analysis became a hobby of mine as I retired as it hit and I knew some key players in public roles relating to the pandemic.

Some of the people you seem to be criticising (with no evidence more than a general ad hom position) I thought were as good as anyone anywhere. Wintertree in particular spotted the odd trend before anyone else I saw online.

You said that doing things differently would have made no difference. A long line of people giving evidence to the inquiry seem to think otherwise.

Calling the lockdown a week earlier almost certainly would have halved first wave deaths

Really?  Based on what?

GCSE maths?

Of course, making the call at precisely the right time arguably depends on hindsight. 

Based on plain epidemiological maths and a very conservative estimate of case growth and covid deaths at the time, if doubling in a week (from March 22nd to 29th UK covid deaths did much more than double, they increased 5 times in that week). In a hypothetical situation where the effective R number (the Reproduction rate: average extra infections per infected person) dropped below 1 in the same way, starting a week earlier, based on the same restrictions, this would have decelerated the rate of spread in roughly the same way, so the peak height would have been reduced roughly to half and the time before infection levels were OK to ease restrictions would have been shorter. In reality the extra breathing space for hospitals might have led to better outcomes.

To be fair it was a bit more complicated than that. SAGE were modelling on flu type spread initially and also they were really concerned about population compliance to lockdowns (which turned out much better than they predicted). Still, enough important people were pressing at the time that Boris could have called the lockdown a week earlier.

plain epidemiological maths

Plain? 

Even then, you would need to demonstrate that lockdowns work.

As someone said above it's really only GCSE maths. R defines how fast the exponential growth increases when bigger than 1 and how fast an exponential decreases if R ( under resistrictions) is less than 1.

As for lockdowns working: compliance was pretty impressive from all the data (surveys, road stats etc). I really don't think a week would have made any significant difference to that and the bonus would have been a shorter lockdown period.

Just finished watching the series. Can't remember the last time I was brought to tears by a TV programme.

Pretty accurate on the early stage impact on home life and especially accurate depicting the moral injury incurred by clinicians placed in an impossible situation. Also good on the harm conspiracy nutters caused to people just trying to do their jobs. Can't tell you how draining it was to spend a block of shifts treating seriously ill covid patients and comforting distraught relatives only to nip out for a quiet pint and overhear some ignorant loudmouth regaling their pub cronies with how it was all a hoax. 

Oh, and then there was the 5% real terms pay cut to put a capper on it.

Blinding tears, and blind fury, yes.

Ditto for me. The third episode was the hardest, as the idiocy from government, and shit moderation on social media lies, that caused so much pain were both so needless.

I watched the first 15 minutes or so. I found a knot of anger and rage forming within me from knowing what we all know now and could see happening at the time. Like a lot of workers I was unable to stay away on furlough and can remember the fear and worry very clearly. I couldn't take any more so for the sake of my own equilibrium I can't watch it just now or for some time to come.

A Rachel Clark opinion piece:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/22/tv-breathtaking-covid...

How would you do that then? Try not locking down during the next pandemic and seeing how it goes?

I recently watched this.Superb performances and  no  soap opera for sure ! Apart from the corruption being out of the picture it covers the most important issues I think from the broken NHS carrying on working against the odds to individual stories of staff and patients.It also points to the conspiracy theory intelligentsia who hopefully  have had a great reset in their thinking in recent years as the truth has sunk in (maybe not ). 

yes pretty accurate in the initial stages of the pandemic, what really got my goat, and still does was the clapping for the NHS, a cynical attempt to make the public feel better about themselves when all they had to do was stay out of the supermarket. None of them did of course, all the elderly folk went to the co op for a chat. People just weren't taking it seriously unless their family was directly affected. 

Those of us working for the NHS didn't have a choice but go to work. Others just whined on about the risk. What are NHS staff left with? a well below inflation pay rise, worsening working conditions and the memory of a traumatic period in their life that could have been very different 

Is that really true? I got the impression the level of compliance was pretty extraordinary. 

Agree, generally I think compliance levels were greater than the government projected, and that played into the late imposition of lockdowns as there was a perception that the public would not tolerate lockdowns for long.

yes you're probably right about compliance but I just remember going to the supermarket looking for non existent bog roll and seeing loads of people who obviously knew each other chatting in the aisles, when everyone knew mixing indoors was the main risk factor. People may have been compliant with the rules but not with the risk.

Not in the slightest. They, and their deluded followers, are still desperately pedalling their narrative across social media. They're even having a festival of stupidity:

https://cumbriacrack.com/2024/02/20/conspiracy-theories-to-headline-new-cum...

Although Distington is hardly Glastonbury.

I've just watched the first episode and am going to leave it there til I get back from the holiday I'm about to go on. I will watch the rest, but I know I'm going to be really upset when I do.

One of the things it's reminded me of really sharply is the weekly update from our vice chancellor. They ended with the names of the colleagues - mostly in our clinical schools - who had died that week. 

I'm also remembering the callouts we did during Covid, especially the first one, when we were just establishing our Covid protocols, to a cas with Covid markers, and it was unnerving. Then using ethanol provided by the local distillery to clean kit after using it, having to wear full waterproofs and our helicopter goggles for callouts however hot the weather, de-kitting straight into bin bags and then emptying the bags straight into the washing machine when we got home, trying to breathe through a sweat-soaked IIR face-mask when manhandling laden stretchers.

It's hard to believe it was 4 years ago, there's a whole period of 12-18 months where the time remains very distorted for me. It was tough, but working in healthcare was unimaginably tougher. I am still humbled by everyone in healthcare's dedication and bravery.

My only hope there is they all take their meds as prescribed and they don't frighten the locals

Heartbreaking.

That tells me you don’t understand an exponential mechanic.

It was never primarily about saving lives from covid, it was about preventing the collapse of the NHS - which improves quality and duration of life for far more people than Covid took.  If the spread of Covid wasn’t controlled until a vaccine was produced, healthcare would have been collapsed and we’d have had mass burials of between half a million and a million people in the first six months.  The societal effects would have eclipsed anything we actually experienced, as awful as the reality was.

Bollox.  But it wasn’t about who was in charge, but about how poorly they engaged with experts and how poorly expert opinion was qualified at the time.

I partly agree, but there was also no shortage of lies (about what could realistically be delivered) when bidding for lucrative PPE and testing contracts.

The mathematics of infectious spread in the early stages, which is very close to an exponential mechanic.  This is textbook stuff in a whole bunch of fields.

We had hindsight from watching Italy, where the initial seeding events happened a few weeks earlier, and from the learnings from the first SARS outbreak.  

The only counter to that hindsight was an illogical exceptionalism about how the UK would be different to Italy.  

It turned out our trajectory was just like Italy’s despite well received claims we wouldn’t be like Italy - https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/we_are_not_going_to_follow_ital...

Stating that the early stages of infection spread is nearly exponential does not show that locking down a week earlier would halve the first wave deaths.

I understand the exponential function perfectly well. But, it takes more than an understanding of GCSE maths to tackle a pandemic. Ironically, the European country that seemed to do best was Sweden, which resisted lockdowns. I can't explain that. And, if you are honest, nor can you.

Also, the lockdowns were a terrible price to pay. That's why all governments hesitated. All our freedoms, our whole way of life. Not to mention  the long term physical and psychological damage of prolonged lockdowns.

What does your textbook say about the consequences of prolonged lockdowns? 

‘course you can’t.  A lot of people can and have and I expect you refused to listen.  In a nutshell, the stringency of their control measures was high, and was achieved with less government intervention because they had better buy in from the population.

It obviously doesn’t.  What I say is that the consequences unrelated to controlling Covid were bad in many ways, yet they were far less awful than the alternatives.

The irony being those complaining about the consequences of lockdown now tend to be those who were vocal against more stringent measures earlier on, measures which if taken could have seen us avoid near catastrophic overload of the NHS and could have reduced the severity of the measures eventually used.

We could have been more like Swede, but we have people who  didn’t understand the situation making a lot of noise and telling worried people what they wanted to hear.  We still do.

Whilst I am all for your views I do question the earlier lockdown based on personal experience. 
 

I was very lucky I had the last operation in an operating hospital theatre prior to the complete  lockdown. I n talking to the consultant he explained that the theatre was being shut down and realigned to focus on the pandemic. All protocols were being rewritten and so on.  

he explained the hospital needed time to do the switch round effectively. 
 

it will be interesting to see if the enquiry focuses on this part of the process in that they had a week or so to prepare for the tsunami to follow. 
 

The operation was cancer related. If they had done lockdown a week earlier I dread to think what would have happened in my case. 

I think you’ve got that backwards.

If we’d locked down sooner, there would have been more time before hospitals were completely overloaded.  The need for shutting down other hospital work wasn’t because of lockdown, but because they knew they were going to get clobbered by covid patients as they could see the exponential growth and that early measures were insufficient, and they were preparing for a near catastrophe.  More stringent early measures would have allowed more non covid work to go ahead as there would have been more time to prepare for a smaller tidal wave of covid patients.

To be fair it doesn't spell it out so I'll just add a bit more by way of explanation.

At the time the rate of infection was doubling each week. Each week the number of covid cases in the UK was 2x the number of cases of the previous week. A lockdown 1 week earlier would have prevented 1 doubling of the number of covid cases and therefore would have halved the first wave deaths.

An earlier lockdown would have led to a lower peak so it would also be quicker to drop back to safer background levels of infection so an earlier lockdown would have been a shorter lockdown as well.

I am not sure that was the case.  When visiting 2 hospitals  prior to that you could see how they were not preparing for covid. Whereas in that short time period the difference in urgency was striking.  Only a sample from 2 hospitals I visited in that short timescale before lockdown. 

maybe if there had been better contingency planning then they might have needed less time to prepare.  But I came away and have always considered that U.K. Gov and the State apparatus needed time to start the lockdown ball rolling. That week or so was needed to do that. 
 

anyway I will leave it at that.  

And other benefits...slowing the rise would have allowed more learning about how to diagnose and treat cases optimally. It would slow emergengence of variants.

(Our - little commented - failure to limit international travel also meant UK had a multifocal outbreak limiting transfer of resources).

(And Sweden is a difficult comparator, which had tighter restrictions than thought  and has many confounding differences).

(UK was slow to grasp the significance of aerosol vs droplet spead and all the issues related to that).

The other factor was economic. In some ways it's a miracle that the lockdowns didn't completely trash the UK economy. That was a major disincentive to lockdowns. It wasn't clear at all that lockdowns were the lesser of two evils. 

It was a giant leap into the unknown.

I don't buy this naive idea that lockdowns were a no-brainer. It was a truly monumental step effectively to put the entire population under limited house arrest. 

I generally supported the lockdowns, but it seemed like a massive risk whatever we did.

The saviour was the vaccine.  We couldn't stay locked down forever.

That’s because of the Covid loan schemes etc( despite the fraud). The treasury did get its act together and that part saved a lot of companies. Although there were still a lot who in the end did not need the cash 

The City coped very well as they had tried and Had tested systems in place to deal with it. Back of England deserve credit for forcing financial institutions to stress test those systems .Unlike some sectors. Power, water etc and food distribution worked fine. Critical industries carried on. 

I think I can (partly) answer this one, neilh, as my dad had to be taken in for a tumour removing in April 2020 - so, at the height of lockdown.

In many ways the treatment he got was far superior to the norm. We were sent in to the local hospital by his GP, and he was taken in via A&E for assessment. I wasn't allowed into the building. I won't forget standing outside, watching him through the window as he sat alone in the middle of the empty A&E waiting room. He was out again in an hour, with instructions that he would need surgery that day, and we were sent to a larger city-centre hospital.

I was allowed in with him there, and the corridors were sparse and eerie. There was a sense of suppressed chaos. He'd been given precise instructions about where we had to go in the hospital but, after asking for directions from reception, we were misdirected onto a 'hot' ward. It had the red signs on the door but at that point in the pandemic we didn't know what they meant. We got two steps past the door before nurses were running towards us in full PPE shouting at us to get out. The realization of what we'd done left a dull fear in my gut that took weeks to subside.

We eventually found where we were supposed to be and I was held at the ward counter, then asked to wait outside the hospital. There was one other patient on the whole ward, also awaiting surgery. I sat on the grass outside for three hours, then was called to come and fetch him and take him home. He was discharged with an open wound, which of course needed packing and dressing for the next few weeks, but district nurses came out to see him regularly at home. I suppose there were risks to such a rapid discharge that were outweighed by the risk of infection; fortunately he did well and is still fine today.

I know this is just one story. I know there were times in those first two years when people didn't get the care they needed and died, and that's still the case now. But in my dad's case at least, the NHS managed to remain operational for someone in extreme need even through the chaos.

Without lockdown, the economy would have been destroyed. This myth that the economy would have carried on glibly whilst the whole of society collapsed as we 'let it rip' is just plain idiotic. Infection would have reached such a state that people would have 'locked down' of their own accord, in fear of going out. There would have been so many people ill and dying that entire economic sectors, including critical infrastructure, would have ceased to function.

Lombardy showed us just how bad covid was. Lockdown wasn't a 'leap in the dark'; the consequences of not doing so were plainly obvious. Lockdowns saved the economy.

would that be a good venue for a bit of tomato and shit throwing?

The only people I ever saw suggesting this would happen were those arguing against control measures,  Nobody in government nor healthcare suggested a “forever lockdown”.  It was used very much as a last resort at the point healthcare wouldn’t cope with any more growth.  Healthcare preserves far more years of life not related to Covid and that would have been lost, with the loss of healthcare staff to death and burnout being far worse without lockdown, meaning the scale back of healthcare would have been deeper and lasted longer.

You said the vaccine was the savour, but control measures were significantly reduced a few months after they came in, then waxed and waned with the seasons and variants.  Lockdowns later on in 2020 weren’t as severe or as well adhered to as the first one, and again nobody suggested making them indefinite.  

The crying shame for me is how long it took the system to realise the bleeding obvious that affordable HEPA air filtration designed for NBC threats could dramatically contribute to reducing the stringency of control measures, and the power of electrostatic masks.

Even before the vaccines we weren’t looking at being “locked down forever”.

For sure, the vaccines made a massive difference for the better, but if they hadn’t come along, we would have found other ways to remove the need for lockdowns; a lot of parts for that was coming together by late 2022 in the literature.

A forever lockdown only ever existed in the minds of those sowing FUD against control measures as far as I can tell, and those drawn in by them.

As captain paranoia says, people would have locked down in response to rising death rates and fear of infection if we’d let it rip.  But, as with past plagues it would be a chaotic and fear driven event far less manageable economically and in human terms than a planned and supported lockdown.  

To flip your very valid comment…

Just imagine if the “let it rip” brigade had had their way; odds are something like the Kent variant would have emerged in the first few months, and we wouldn’t have had the clinical learnings about things like dexamethasone.  That scenario would be what, 1.2 m dead in 2020 alone?

Only it wouldn’t because the sheer nationwide panic would have put us on another path, and one that’s not so easy to ballpark estimate but that would have been very dark indeed.

And still does in the minds of those pushing '15 minute city' conspiracy theories, and those drawn in by them.  (Aided and abetted by ludicrous politicians hoping to pick up a few votes by promising to oppose these imaginary policies that they know damned well have never actually existed or been proposed by anyone.)

While I broadly agree with this, I think it highlights the difference in our thinking. For you, everything that turned out to be true was obvious and inevitable. The economy didn't collapse under lockdown, so that could never have been a risk! Lombardy turned out to be a good model for what followed, so that was also inevitable. 

The idea that lockdown wasn't a leap in the dark shows that your thinking is almost 100% based on hindsight.

And of course a vaccine would be developed quickly. There was never any doubt about that either. 

Perhaps not forever, but for years. There was no way out until either there was a vaccine and/or COVID mutated into something less deadly. I don't know how else you think the lockdowns would have ended.

I wish you had posted on here how and when it was all going to end! The truth is that there was no end in sight.

And, even with the vaccine, there was huge uncertainty about when it was safe to emerge from our bunkers.

Lockdown was ordered by that most sceptical of UK PM's based on huge efforts from an army of clever people feeding into SAGE. His government put in place numerous incredibly expensive measures to stop economic collapse in lockdown. Just over half those employed still went to work. At the point lockdown was ordered the PM knew hospitals would really be on the edge of coping at the expected covid peak (and Lombardy just showed what that meant... the regional NHS would have effectively been non functional for covid care and normal emergency care let alone scheduled non urgent work) and was probably regretting decisions he made and things he said a few weeks earlier.

Not knowing everything exactly is simply not the same as a shot in the dark. Exponential growth of such a serious virus just has to be stopped. Without lockdown parts of the NHS would have stopped functioning. On covid deaths, hospitals saved anywhere from 90% to 80% of those whom became seriously ill most of whom would have died if things became like Lombardy; plus anyone who had a heart attack or stroke or other serious life threatening illness requiring hospital care. People would be scared to go to work if that could be a death sentence. The economic impact of the order of upto half a million deaths and the fear and chaos attached to a failed NHS would have drawfed the costs our PM agreed.

Where were the westernised countries who didn't lock down? Sweden are often cited dishonestly but if you compare measures their lockdown severity index was almost identical to ours... they just let more people meet outside at low risk.

The first lockdown ended in but a few months.   There were further lockdowns, none as severe or respected as the first, and there were other control measures between the lockdowns.

You seem to be misremembering events severely.

I had plenty to say - about the role HEPA filtration could play, about understanding when periods of higher transmission were coming, about the efficacy of FFP3 masks as that data emerged. All the tools were there to manage a zero-vaccine scenario without recourse to stringent lockdowns.  No scenario I ever saw or lived through involved endless lockdown.  I don’t know where you’re getting that from.

Yes, some parts of the press and forums held on to the idea of stringent control measures long past the point that was the appetite way forwards.  I was quite vocal on here against that when the right time came.

Leap in the dark? The principle has been well established for hundreds of years... you might want to look up Eyam.

Eyam, of course! How silly of me.

The clapping, I am sure in one news clip.you can hear Johnson and Sunak saying to each other

"Keep this up and we won't have to pay them"

Hancock's badges, treat them like kids with a gold star.

This, the miners trike documentaries and Partygate have all be broadcast a little too early, they will be out of conversation come the GE sadly.

I distinctly remember being locked down for most of the winter of 2020-21. 

And, I certainly don't recall any hope of a return to normal life without the vaccine. In the summer of 2020, I was mentally prepared for 2-3 years of lockdowns.

And I don't recall any national optimism that it would all soon be over. Quite the reverse. I recall 2020 as a time of national despair. With no end in sight.

I also recall that the lockdowns in Scotland went on beyond those in England. 

But, my memory is a bit suspect these days, I do confess.

But didn't Scotland only have two lockdowns while England had an extra one in the autumn of 2020? I think the two in Scotland were more or less the same as the corresponding English ones.

Yes, after a long period of not being locked earlier on in the year.

Which shows your claim "We couldn't stay locked down forever" to be irrelevant as we lockdown was not permanent even in the first year.

Lockdown dates for the first yer of the pandemic for England [1]:

• 26th March to 23rd June
• 5th November to 2nd December
• 6th of January, relaxing progressively from 8th March. 

So, in the first year of the pandemic, we spent less than 50% of the time under lockdown conditions, and the later two were not as stringent as the first.

I don't know how one goes from less than half a year under lockdown to "We could't stay locked down forever".  There is no credible example I'm aware of that this was proposed by the government, rather the opposite that they were - repeatedly - willing to take the NHS to the brink in order to have as little lockdown as possible.

If we could manage to spend the first year 50% not locked down, with rising natural immunity concentrated in those most exposed to catching it and with increasing learnings over transmission and transmission control, there despair over the future became ever less grounded but the messaging from the media and the government was so poor, and the quantity of misinformation being pushed so large, I suspect that's caused a lot of warped perceptions.

I think it shoes the level of pessimism that was out there, and I think it was easy for people to listen to the noise being made by those opposing lockdown, who sought to paint it as an endless measure.  They were bad people who were kicking the population when they were down to try and meet certain extremest political goals, overtly funded by worse people in the USA and with clear links to those who funded and managed the campaigning for Brexit.  

[1] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-12/timel...

Edit: it would have been really shit if no vaccines had come along, and weakening seasonal lockdowns and other control measures would have likely persisted for more years - at least until 2024, but it would never have resembled being locked down “forever”.  The last pre-vaccine lockdown was pretty mild compared to the first.

Go back and read the threads. We're not talking hindsight here, but repeating what we said at the time. And what the carefully prepared pandemic response plans (which were torn up...) said should be done.

Because lockdown allowed the economy to continue, because it stopped society collapsing in a let it rip scenario. That is the risk you are ignoring. As I said, lockdown saved the economy, as well as saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

I think that we all look through the lens of our own perceptions and memories, and extrapolate from there - with variable results depending on our own viewpoints and personalities.  I can see (from one of the the few threads still accessible https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/rock_talk/is_climbing_banned-717196?v=1#x... ) that you were stuck in London without transport and presumably without much access to the outdoors and countryside?  I'm blessed to live in Sheffield with the edge of the Peak District a very short run away.  I can see from my exercise database (yes, really...) that I went for a run on 50% of the days in 2020, and that was me following the lockdown guidelines diligently.  I never - personally - felt a 'national despair'.

I don't know where you find your patience from, I really don't. 

Decades of having to deal with myself…

Thanks to our great "I shook everyone's hand" leader "saving Christmas"...

I stayed at home Christmas 2020.

You can't have it both ways. Either the plans were torn up or lockdowns were in the plans and implemented.

OK, so Boris Johnson's government saved the UK with its COVID response?

The response plans, developed from many 'war gaming' exercises, and in light of other disease outbreaks, were not followed until far too late. Ad hoc plans were dreamed up as the pandemic progressed. There are plans, and there are new plans; the two are not the same, as you seem to think. The provision of PPE was terrible; read Offwidth's post above, about how preparation exercises pointed out our PPE provision was inadequate, but this warning was ignored.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/culture_bunker/breathtaking-767731?v=1#x9...

I think I'd put that down to the scientific civil service managing to get the government to respond, too late, to the pandemic, and reluctantly implement measures, too late. They made far too many obvious errors; obvious at the time.

Paid furlough was a good decision. "Eat out to help out" was a stupid decision. "Saving Christmas" was a stupid decision.

You probably need to read the findings of the covid inquiry. Hopefully, we will all learn from this, but given the government ignored the previous lessons, I fear not.

No. They had plans, they had experts, they had credible expert advice available. 

No. A bunch of grinning buffoons, with Hancock and Johnson at the fore, decided to wing it. And they F**ked it. They self sabotaged what was a workable plan with a series of blindingly obvious blunders, all of which were well documented and lengthily discussed as they were happening. 

I know you've stated you may have memory issues. Any time spent in a coma?

Perhaps this a good point at which to draw a line under the debate. And end with that paragraph as a broad consensus on UKC of the response to the pandemic in the UK.

The only thing to add is the equally culpable Sturgeon and Drakeford, who blundered their way along in Scotland and Wales respectively.

Hardly - they weren’t having parties, handing out dodgy PPE contacts to their mates and telling lie after lie.  With the benefit of hindsight there will be things they wish they’d done better Im sure, but to equate the way  either Sturgeon or Drakeford conducted themselves during Covid with that bunch of shysters in Westminster is very unfair.

I agree but with the caveat that both Sturgeon and Drakeford politicised their actions. They very much played a "we care more than Boris" card as a political tool.

I think their actions were broadly right in doing this but I am unsure as to their motives.

My perception is that they really didn't. 

Obviously in announcing policies they had to explain why they were doing things the way they were, and why they thought they were doing the right thing.  And when there were significant differences to what was happening in England, it seemed to me that they went out of their way not to say that those differences were on account of the Westminster government being a bunch of grifters, shysters and halfwits.  (Even when that pretty clearly was the case.)

I don't think they really had any choice but to broadly follow the same approach as England, at least at first, since the Westminster government held the purse strings for furlough etc. It would have been a huge step to take a different approach from the beginning. Later on some deviation judged better was possible.

I agree entirely with this. There seems to me no reason to believe Sturgeon did not act in good faith in the interests of the people of Scotland throughout.

By the way, what did you think of Sturgeon's tears while giving evidence at the covid enquiry (I remember that you think if yourself as a bit of an expert on crocodile tears from a discussion on here about Hancock's tears on TV when vaccines became available)? I have a Telegraph reading friend who swallows their whole line about Sturgeon being the devil incarnate and talks about her crocodile tears as a matter of fact.

"They very much played a "we care more than Boris" card as a political tool."

I would, with the caveat that you actually did care more than Johnson, call that your duty. 

No, as I tried to explain at some length on that thread I don't think I'm an expert at all, just fairly average neurotypical normal as far as 'reading' the emotional states of others goes.  Which I guess is claiming some degree of expertise, because most humans are very good at that so the bar for what's 'average' is set quite high.  But a significant minority are rubbish at it, and I think you're fairly obviously one of those.

I tried to make an analogy to colour-blindness in that thread about Matt Hancock - it was like you were red/green colour-blind but insisting that your vision is completely normal and flatly refusing to believe that anyone else can see the difference that you can't.

Hancock's fakery in that GMB interview is as clear as a red flag -vs- a green one: completely obvious but extraordinarily difficult to explain why it's obvious to one who can't see it.

This on the other hand..
https://youtu.be/zQnyN2fQrUk?feature=shared

Looks genuine to me.  Of course I can't be certain that she's not acting but if she is she's very good at it.

Ok, fair enough, not an expert, just an arrogant overopinionated arse who would rather resort to personally offensive attacks on flimsy evidence about people you don't even know rather than enter into adult discussion on debatable points of honest disagreement. I shouldn't have bothered.

In the interests of science you should show this thread to several people who know you well and - on the promise of absolutely no reaction from you either way - ask them if there is any truth in Monsieur Soup’s description. 

No need. Deepsoup, as he repeatedly demonstrates in his interactions with me on here, is just a nasty gaslighting small-time internet bully beneath my contempt. 

Oh dear. I thought from your asking the question that perhaps you were ready to deal with my answer but obviously not.  It was your choice to raise this again, but I wouldn't have responded if I'd realised this would still be so triggering for you.  Perhaps you should try to have a think about why that is the case.

It seems rather pointless saying it as you won't believe me, but nothing I wrote there was intended as an attack or insult of any kind.  It's just the simple truth as I see it on the 'evidence' of our previous discussions, which have been more than enough for us to get to know each other somewhat.

Imagine for a moment that The Soup was correct. Why would that be so bad? It’s not a personal failing, just a quirk of psychology. Some people are demonstrably bad at reading others’ emotions, wouldn’t it be useful to know if you were one of them? It sounds like it would  save a lot of unnecessary faff and misunderstanding. 

Also whilst I get that it’s upset you, I can’t see how any of the descriptions you’ve given the post match what was actually written. There certainly wasn’t any gaslighting, and it didn’t strike me as a nasty post. 

Indeed, I am happy that they did care more, just noting that they took political mileage from doing so.

I think you might see it in a more similar light to me if you knew the full history of my interactions with deepsoup on here. Never accepting that I might simply have an defensible take different to his own and preferring to make it about me rather than the issue being discussed. 

The truth behind our disagreements is probably that you tend to see the worst in people whereas I perhaps tend, sometimes possibly too far, the other way. But the problem is that you seem incapable of then sensibly discussing our differences without getting personal about it. Our last spat in the Rubiales gaslighting thread that you started was a perfect example; you basically simply said I was wrong and perhaps ought to take a break from the internet for my own good. Actually rather hilarious in a thread which purported to be about condemning gaslighting. Made you look a terrible fool (especially when the only woman to openly post then pretty much shared my take on it).

Bit ironic given the turn this thread has taken since I unwisely chose to give you an honest answer to a question you needn't have asked.

I don't remember the details of the first bit, but if I said you were wrong no doubt that will have been because you were wrong.  Ha ha.  (Here's a smilie if it helps at all: )  Good lord - if that's an unforgivable personal insult on UKC now we're all in trouble.

The second bit I do remember - I suggested that perhaps you ought to take a break (from arguing about things on UKC, specifically, rather than the internet in general) because you seemed to be taking things way too personally and getting excessively upset.  As indeed you are now.  Again, a remark never intended as an attack or insult of any kind.

But you also chose to go on about me being a neuroatypical outlier.

It was a matter of opinion or of probabilities, not a matter of known fact. That is my whole point; you assume your opinions are facts.

Ok, it may have been your idiot sidekick Thunderclap (or whatever he calls himself) who suggested the whole internet. But no, it was not me who made it personal; you attacked me for not agreeing with your opinion - that was what I took personally (because it was).

I think my conclusion is that, in both the cases of Hancock and Sturgeon, those who "wanted" their tears to be fake tended to conclude that they were. Given that, whatever faults they may or may not have, their very real responsibilities gave them both very good reason to be feeling emotional on those occasions and so I am happy to give them both the benefit of the doubt.

And as for whether I am incapable of reading peoples' emotions, I think if this were the acute problem you seem to think it is, I'm sure it would have come up in my sixty years of real life and I really don't need to worry about some anonymous person diagnosing it on the basis of a few disagreements on the internet.

I'll leave it there and I think it probably best that I avoid interacting with you on here again.

youtube.com/watch?v=suwk1bNLqO8&

Suit yourself, no skin off my nose either way.