UKC

I quote CB294 

"How can you be apolitical about an intrinsically political issue?"

I would retort "how can you be political about an intrinsically apolitical issue". 

In times of crisis the issue to be dealt with is the crisis itself, not whether left or right wing government is dealing with it. When the government gets it right it's because they are people dealing with a crisis, when they get it wrong it's because they are a right wing government. That's deluded. 

I have been amazed about how so many people, from people on this forum to other social media, to the journalists, who have turned covid into a tory government bashing. They can't hide their dislike of a tory government and their cognitive bias that all the errors made a because the government is a tory one. Quite frankly they are absurd.

Have you considered that mistakes may be made because the government are people. That they have complex decisions to make with difficult trade offs. That you can critique the governments actions without making it into a political points scoring contest, that errors have nothing to do with whether it is a right wing or a left wing government. 

The political bias is very strong in this one, unhelpful at best and as I said, deluded at worst.

Ironically the only reasonable criticism has come from the opposition, Corbyn gave his usual old mans waffle but Keir Starmer seems quite reasonable, looking for constructive ways forward.

Do grow up. 

Of course its political. In fact it's hard to imagine anything more political. It touches everything and everyone and there are myriad ways of balancing social, medical, economic, cultural and personal effects. 

I think you are misinterpreting how most people feel. This is not about left or right but about good or bad government (and that means: competence or incompetence, foresight or stupidity, planning or negligence, responsibility or complacence, organisation or disorganisation, transparency or obfuscation, honesty or dishonesty.)

That is "almost" exactly the point I am making, but also misses it entirely. As I said, it seems that whenever there is criticism it must be because they are a Tory government, and whenever they do anything right it must be because the are the government (no Tory prefix). 

When dealing with an issue such as this political point scoring is pathetic and entirely unhelpful. 

But if there are any problems from the past, then both Tory and Labour governments are guilty of mal-managing the NHS, partly by swapping and changing the approach, partly by not spending the money required, partly by letting the GP establishment ditch their on-call requirements, without much financial loss, partly by not getting the computer systems right for transferring information, and wasting money there, etc, etc. So the politics are in good part, in the past set-up from both sides. 

Sorry but anyone who thinks this isnt a political issue is beyond deluded. However I suspect this difference is explained by your seeming impression, from that strawman, that "politics" is supporting/opposing the government based purely on whether it matches your political bias.

It isnt.

Have you thought that you might have some cognitive bias yourself and that declaring this is beyond politics is one of way you are trying to deal with it?

I sort of agree but don't think on call GPs have much relevance here, and after 10 years of Tory(ish) government I think they need to accept accountability. I agree with the OP some of the criticism is unreasonable but that doesn't make this an apolitical matter 

What have they done right, in your view?

Actually, I couldn't care a damn whether it's a Labour or Tory government right now. Much as I detested her policies, I would have preferred Mrs. Thatcher handling this many times more than our present useless incumbent. She at least knew what a PM's job was, and would have got a total grip on the situation. She would also probably have been addressing the nation almost every day to keep us up to speed. Starmer would also be about 1000 times better. Indeed, almost anybody, in almost any street in Britain could, I think, do a better job than Johnson. It's almost impossible to imagine anyone doing a worse job.

I entirely disagree. In fact you are so wide of the mark and have missed my point so entirely that  I think we'll just go round in circles so we will have to agree to disagree. 

You disagree thst you have biases!? 

As a few examples from both sides:

I think holding off lockdown was the right thing to do.

I think they have communicated clearly with the public.

I think they have done well to increase the capacity of the NHS and have avoided overwhelming the NHS's capacity.

I think they are doing well being cautious lifting the lockdown.

I think their financial aid response has been huge.

-

I think they could do better on 

Providing PPE

Testing

Disbursement of the financial aid

Of course it's political! 

Apart from some comments that austerity set us up for a worse fall, I haven’t seen much “Tory bashing”, and the austerity comments are hard to argue with.

Don't suppose you’d like to provide some references to posts on this forum that are “Tory bashing”?  You say “so many people” on this forum are Tory bashing so it should be trivial to substantiate your position with a whole bunch of thread references.  Or are you setting up another straw man?

I would note that criticising the government is not Tory bashing unless their political identity is key to the criticism.  There are plenty of apolitical grounds to criticise the current government on and they largely result from the weak state of cabinet resulting from ideological purges, so a problem equally applicable I think if Corbyn had got in.

Also, of course the crisis is political.  A trade off has to be drawn between life and economy.  How anyone can think that’s an apolitical decision is beyond me.

Fine, but that was a political decision - balance of medical, economic and social priorities 

Again political - economy vs medical priorities 

It has but again political - see other approaches taken elsewhere with different priorities. 

Etc. It's all political. 

Do you believe a group of twenty to thirty ministers from one political group would make the same decisions as the same number from another?

In the same order? With the same priority? With the same group of scientists? With the same backing from the media?

With all due respect, the idea that the response to any crisis is not political, is quite frankly wrong.

For an extreme case look what is happening in Brazil. 

It's definitely political. The austerity policy was at least partly due to Conservative ideology this almost certainly contributed to the current lack of PPE, being focused on Brexit didn't help either. Holding off lockdown was the worst thing Johnson has done:  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-cities-flattened-cur...

"By comparing fatality rates, timing, and public health interventions, they found death rates were around 50 percent lower in cities that implemented preventative measures early on, versus those that did so late or not at all."

Nope. You don't really get it. You can't separate governing from politics. 

If senior management in a large company had to make decisions you wouldn't call it 'political'. (well, 'you' might, but it wouldn't be.) you would call it managing - or maybe even leading if you were being magnanimous. 

And of course it's political, in so far as innumerable political decisions and choices have to be made, government aid provided, priorities weighed up, etc, etc. It can't just be left to the services.

Ppe, is it even a government or an MPs job? There are some seriously well paid nhs trust ceos and managers, they must be responsible for both equipment and duty of care of their staff? 

Politics isnt what you think it is - it is not superficial tribal allegiances to parties. It is setting the direction for managing a country (or council etc.), balancing competing demands, interests and priorities. Covid is very political. 

This crisis involves government, the state and the exercise of power, therefore it’s political. You would have a better case if you said ‘party-political’.

And like politics we are all going to go round in circles, entrenched in our views, no sands shifting.

I stand by my position that crisis response is not a left/right political issue. 

That is fair, and in actuality what I meant. Apologies for the short hand.When I mean political I mean party political. Hence my separation of governance from 'political'.

Yes.  Back in 2016 it was decided that the existing approach of having each individual body ordering own goods was inefficent so for England the purchase and distribution was centralised to a company under the control of the health secretary.

You haven’t defined what you mean by the term ‘political’. Politics can refer to the resolution of conflict within a society/ system brought about by competing/ conflictual ideology and interest groups. The response to any issue/ crisis is, therefore, by definition political - making choices and shaping policy based on judgement of what is the best course of action to manage this conflict. Examples are provided above - holding off lockdown or instigating a less draconian lockdown = political (compare to China for example), providing economic security to 80% of wages = political (why not 100% - judgement this would be fiscally imprudent, ergo balancing short term need with long term finance) etc. Your argument that this is an objective crisis with an apolitical solution is not persuasive. It is in the nature of the system and society to hold those in government to account. The government is conservative so the criticism is levelled at the conservative government, could you be more specific what critiques you find particularly unfair and why this is ‘political point scoring’ rather than just legitimate criticism?

My issues with them have nothing to do with right wing or left wing politics.  Indeed, I can't think of how the governing party's political leaning would affect how they ought to react.

It's their competence I rate poorly.  Like you, I think they have done pretty well on some issues (e.g. Nightingale hospitals & NHS capacity), adequately on others (e.g. communication) and there are points on which, in my view, their performance has been poor.  Their delay in starting the lockdown is the most important one as it has cost many extra lives and has extended the lockdown period.

None of these points are political.  I don't think they're making errors because they happen to be members of the tory party.  We'll never know what a Corbyn government would have done but, had they been failing in the most basic duty of a government i.e. to protect their people, I think there would be some pretty sharp criticism of them too.

So far this government has got off with pretty light criticism in my view.

Another example of politics entering this is similarly the role of the Federal Government versus the states in the US.  It is a deliberately political act to absolve the Federal governemt of it's tradtitional roles, resulting in a large degree inefficiency as states are forced to compete and set their own policy.

So while (OP) this isn't directly political, and the differences between parties is small, the government is being judged on competence, efficiency and it's record on the NHS.  Given that this government has form for being lightweight and good at bluster, bad on details , politics inevitably must creep in .

I'd agree what is it was missing saying all trusts should have a given volume of ppe in reserve. Say enough for every person for 1 or 2 months for example. A buffer.

The failing was not securing much more in January and February. 

I still think trust management is very quiet on this matter. Keeping their heads below the parapet.

Governmental response to national crisis is informed by the political structures and ethos inherent in the decisions made and the mechanisms of power in place. Just compare the response and debate around CV19 in China Vs the USA.

How can command decisions made within political institutions by career politicians be anything other than political? 

'I stand by my position that crisis response is not a left/right political issue. ' Who has said that it was? Can you point to a post that says 'this has been handled badly because we have a Tory government?'

FWIW I am sure that if Corbyn had been in charge (not that that was ever going to happen) we'd be in an even worse place by now.

No reply to my earlier request for this despite claims there are “lots” of forum posts doing so.  Without some evidence of this, the only way I can interpret the original post is that the poster has been interpreting lots of criticism of the government as party political criticism rather than criticism of their actions and inactions.  Which is ironic because if so, they are politicising things far more than others.

So how should they have interacted with Supply Chain Coordination Limited?

It would have been nice to be invited to a thread that is started by quoting me, but here goes:

You ask for the crisis to be "dealt with". For this, you must first decide what to try (no template available), and must weigh different the consequences of different choices against each others: Economy vs. civil liberties vs. cost vs. deaths....

This weighing IS politics in its purest kind, and will of course be influenced by your general, party political outlook.

Nevertheless, there are some aspects of this crisis that make a neoliberal or libertarian approach generally less suited for dealing with it: Markets did not respond well in a situation that would have required long term preparation (which was deliberately cut for short term gains, a political choice), dicatorships have it easier to enforce lockdowns and track people, etc.

Chuck in a dose of religion, and as a consequence, countries like Brazil, the UK or the US are doing worse than, say South Korea (with its tight social control) or Germany (where the local flavour of capitalism has a generally larger collective aspect).

If you were consequent, you would have to argue that we should follow e.g. the Chinese model of state organization (not politics, as you have declared that word taboo), because it is clearly superior in "dealing with" the pandemic.

I very much prefer living in a continental Euro democracy, even if this means that we have to argue about every step and no government gets a free pass.

So yes, the Tories f*cked up in part because they are human (if particularly mendacious ones: EU procurement emails, PPE from Turkey...), but also because of their underlying ideology (who needs experts, so forget what they recommend as pandemic preparations) and they need to be held to account.

In fact, the state government in Bavaria, who are rather more conservative than Merkel's CDU, took the lead here in Germany in tackling the corona crisis. I have no problem acknowledging this, even though I have never and will never vote for them.

CB

Corbyn...

I think that's something that, incredibly, we can all agree on. 

Absolutely.  The shitshow here isn't the government performance, no matter how lacking it may have been.  It's people allowing petty politics partisanship to so heavily play into their thinking in a time of crisis.  People haven't moved out of Brexit mode and the press hasn't moved out of sensationalism mode.  And like Brexit, I can see a backlash brewing...problem is, people are so stuck in their own media echo-chambers they are unaware how their actions are being perceived.

However, given the unprecedented position the world is in, Boris may have done well to bring Starmer in to the cabinet.  If nothing else it would have helped quell the idea that everything that goes wrong is the result of some Tory hatred of people, while forcing the other side to also take some responsibility for resolving the crisis.

If it's any consolation I agree with you. Like many people I know and talk to we think the government is doing a reasonable job, the government includes the behind the scenes civil servants and health advisers that are probably the main drivers of policy. Politicians deliver the advice, some better than others, they are humans.

From the very start we have to accept there will be mistakes from all countries including UK, that is the nature of fighting a completely new foe, we don't know the best methods until we look back from a year in the future. 

So I think I am giving this forum a rest for a while, it was bad enough during brexit but the continuing daily negativity on covid is wearing me down. So I'm off to have a dose of disinfectant and I might see you again in the future.

The fundamental question near the start of the outbreak was whether to lockdown soon, prioritising looking after vulnerable people by severely limiting the virus spread but with obvious and severe economic drawbacks, or to prioritise economic activity by avoiding lockdown as much as possible, accepting an inevitable increase in cases and deaths.

There is absolutely no way that that wasn't a political decision, and most people's expectations I think would be that those from different points on the left-right ideological spectrum would prioritise differently, making it an ideologically driven political decision.

As it turns out, the poor decisions made at the time and subsequent mismanagement may actually have left the UK facing the worst of both eventualities.

Have to work now so hence not so active on the thread.

I think the government is doing a reasonable job.

I see a lot of criticism coming from people who clearly think we should be following a more 'left wing' approach to dealing with the issue. (as CB294 mentioned, thanks ).

I regard this criticism as political (or party political to be more precise), or ideologically political to use another term, and entirely unhelpful. 

This isn't a time to silo into ideology. Criticism of the government shouldn't be based around things that are clearly idealogical issues. (at the moment - post event the usual political mud slinging in both directions can begin again.)

when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.

Quote ends.

Is that politicised or informed by medicine and science?

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-20...

Is criticism for failure to deliver on promises for practicalities such  ventilators, testing and PPE too political?

I haven't said that I think there should be no criticism. 

It needs to be balanced though in a constructive manner. The government shouldn't promise what it can't deliver. People also need to understand, for example, there are significant supply chain difficulties that aren't easily overcome. 

It's become political on UKC because UKC has become more and more politically left to the point that it is now essentially an echo chamber.

If that were true, everyone would essentially agree about what to do. This clearly isn't the case! 

I think perhaps, if you were to ask someone right of centre - such as myself - they wouldn't agree with you.

Err...there you go. 

And shouldn't our elected government understand even more that there are significant supply chain difficulties that aren't easily overcome? Isn't that the whole point of the stockpiling part of disaster planning? 

Constructive is good but balance? Are they in positions of responsibility or are they whinging snowflakes in need of cuddles?

The point where it crosses beyond belief is that they had done planning, were meant to have a stockpile and had months in which h to use our knowledge of what was happening and of the supply chain scaling problems.  We knew exactly what to do.  We didn’t do it.

I think the “balance” is a neutral look at how the UK is doing compared to other developed nations, small and large.  We’re certainly a standout nation in terms of that analysis...

Okay, I'll bite. This is an example of what I mean both in terms of constructive criticism, and not politicising the issue.

Unconstructive/political criticism - Was it the Tories policies of the past 2/5/10/whatever years that has lead to perceived x/y/z problem in this crisis and why haven't you done anything about it. 

(the answer is in the question, because the policy is in the past and the crisis is now) 

Constructive criticism - why haven't we got enough PPE coming through the supply chain and what are we going to do about it.

Whether we like it or not every political decision has led us to this point including austerity, privatisation and a country so obsessed with Brexit (on both sides) that other important things have fallen by the wayside.

I hope that out of this comes a consensus that a well funded health service is essential but I'm not hopeful.

As you might have gathered I don't really care what other nations are doing.

Hey, I commended the second most right wing state government in Germany for their efforts!

And of course, ideology does play a role in shaping concrete decisions (don't tell me you believe the "missed email" narrative on the EU procurement initiative).

To avoid the Tory example for a change, the absolute failure of the Brazilian response to the CV crisis is ENTIRELY due to ideological constraints that do not allow the Bolsonaro government to undertake the steps that would from a nonpolitical/scientific POV be better suited to deal with the pandemic (as is consensus almost everwhere else, except maybe the Trumpist heartlands of the US), else they lose their raison d'etre.

Nevertheless I think that this crisis as such has specific properties that favour "lefty" state responses over "right wing" or market responses and give them a better chance of succeeding. In practise, even right wing governments try to spend their way out of the crisis in true lefty style, dumping all they thought holy beforehand. Seems there is a magic money tree after all, so it is only fair enough to ask where they hid it beforehand.

I am sure that one could construct other circumstances, where a more free market response to a crisis may be more successful. For instance, I would have preferred more banks to go bust back in 2008 rather than socializing the debt.

CB

It certainly makes it easier for you to claim our government are on the whole doing a good job when you choose to ignore that we are now one of the three worst affected nations (with more than a tiny population) on the planet, despite our luck early on in terms of when it took hold locally.  You’ve previously used rather Ill defined claims like “genetics” to explain why the UK should be considered in isolation.  I’m not aware of any great outpouring of medical evidence to support that.

It’s very hard for me to find a way of looking at your view other than “wilful ignorance”.   

I see you’ve not brought any links to show evidence for your OP’s stance of “lots of” party political blame on UKC.

We would be here all day quoting threads. 
 

Hi!

Sorry, this threat wasn't specifically aimed at you, you just provided a juicy quote to start it  

And yes I agree Bolsonaro is a nutter (I think that goes beyond political into lunacy), and that debt shouldn't have been socialised in 2008 (although whether allowing the financial system to truly collapse would be a good idea or not is another thread, I suspect it would be worse for everyone). 

Sorry, I’m not picking on you but what numbers are you using to back up that statement?

WTF?!

I said susceptibility to the disease may be genetic (as it does seem to be the case) and may mean different responses and impacts. I did not that is why the UK should be considered in isolation. 

You'll imply I am into eugenics next in which case you should wind your neck in as I most certainly am not and you should not insinuate such a thing lightly. 

I am never going to trawl through threads or google to give examples of anything just because you ask me to.

It isn't a case of what should be done that has made it political on UKC, but rather using the whole situation to have a wholesale attack on the Conservatives that has made it political on UKC.

Total deaths and per capita deaths from Worldometer.  Given the daily death rates in other countries it’s not looking great over the next two weeks for our relative positions.  Only the USA and Italy have more total deaths than us, and per capita discounting two tiny countries, only Spain Italy and Belgium are worse than us.  I don’t know the details of what each country is reporting, but we’ve been consistently going one way in these rankings for some time.

But that is either naive or wilfully ignorant. Other countries are your only point of reference to allow you to test how well your own policies are working up to now, and to predict what any changes to your policies may effect.

As I and others linked to repeatedly, the Euromomo data reveal a clear and statistically significant spike in mortality coinciding with the CV crisis in the UK, but not in, say, Austria or Greece. This demonstrates that either the countries differ in their aims (again politically, deaths vs. economy), or if mimizing deaths was the aim all along, some got their response right and others wrong.

In fact, for the UK example, it seems to be a combination of both, where an ideologically motivated preference for avoiding shutdown measures led to concrete decisions aimed at herd immunity (e.g. allowing Cheltenham or the Liverpool CL game to go ahead), only for the approach to be flipped a bit later, but now not having the infrastructure in place that could have been set up in the months before.

CB

This, and your unwillingness to consider decisions that affected the position we are in now (whether you think that good or bad), suggests you aren’t interested in learning how to do things better in future, which is odd. Learning lessons seems self-evidently a good thing to me.

I didn’t insinuate it.  You previously didn’t even specify if you meant population genetics or viral genetics - the later seems more sensible to me, given the vast genetic diversity in many badly affected countries.

Yes, you’ve made it quite clear that you’re unwilling to provide any evidence of the largely imaginary forum posts you rally against with your straw men threads.

Surely it both is and isn't political?

Fundamentally, the scientific evidence gives you a probablistic model for what's currently happening, it doesn't tell you explicitly what the best course is (it only highlights what 'extreme' or variant courses of action may be), partially because the quality of evidence isn't good enough, partially because, fundamentally, that isn't the job of science.

So the choice will always be, fundamentally, political. How important is freedom? How important is the economy? How do we weight the harm that lockdown is undoubtedly doing against it's necessity? When do the scales tip?

At which point, constructive, critical debate can be a tool for better decisions. Now is the time to argue, just not throw stones. Generally, I think the official opposition has broadly got the tone right; not that I've been paying much attention tbh

On the other hand, on social media it's like a general election; ideological driven bollocks is everywhere. Friends on Facebook as guilty as some journalists (Allison Pearson springs to mind) where people have clearly decided to reason from ideological roots and select the evidence based on their preconceptions. Yeah... that's not helpful, and in that sense, a political approach is the last thing we need.

No worries! I agree that the 2008 financial crisis (and our responses to it) is a different issue.

I just tried to come up with an example for a crisis that has properties that would make a political response guided by right wing / market ideology more likely to succeed than a traditional lefty, state centred response, but there may be better examples.

CB

Not on this forum, but I've seen A LOT of Tory bashing. Generally spinning facts; such as the ONS death figures as an example of a cover up, or just straightforwardly choosing the most negative / lacking in nuance interpretation of stuff.

Flip side, this is also flushing out the right wing nutters, who are claiming that this is basically just the flu, that the gov't don't have the right to impinge on their freedom, and who see 'Libertarianism' as justification to be a selfish asshole. (that's not all Libertarian philosophy mind)

Surely the whole EU procurement 'narrative' was/is a media concoction. I can't see what story there is there given that the said procurement initiative has yet to deliver anything to anyone? The 'story' was surely politically driven, no?

I'm a "leftie" broadly. But to play Devil's advocate; is that partially because you're thinking through your own biases? Germany probably did the best of all European countries in response to the crisis, and they would not describe themselves as Left Wing.

More broadly, whilst centralisation / command and control might be best in the teeth of a crisis, it might also exacerbate the after effects if it suppresses the economy when there should be an upswing. It's about balance, rather than one side or other having all the answers.

You really should.  But that's your political decision.  

The discussion largely is about whether the government is doing a good job.  Generally they are but they were slow to get going and seem to be making it up as they go along.  Perhaps they should have looked at other countries?  

I would note that the Mail and Telegraph have both run headlines very critical of the government response so I would say that there is cross party discontent.

Where does this get very political -compare Scotland and Westminster where Scotland was consistently getting out ahead of Westminster which might be a political decision but more probably seems to be a result of having a decisive process for decisions rather than a lot of faffing around while someone is forced to a decision.  If you're a party with a rep. for being nasty but competent being revealed as incompetent in a major crisis is not a good look.  

Thanks. I think that makes much more sense now.

Whilst there are some clear errors in the UK's handling (Cheltenham was not a good idea, though minor in the grand scheme) international comparisons are not that easy:

- It's worth looking at the COVID UK deaths by internal area; compare London and the South West for example; to what extent is the crisis a "London Crisis" and to what extent is London unique in Europe (it isn't and it isn't, but the idea that you can even treat "the UK" as homogenous is very misleading)

- It will depend on the frequency of international travel

- It will depend on population density

- It will depend on differences in population / household structure (this might be why Italy was badly affected)

- We are no where near the end of this crisis, and we have no idea how decisions will play out in the long term

- It will depend on how the reporting is being done and whether it's reliable.

This is not a defence of this administration. But we are in the middle of the crisis right now and anyone who claims they know for certain whether a given approach was absolutely better or worse is making an ideological claim and not arguing from evidence, as the evidence is just not there. 

Edit: That being said, that doesn't mean you don't do the international comparison; you just do it whilst aware of (and trying to account for) the above. And you try and use it to make the best guess about what decisions to make next. It's just that we're far away from having certain conclusions right now.

Happy to learn lessons, generally after the fact though, not while fighting the fire.

Nope.

Whether that initiative was successful is one story.

Why the government did or didnt choose to join it is another and still stands regardless of the success or not of the initative (of course if the stated reason at the time for not engaging with it was that they didnt think it would work and an alternative would be better then the success becomes more important).

No. They are not being criticised because they are a Tory government. They are being criticised because their handling of the issue has led to and is continuing to lead to thousands of people dieing unnecessarily.

Everybody should be hoping that this government's response is as effective as possible in minimising the deaths and hardship caused by this crisis. The response to reduce the economic impact has been largely positive (though not without issue). But the response to limit the impact on deaths and health has been inadequate from the start and lessons still are not being learned.

If you dont evaluate the effects of our response relative to the response of all of the other countries who are dealing with the same threat, you cannot be in a position to judge the relative success or failure of our response.

We were in a very fortunate position being hit later than other countries, allowing us some time to learn from others' successes and failures to modify our response. But a failure to learn lessons from other countries is seeing us on course to have one of the worst death rates in the world.

The nonsense idea of British exceptionalism is one of the reasons why people in this country have died unnecessarily. It needs to stop now.

Which people have been doing this? I presume you mean people like Toby Young, Daniel Hannan and the like?

https://www.ft.com/content/ff54be82-82ec-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714

"It is striking how many of the hawks come from one of two often intersecting Conservative camps, the leading lights of the Leave campaign and a claque of the government’s media outriders clustered around the Spectator magazine,"

Lessons learned now still have the potential to save lives. Learning them after the crisis is over is too late. You can't bring those people back.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I'm assuming that from your comments about tory bashing you are largely in support of the current government.

If we look at your comments, it could therefore be seen that they are inherently political in themselves as the 'it's not political' argument is a great way of saying 'you shouldn't be criticising my parties failures'.

I am a very critical of this gov but that is because they are incompetent liars. That does not make me anti tory - I voted for them in 2017 but so many people seem to prefer to dismiss my points as political bias so they can carry on cheering their side.

After they may be of use to us in actually putting the fire out? 
 

Not sure I follow the logic in that.

I agree that international comparisons are not easy, they require expert knowledge from many fields, not only biomedical but also from political sciences, sociology and even history, in order to be able to guide the political decision process.

Unfortunately you cannot simply re-run the experiment, so you have to extract as much information from the not quite concurrent and not 100% standardized "experiments" that are going on right now*!

That said, there are certain parameters that can already now be evaluated post-hoc and between countries: Deviation from the expected seasonal mortality is one such factor. Only indirectly linked to CV, for sure, but clearly immune to differences in testing rates etc.

Given that there was no famine in the UK from January 2020 on, the CV pandemia is the only plausible reason. One conclusion would be that the UK system still under-reports CV deaths, another that direct CV deaths are not the only deaths caused by the pandemic.

On the other hand, better air quality due to the shutdown has today been reported to have prevented 11.100 premature deaths in Germany this year already (I take that to mean more than 1000, fewer than 100.000, I hate that pseudo-precision in the news coverage!). There is a lesson for after the crisis!

CB

*edit: forgot to state above that not being directly comparable is bad, but the not quite concurrent bit is actually an advantage for this kind of comaprative approach

Not especially (as in I am not especially in support of the current government.) 

I just don't see it as constructive or helpful to make out the current crisis to be about politics. Too many journalists questions, editorial and opinion pieces, and crap on the internet clearly have a political bias to them.

As I said before in another thread, if you are having an epic you don't have an argument with your partner about whether you should be there in the first place, you get the hell out of dodge and go over it when you are safe in the valley. 

edit: I should add, I am not a fan of political journalism and commentary at the best of times, directed at either party. My knee jerk response when I listen to journalists asking 'difficult questions' is 'do stop being a twat, as if you're so perfect'

But you will yell at them if you think they are taking to much risk (and are even happy to continue up)!

CB

At the request of the press we just increased our number of deaths by 25%.
 

We have no idea what other countries are doing about deaths outside of hospitals. The WHO model was to include only hospital deaths. Lots of EU countries are now playing catch up on their figures as we are. 
 

So now we have no idea how we are doing compared to other countries. That was a useful exercise wasn’t it.  That’s exactly what happens when you start making things political. 

Yes, let's just gloss over any failures that got us to where we are. That's extremely partisan and political.

The time for constructive suggestions was a three months ago when the crisis was a clear possibility but still in the future. Then they could set British industry and hobbyists sewing and tinkering away to produce masks, visors and gowns in a large scale and distributed way. When they thought they needed ventilators they could have plagiarised an old, simple & approved design suitable for manufacture by any fabricator. Develop an test a tracing app so it's ready for deployment. Most of that was suggested on UKC months ago. Some of it could have been done 5-10-20 years ago.

Start building permanent stockpile.

Record problems & successes for inclusion in the pandemic plan.

Engage with EU PPE programme if it is not too late.

Decentralise with distributed manufacture within UK (see above), in parallel with the centralisation of PPE, testing & ventilator that often failed (can't afford to change that now).

They could investigate a programme of sterilising & reuse of disposable PPE - very dodgy sounding, it's been reported and maybe rejected for good reasons. It does mean you can reuse the specialist non-woven masks when you can't just sew your own.

Commercial laundries for closed hotels & restaurants must be under-utilised so boiler suits available for when paramedics have lacked tyvek suits (as reported on UKC).

That's just my ideas or stuff I've read about that seem obvious to me, there will be better ones from more specilaised and far cleverer people that are far more likely to be useful.

It all needs competence & flexible thinking though. On the economic front they've been very flexible and don't get much criticism. On the scientific/technical/practical they've floundered.

ha, indeed!

Well dammit, I must get the government to read UKC so they know what to do.

This isn’t two mates on a climbing trip, it’s a global pandemic with tens of thousands dying, and high-stakes decisions with potentially catastrophic outcomes for entire nations required on near daily basis. These decisions are being informed by many factors, including the values and competency of current ministerial incumbents. Their choices will have direct consequences for people who have no way of influencing the decisions, and whatever path the government takes will inherently favour some groups over others. This is the absolute definition of politics, and you seem inexplicably blind to the fact that criticism is not from “the usual suspects” but from across the spectrum of party preferences. 
 

I’m not sure your climbing analogy is of much relevance. And your attempt to categorise legitimate criticism of government performance as motivated by petty tribalism is, ironically, a deeply political act in itself 

Without reading every post I think a lot of people are conflating ideology and governance.

Political ideology may influence the strategy adopted to tackle the crisis. Some on the left would accuse the government of putting the economy before people's lives because Tories care more about money than people. We see this amplified in the US where opposition to lockdown seems to come exclusively from the right. Personally I don't think we can accuse this government of taking an ideological approach to tackling C19.

On the other hand there is governance. How well are the government executing their plan? This is where I am not alone in thinking the governments in the UK can be criticised for being unprepared even when they were warned, possibly not moving fast enough and possibly having a badly managed procurement process.

For a government to do a good job they have to have a good strategy and implement it well. If either strategy or implementation is poor (or both) then the overall result will be poor. Thus the probability of being successful, at the simplest level, is 25%. 

In other words the chances of failure are high.

So  you think actually knowing how many deaths there are is political?  Aside from anything else it would be easy to solve. Provide total deaths and then the breakdown by different categories.

I think a major problem is the right wing press arent currently dancing to the governments tune and its making some people who are used to an uncritical press very very nervous.

People are dying because our leader is an idiot.  Of course it is political.  

Yes they are.

Because our leader is an idiot.

Well, that's your opinion. It's not mine.

As I have gone over, and won't revisit, it is not that there is 'any' criticism, it is the politically motivated criticism. 

I wouldn't imagine their remit covers national resilence arrangements, in much the same was as each regiment in the army doesn't get to pick which model and calibre of rifle it fancies, who supplies the ammunition and how much is held in the event of war with Russia.

No, just reflect on and respond to their failures.

No. I think comparing it to other countries is political. 

In this country we are adversarial. Someone must be to blame. We can’t blame the virus for the deaths, it has to be someone. The only people we can blame is the government. 
 

This isn’t new, it happens in all areas of life, it’s counterproductive when it comes to actually doing things because people start to do things to absolve themselves of blame, rather than addressing the problem.

Take tests for example. It’s not enough to say we are manufacturing and distributing kits, we have to attach a number and a timescale. That number and timescale is a made up figure but it buys time with the press, and we know that for 3 weeks they’ll just focus on whether that number will be met. Today they’ll announce it isn’t and the press will have a great day calling for resignations and heads to roll... The UKC massive will be rolling on the floor in jubilation at another failure by the right wing government. To what end? Will that suddenly make the tests arrive tomorrow? It’s all very childish.

I find this just bizarre. There are countries ahead of us in the pandemic with clear successes and failures. Why on earth would you not want to learn from them? I really don’t understand your position at all. As far as I can see you object to anything “political”, which you seem to regard as anything not thought of by the government, regardless of whether it might be beneficial.

Depends on what lessons. Pulling apart current policy using hindsight and trusting a crystal ball based on what is happening in other countries (well done Germany for ending lockdown and being the test case) isn’t really a great lesson to learn. 

Which leader? That surely depends if you live in one of the devolved nations who have different leaders making up different rules. 
 

We’ve got Boris (Tory) giving out one set of guidelines and Drakesford (Welsh Labour) saying we’ll do things our own way and differently to you.  For example lockdown ‘rules’ and testing systems. You’ve also got Plaid Cymru jumping on the bandwagon saying that the English should be sent back across the boarder with their disease.

Nonsense. If as seems likely the testing pledge has not been met, I won’t be crowing over it. It’ll be another dose of that sick feeling that I cant shake, that we’re in a hole that’s going to be very hard indeed to get out of.  
 

I’d happily trade this government for another Conservative one, if it was higher on competence and effectiveness. From other contributors, some German states and Canadian provinces appear to have just such administrations - I’d have no complaints if we could say the same 

wait. what? So you dont want any comparisons? That is a frankly batshit policy. Why not nick best practice from elsewhere? To do so you need comparisons.

Actually no lots of people can be held, correctly, responsible for different things just as other (or sometimes the same) people can be praised.

I thought the right wing was supposed to be all about taking responsibility.

You mean by declaring that any criticism is political and trying to shut down discussion. Yeah I agree.

Well yes having targets does generally help (although of course Goodhart's law applies here). Its one way of measuring performance.  Saying we are making kits isnt overly useful if it turns out to one bloke making them part time.

As for "made up figure". It was one provided by the government. So really they have no excuses. Anyone who has any real experience knows to underpromise so you can overdeliver or, if you screwed up, just deliver. So to be honest it really doesnt reflect well on the government that they are likely to fail on this.

“So”? That’s a high leap and not what I said.

Let’s compare ourselves to Brazil. Only 13 deaths today. What are they doing that’s working so well?  

Why? Because somone pulled out a figure and has not met it? Really? Why are you listening to this nonsense? You don’t believe anything else they say but decide to believe that? What does it even represent? What does 1 billion pieces of PPE even mean?

How do people get so emotional over numbers that mean nothing to them in their limited everyday experiences. 

What possible motive do the government have of keeping everyone in lockdown and watching the country slide into anarchy? you’ve got to be some real conspiracy nut job to believe they’re not producing tests on purpose and at the highest rate they can. 

So what exactly were you trying to say by "I think comparing it to other countries is political. "

Good question. might be something which can be taken from them. One thing which seems to be working ok is the power of the states to take action as they see fit.

Lying? Do you really believe this number?

CB

I'd say they're more wartime government than tory for now. The populist tendency is far more worrying than any residual rightward bias in their response. If we get to a recovery phase then their economic leanings will matter but I suspect the election may arrive first.

Unfortunately what they are is an incompetent government morally and intellectually hollowed out by the populist lunacy of brexit. They happen to be tories which hardly matters given the economic counter measures are about the only bit they seem to be getting broadly right.

I'd happily swap then for Major's government or Thatcher's for that matter.

jk

Exactly my point. We can pick all the countries on the list and look at their figures and we can make them say whatever we want. France we know have a big backlog in their care home figures. I don’t know about other European countries. So rather than saying we are 2nd in the list, because we are going to ignore the small countries, we are  also are saying we’re going to ignore all the countries below us as their numbers might be higher. 

Not going to include Brazil, Iran or Russia because their figures are made up. Going to ignore Sweden because they’ve got a small population (although if you compare them to the other Nordic countries they’re in big trouble) 

Cheery picking which countries to include to suit our bias. Politicising statistics to our own ends. 

I think Grenfell illustrated that learning lessons during the fire would have been helpful.

How?

testing is part of the way out of lockdown. Other European countries (Germany, Spain, Italy) are managing to test 2.5 times as many people per head of population as us. Even the US, despite dysfunctional relationships between government bodies, has tested 50% more per head of population. Confirmation we are failing to close that gap, despite the best efforts of our government, and the implications for future options to exit our current lockdown, is a bit deflating to be honest. 

Could you explain what a more left wing approach to the crisis would be? Arguably the Chancellors economic responses to the crisis are quite left wing, equally we already have a socialised health care system, so in comparison to say the US, with our care free at the point of need, that is pretty left wing.

What we appear to be missing is competence in our management of risk, which includes everything including, but not exclusively timing of lockdown, level of lockdown, supply chain and stockpiling of vital equipment, testing capacity and communication. This doesn't feel left or right wing to me, competence isn't ideological.

One thing that I would say is that there are a lots of people working very hard to try and shift the blame on this one, I hope they are employing appropriate social distancing on Tufton Street.

It's closer to 15% by my take.   3311 additional non-hospital deaths  added to 22,800 or so.  3311/22800 = 14.5%

That's one interpretation.  We've always been reporting those deaths, just through another channel.

It can be looked up.

Indeed.

As I said in my message " I don’t know the details of what each country is reporting".

I am not making it political.  That 15% difference makes very little difference to our rankings in absolute or per-capita rankings, and with our per-capita death rate being higher and falling more slowly than some of the other countries, that difference is eroding fast.

Rather than insisting residents remaining in place was the best option, they could have been rescued - alive.

Which is a shame could be good for recruiting.

You could have the superdooper update to date regiments using the MP8484 with integrated laser, telescopic and red dot sight all in one package as seen in Call of Duty slightly grey ops 49 to appeal to the gamers.

Then you could have the regiment with the Brown Bess to appeal to the hipsters. Maybe one with sawn offs and uzis for the wannabe gangsters.

Elsewhere said "Most of that was suggested on UKC months ago"

To which you replied "Well dammit, I must get the government to read UKC so they know what to do."

You then said in a different post "Pulling apart current policy using hindsight"

As you do apparently recognise the significant amount of on-the-ball foresight on UKC (even if it gets a sarcastic response) you could stop claiming hindsight here.  

The foresight wasn't just those on UKC often written off as "armchair experts" but also in many hundreds of medical and public health domain experts publicly and privately raising their concerns with government.

Interesting. Why exactly?

jk

Couldn't cancel Cheltenham.

But that is in hindsight. Not at the time. 

Strictly it's what happens when you fail to break down the new composite figure into its components, a trivial task. As you say by poor reporting they've obscured both figures, we can hope that's a mistake while fearing it's not.

A week ago people were saying it'd be impossible for government to collect timely and reasonably accurate care home death data but lo and behold faced with embarrassment at PMQs the impossible became merely inconvenient.

jk

Is all that testing accurate? 

Predicting what might happen and then when it does saying you said so all along is a bit like a gambler in a two horse race winning and then telling you he knew all along which horse would win.

There’s always going to be a problem when you have two different scientific opinions on something that has no experiment outcomes to rigorously test and conclude from. If your knowledge of the impending catastrophe was so complete why was it so weakly presented, why wasn’t all the incontrovertible evidence produced?

I never said anything about a left or right wing approach. I was commenting upon the comments, criticism, opinionated journalism etc that has sprung up around this crisis. 

Because at the time it wasn't clear that it wouldn't have been a knee-jerk reaction that ended up as overkill. 

(with apologies for the double negative).

Feel free to have a guess which country.

Well no. Some data has been produced. It’s a week old and goes back two weeks. 
 

But again, the journalists can sit back now and relax because some meaningless figures have been produced to keep them quiet for a bit. 

Further to my point, just look at the images in this Guardian article (I know, some think that is Satan's own newspaper, but still).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/brazil-manaus-coronavirus-mas...

Still, as they are not testing, could be anything.

Of course rightwing governments from Bolsonaro to Trump and Johnson are all distinct, but they are united in their tenuous relation to facts.

CB

Just because numbers have been produced doesn't mean they're right. The human process of producing death certificates hasn't changed and therefore the time taken to generate DCs outside of an acute setting is at best uneven.

I believe China are a Socialist Republic. Bastions of the truth and human rights. 

"I see a lot of criticism coming from people who clearly think we should be following a more 'left wing' approach to dealing with the issue. (as CB294 mentioned, thanks  )."

So what is this more left wing approach as opposed to increased competency, it may be a reflection on how I filter news or social media, but I'm not seeing overtly left or right wing approaches, I'm seeing some international comparison such as Germany (centre right government) and New Zealand (centre left government), but beyond the sorts of policies of the left that I have already mentioned that the government have adopted or already had, I'm not seeing an articulation of a left or right wing approach.  I have seen an articulation of a more or less authoritarian approach, but that obviously can apply across the left / right spectrum.

I consider them communist in name only. They are a unique dictatorial or at least authoritarian system that does not sit easily in the historically Eurocentric left/right spectrum.

Do I believe their numbers? Not as far as I can vomit.

CB

Great way to engage people in you point of view.

Life's political, how can this not be? The virus it's self obviously not, but the response to it, absolutely.

worse still the lack of preparation from 2016 Exercise Cygnus, to doing nothing in February and playing it down to something, "we can take on the chin" most definitely.

Strange how something so important can be non-political and yet, a coat, a tie or, how far you bow, can be the considered the most definitive.

The failing was not acting on Exercise Cygnus in 2016, and then hiding the report that came out of the exercise.

Assuming the data is drawn from death certificates. They're managing timely reporting of hospital deaths.

jk

So what has changed to convince you the lockdown was necessary since it was implemented that you didn't and couldn't know or very reasonably suspect by mid March?

jk

The way the NHS has fared has had nothing at all to do with who has been in power?

David Cameron: 'No top down reorganisation of the NHS'

Michael Portillo: 'If they'd have been honest about what changes they were going to make they'd have not been voted for'

A decade (circa) of the NHS staff talking about being stretched and struggling due to Conservative policies on funding and structure.

Covid19 appears. 'Support the NHS!'  'Isn't Tom a hero?' 'Lets clap and raise money'.

Of course it's political....

Edit: Which is without mentioning that the UK government has been differing from the best known scientific advice, and predicted to have the highest death rate in Europe. 

Hiding or not publishing widely? It’s available if you search for it. 

You have 5 days to report a death in the community. Hospital deaths will be counted separately to the ONS data which will be using death registrations. 

From the New Statesman. 

In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise, codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, but the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016.

“We’ve just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu, on a pandemic that killed a lot of people,” she told the World Innovation Summit for Health at the time. “It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies,” Davies said. One conclusion was that Britain, as Davies put it, faced the threat of “inadequate ventilation” in a future pandemic. She was referring to the need for ventilation machines, which keep oxygen pumping in patients critically ill with a respiratory disease such as coronavirus.

Despite the severe failings exposed by Exercise Cygnus, the government’s planning for a future pandemic did not change after December 2016 – at least not formally. The government’s roadmap for how to respond to a coronavirus-like pandemic has long been available online, and the three key documents – the 70-page “Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy”, 78-page “Health and Social Care Influenza Pandemic Preparedness and Response” and 88-page “Pandemic Influenza Response Plan” – were published in 2011, 2012 and 2014 respectively. These plans were tested and failed, yet these documents were not rewritten or revised.

They share a glaring shortcoming: not one of them mentions ventilators, which are now in such high demand that Matthew Hancock, the Health Secretary, told British manufacturers on 14 March, “If you produce a ventilator, we will buy it. No number [you produce] is too high.” He urged firms from Rolls-Royce to JCB to stop what they do and to begin making ventilators.

The government does not have a stockpile of ventilators, as the documents made clear and Hancock has confirmed. All three of the plans refer to stockpiles, but only of antivirals, antibiotics and personal protective equipment for NHS staff. Aside from face masks, the only mention of equipment in Public Health England’s Pandemic Response Plan is to do with IT staff being trained to use smart boards. Medical devices are not mentioned in any of the documents.

Hancock’s entreaty to manufacturers was the first time the government has publicly recognised Britain’s urgent need for more ventilators – six weeks after the first cases of coronavirus were reported in the UK on 31 January. But the necessity for the devices in any pandemic has long been clear. As the 2011 preparedness strategy puts it, “Critical care services… are likely to see increases in demand during even a mild influenza pandemic. In a moderate or severe influenza pandemic demand may outstrip supply, even when capacity is maximised… it may become necessary to make decisions concerning priority of access to some services.”

“Plans to increase capacity of these [critical care] services are an important aspect of planning,” the document continues, but these putative plans are strikingly absent from the government's otherwise extensive documents. And Downing Street officials have, according to the Sunday Times on 15 March, found such planning to be non-existent. Pre-existing pandemic plans, an official is quoted as saying, “never went into the operational detail”.

Britain now faces a grave shortage of the machines that will keep critical patients alive. By combining government statements with publicly available documents, that shortage can be estimated. The government expects between 60 and 80 per cent of the population to contract coronavirus, or between 40 and 53 million people. Assumptions laid out in 2018 by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, or SPI-M – a working group of 10 academic teams – predict that 4 per cent of cases will require hospitalisation; this is in line with estimates for Covid-19, the disease that is caused by the virus Sars-Cov-2, both commonly referred to as coronavirus.

SPI-M's modelling also assumes that a quarter of those hospitalised will need a ventilator; this, too, aligns with the World Health Organisation's findings on coronavirus in China, and may even be an under-estimate. In short, at least 1 per cent of all cases can be expected to need ventilation, or between 400,000 and 530,000 people. Modelling released on March 16 by a team at Imperial College, which has informed government planning, suggests a 1.3 per cent rate. That rate has risen after new data from Italy.

The government has said that it expects 95 per cent of all cases to occur over a nine-week period, with 50 per cent coming during a three-week peak. This reflects modelling by SPI-M in 2018, available online, and the course of the 1957 influenza pandemic in the UK. This means that during the peak, which is expected to arrive in Britain in late May or June, 15 to 20 per cent of all coronavirus cases will hit the NHS every week for three weeks. Assuming only a 1 per cent rate, rather than the higher rate in Imperial's latest modelling, the number of patients needing a ventilator would therefore range from 60,000 per week to more than 100,000.

The United Kingdom has 5,000 ventilators. Many are sure to already be in use, as ventilators are deployed with intensive care beds, and Britain’s intensive care beds run at 70 to 80 per cent capacity most months. Each ventilator will typically be required for at least ten days, making the gap between demand and supply more acute over time.

On 25 February, Bruce Aylward – the epidemiologist who led the recent WHO mission to China – returned from Wuhan, where the crisis began, and gave a warning to the world. China, Aylward explained, had done something extraordinary. It had managed to wrest control of an exponentially expanding epidemic. “When you spend 20, 30 years in this business,” Aylward said, holding up a graph that showed the improbable slowdown in cases across China, “it's, like, ‘Seriously, you're going to try and change that [curve] with those tactics?’”

The UK has not attempted to emulate China's response, or those of other countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan that have successfully curbed, or held back, Covid-19. But the government’s high-risk strategy is informed by a belief that coronavirus cannot be stopped and that the success of others in checking it is only temporary – because the virus will return once people resume normal life. The government’s strategy is led by Christopher Whitty, the chief medical officer for England. Professor Whitty is an epidemiologist and is recognised as brilliant in his field. “He is a very thoughtful and careful man,” Deirdre Hollingsworth, a leading epidemiologist at Oxford University, told me.

Whitty is not only respected but has long prepared for a pandemic. As the professor of physic at Gresham College – a position which dates back to the 16th century and reflects his standing – his 2018 lecture series was on how to control one.

He now has a real-life pandemic to control, and his bold strategy is increasingly being doubted. He recently told a parliamentary select committee that the NHS will “flex” and cope in the face of coronavirus. But with a bewildering absence of ventilators, inexplicably unmentioned in official plans and already in short supply, it is not clear how.

Given the above about Operation Gygnus, and that the pandemic didn't start here, but in China, how can one excuse our government asking manufacturers to make ventilators 'after' the start of this pandemic infecting people in the UK, when modelling has already shown that a lack of ventilators would be a problem, or write off criticism of them as 'political'? When the germination of this crisis could be seen happening in China, wouldn't a wise government decide to start preparing ahead of time?

Please, don't you dare say it isn't a political issue, it's been the Conservatives who have done the modelling which found we wouldn't have enough ventilators and didn't prepare for this. I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, but that much is obvious even to me.

Although if you predicted what would happen with reasons rooted in evidence and logic, and then it happened, it's not much like gambling.

A great many experts accurately predicted what was going to happen.  A very few experts, who happened to be on SAGE, predicted differently.  I would have hoped that both SAGE and the government would have looked at the severity of what the majority of experts were saying and understood basic risk management of "chance of occurring" x "severity of consequences" and decided to take stock and consider reasonable-worst-case outcomes.  Even if you think the majority of experts are wrong, that translates to assigning their opinion a low probability.  If they also posit severe consequences, the risk remains significant and should be treated accordingly.

There were experiments playing out in several countries in the world with truck loads of data.  Conversely we had a minority view from experts who happened to be on SAGE - apparently a minority view within SAGE itself - with no compelling evidence about what made us different.

Not "incontrovertible evidence" but "highly compelling reasoning evidenced by happenings in other countries".  It wasn't weakly presented in my view - e.g. http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia/UK_scientists_statement_on_coronavirus_me... - this was plain, clear, and signed by an order of magnitude more experts than are on SAGE.  There were many other public - and I assume private - representations made before this.  

Why didn't the government listen?  You and the OP seem to consider any attempt to question this political and unhelpful, and then when a compelling argument is made you dismiss it with "hindsight".  My personal estimate is apparently driven by some "dogma".  I guess it will all out in the wash eventually.  It won't be pretty.

When the evidence and case was presented to UKC,  what happened was  non scientific but populist and totally wrong (as it turns out, in hindsight) messages like "We aren't Italy so we won't follow them" got pushed about, and a lot of people who didn't understand that they didn't understand the exponential mechanic of an early stage pandemic dismissed warnings with confidence in their totally flawed understanding ("As deadly as Michael Barrymoor's swimming pool").  Myself and colleagues pushed hard at work - net result was all face-to-face contact with 20,000 customers being cancelled 10 days before lockdown, something like 300,000 contact hours.  I would like to think that the number of institutions taking such totally unprecedented shutdown and distancing actions in the two weeks before the lockdown entered the attention of the government and got them to question their policy. Given my communications with my MP I certainly think this was a more effective way of sending a message.

If you know a link to the full report, you might share it with us and with these people who are planning to launch legal action if the document isn't made public...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/26/doctor-sue-results-operatio...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/labour-urges-government-publi...

The information, or at least part of it might be available. I'm not sure the government ever published the report. Unless you know better, I'd like a link if you have one.

Not sure I really get the point of this post considering the current position on ventilators and the number of people on them?????

Probably just shows how fast moving the position is and the way the NHS has " flexed" to cope, which is what Witty suggested would happen.

Its not good being put on a ventilator as we all know.

Can you please predict an asteroid strike, the actions we should take and how it will fully affect the economy please. 

What a dismissive post that totally fails to engage with any of the detailed points I made.  

Brazil is nepotism though, which is entering another sphere.

I'd be interested to see where - people were asking for it to be published four days ago:

https://www.leighday.co.uk/News/Press-releases-2020/April-2020/Government-l...

You’re just reproducing more flannel. 

Yes. You produced loads of detailed scenarios that ‘came true’.

I think you’ve missed my point completely though. 

funnily enough a report on this was on this mornings today program looking at the global distribution of impacts and commenting on where emergency equipment should be pre-placed.

I gave an example of *literally* hundreds of experts showing foresight to make the point the governments committee was a minority opinion amongst experts and that your “winning horse gambler” comment to suggest this foresight was not useful is absolute crap.   I evidenced this with a document.

 > I think you’ve missed my point completely though. 

No I just think it’s an indefensible view in the face of overwhelming evidence both from other countries and from a wide range of UK experts - as well as many on UKC several of whom I always pay close attention to the views off...

I note that you’ve claimed the Cygnus report is available and have presented no evidence of this despite at least 3 requests and 1 evidenced counterpoint.  When I evidence my stance you come back with a flippant post followed by some talk of “flannel”.  I’d suggest it’s you whose bringing nothing but opinion to this rather than several other posters.

I should also add - I’ve worked on technology that enabled research that is now used as part of asteroid detection.  I’d hope we have a plan for this at the state level as it’ll be similar enough to plans for a nuclear attack, and that with 3 months notice it was on a potential collision course, we wouldn’t listen to a minority opinion that it’ll all be fine and so not start a phased activation of the plan making incrementally largely steps as the risk failed to decrease over time.

Well yeah, cause in hospitals you have generally better record keeping and a ready supply of doctors to do the certification.

Neither of these is really true of, say, a care home, and remote certification isn't making things any easier.

Apologies for not being directly on topic but why do you think that was the right thing for the government to do? IMHO it was a major mistake with few, if any, advantages.

That is not how probability works.  

As an actual health care worker in the NHS I can tell you that they have made an absolute **** of it. I have seen this coming for months, especially as it first spread into Europe.

I knew we would be in trouble and we are. We have no idea what the infection rate is and the death rates are equally a guess at the moment. What we do know is the weekly expected death tolls are doubling compared to normal and that frontline staff are being put at risk and dying as part of their job.

PPE provision has been an absolute disaster. Some places might have 'enough' while, for example, my old ICU unit had to stage a 'tools down' protest as the trust failed to give adequate protection. When masks were provided they were 4 years out of date.

We all saw the Chinese throwing up 1000 bed hospitals in a few days and the government had more than an idea of how this would pan out based on their simulation in 2016. They failed. I really really could not give a shit what party was in power. They have failed, and for that they should pay.

After 18 hours, you've produced zero examples of people on this forum tory bashing.  It does seem that you take criticism of this government as Tory bashing, which if true reveals more about your sensitivities than anything else.

I think the government deserve the kicking of a generation over this, and I couldn't care less what flavour they are. 

I think there are more structural questions to be asked about the relationship between the academy, government, the civil service and special advisors - it's seems likely that part of the failure is in how politicised the government's scientists have become, and in how members of the cabinet and their scientific advisors apparently aren't trained in working together.  

We don't need to predict the strike do we, we need to be prepared for a mass demand on the NHS, be that from pandemic, asteroid strike, or other disaster,. We should have an NHS that stands a decent chance of keeping staff supplied with PPE, and maybe a plan for an influx of patients.

Which presumably is what the report which hasn't been published might have highlighted our current deficiencies.

Especially if you are conservative, it is a good time for Tory bashing. There is not much conservative about the current group at all.

Speaking as a scientist myself, I'd prefer not to trust scientists in emergencies, especially the modellers. Science tends to look too much to interesting exceptions and optimal (theoretical) solutions. Who a government should really talk and listen to are consultants in the control of contagious diseases. I assume there is a bunch of them working at PHE?

I’ve shared my views on the modelling a few times here.  I don’t think the epidemiologists who developed the models understood how deeply flawed and non predictive they were.  The social mixing matrix alone in the much discussed represents 256 free parameters and they were predicting ahead for 60 days of data.  That’s not good science....  Indeed a model must either be too coarse grained to be truely predictive, or so riddled with estimated parameters to be truely predictive.

I agree.  I was including them in “the academy”.  It sounds like SAGE was split between these two camps.  The problem I see time and again with modelling is that models can be jolly clever theoretically/mathematically and sometimes computationally and a lot of people get carried away by that cleverness and forget that cleverness does not correlate with correctness.

I do a lot of markov modelling both analytical and Monte Carlo, in particular complicated thermal system and ion channel mediated signalling.  I can get all sorts of fancy results but any attempt to get a model to match reality opens a window into aspects of reality I misunderstood or didn’t even know about (because it’s not in the literature - shutdown of IP3R is more complicated than people think I reckon...) and the biological models rarely have predictive ability beyond the datasets they were trained on.

What’s really put the shit up me is how the massive RAMP effort to recruit scientists into improving the pandemic model seems to be focused on putting more complexity and parameters in and not studying the bounds of its applicability.

Also, when in doubt play it safe seems such obvious advice for a contagion in an exponential growth phase that I’m at a loss how speculative modelling could have totally overridden this.

The people I knew in public health left when it all got centralised in to PHE about 7 (?) years back.  I know little about PHE but think that may change come the inquest.  

Back to your point about (not) trusting the scientists - I agree; their input should be a cornerstone of government policy but not the driver of it; they should be focused on giving practical advice and predictions for different policy with confidence bounds; what seems to have gone wrong here is too much faith in the modelling of a minority of the panel.  Giving Cumming’s interests here it’s tempting to speculate as to why this happened.

They watched the China struggle, they then watched Italy, Spain and France, they then watched the USA and still f*cked up.

27,000 dead and only 171,000 known cases. They've hideously mismanaged this despite watching others.

The US is at 63,000 dead, 1 million cases. Look at the testing data?

https://iea.org.uk/the-nhs-blame-game/

"Far be it for me to defend the government, but in the absence of any evidence that politicians actively discouraged stockpiling of PPE, it seems to me that at least some of the blame for the shortage should be laid at the door of the people working in procurement at multi-billion pound organisations who are specifically tasked with stockpiling it. But no, let’s just blame “the government”."

The absolute certainty, and complete lack of nuance, with which people approach this issue and cast their accusations at the government looks entirely political.

You would be better quoting someone with the first f*cking idea about what they are talking about!

Edit: Tufton Street again of course.

Unfortunately what Mr Snowdon has omitted is that the company responsible for the distribution of ppe is owned by the Dept of health, and under the direct (named) control of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (currently Matt Hancock). 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Coordination_Limited

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10881715/persons-with-significan...

So yes, I agree, the blame should be laid at the door of the multi million £ company responsible (costs estimated at £250m pa), and its owners / directors.

A government department, no less.

NB - they did have some stockpiles, but they were very soon exhausted, and the company responsible for sourcing appear to have been caught with their trousers down a bit. But who could possibly own / control that company, i wonder......

NB 2 - Wasn't it Matt hancock who said the challenges weren't in the supply, but in the distribution. He should know, he's in charge of it.

Yes, it just makes stuff complex and gives the illusion of accuracy. But all those parameters are still based on estimates of the reproduction rate and times that have pretty large error margins. So it is a lot of precision engineering on top of shaky foundations.

In my field (condensed matter physics) one of the problems of modelling/theory is that it is very easy to calculate predictions and very expensive to varify them. And it pays of scientifically to find something interesting. So theorists are incentivized play with models until something interesting shows up. Experimentalists can check the predictions, but will only put in the hard work if it actually is interesting. The rest goes unpublished, resulting in a false feedback loop about the predictive capability of the theories.

modelling 101

it is a hard balance to get right. But UK probably errs on the side of too centralized.

Was that Cummings' doing? I've read reports that it was Cummings who pushed the panel towards doing what most other countries were doing.

Isnt the conclusion then that if your political agenda is to devolve healthcare to a pseudo private structure you'd better make sure you have an adequate oversight process?  Just because the government has outsourced this doesn't release it from its obligations and responsibilities. 

Just an aside, but the WHO has today quoted Sweden as a template for Covid19 restriction. No lockdown at all in Sweden, just social distancing.

Interestingly, they actually brought it more in house by the creation of this company. It was previously contracted out to DHL. 

Uk doesn't have a real lock down either, masses of kids of key workers still going to school, key workers in a multitude of jobs,  dog walking, exercise, shopping, diy etc. The difference between the UK and sweden is not as wide as the press makes out. 

Did they?

I thought that was exaggerated. The death rate per capita is one of the worst in the world (worse than the USA).

they still banned mass events while the U.K. held Cheltenham races.

That's not really a fair description of what Dr Ryan of the WHO said. There is a clip of him speaking in this https://nypost.com/2020/04/29/who-lauds-sweden-as-model-for-resisting-coron...

It seems he is more suggesting that moving into the future there is going to have to be a similar compact between governments and people to social distance. Sweden is doing badly in terms of the impacts of covid 19 compared to both its neighbours that it shares a border with and compared to Denmark across the bridge.

I haven't seen any official figures but most secondary schools I've seen reports from, via teachers' professional groups on social media, are seeing below 1 percent of their student's coming in. My school of 1,200 is getting 2 - 5 students coming in. It seems higher for primaries but not significantly so. It's very easy to socially distance with 4 kids in a school set up for 12 hundred. I don't think "masses" is any way a fair description.

Converitng that to policy is another job  and in this case absolutely political.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8275365/PIERS-MORGAN-Boris-boast-w...

Ive started agreeing with Piers Morgan!

...in the DM. It's the End of Days.

This simply isn't happening in secondary schools. My own former school of around 1500 students only has 9 attendees, the majority of whom are troubled souls. If one of the purposes of this initiative was to free up key workers with secondary age kids from childcare issues, it hasn't worked. Arrangements for school opening as part of easing lockdown will need to take account of this. For instance, half-day opening would be a real headache for many parents.

They do say the campaign has arguably been too successful as most people are too scared to do anything now. 

I think the answer is tough. These unusual times will likely continue for a year or more. There is no return to normality and we just have to adapt in differing ways. 

Better to send kids back 2 to 3 whole days per week if the plan was to spread them out more in school. 5 half days is very inefficient. 

Couldn't agree more.  Can't understand why the government is so fixated on political point scoring.  They should simply admit they screwed up the initial response and move on.

Sorry I missed your post.

It’s hard to see how we went down that route, if Cummings was against it, it’s even harder to know why the modellers apparently got so much traction.  We’ll probably all find out one day.  Wouldn’t be the first time my theories on who did what turn out to be completely wrong...

The problem is we don’t have any historical data - or even sufficient contemporary data - for this particular virus, so we end up with more free parameters in the model than data points being extrapolated from which should have set alarm bells ringing.

I do agree - and have said before - that these models help hi lite the key parameter.  However with an exponential mechanic the key parameter is clear - the growth rate, R0.  Decisions on how to lower that can and should be led by clinical and biomechanical data - I’ve seen some great visualisations of sneezing with masks on etc.  One area the models do seem to have real power is in comparing different kinds of social mixing in relaxing lockdown, but again that should be led by healthcare admissions.

Yup.  Totally agree.

No problem, there is plenty of stuff in life more important than responding to online discussions...

Maybe Cummings first pushed for herd immunity and was faster to change his mind? Who knows until the meeting reports will go in the public inquiry afterwards.

But even the exponential mechanic is an assumption... although a reasonable one.

I've looked a bit at Dutch and German data.

Dutch data (hospital admission per day) does what you expect: steady exponential growth with R0 = 3 before it drops and the cases decrease.

But German data (based on a lot of testing and backdating to the day symptoms started) are more superexponential at the start. R0 was around 1.5 for a while, then increased to about 3 and then directly fell back to below 1. The peak in R0 is about 2 weeks before the official lockdown. Also the decrease of the cases per day fits better to a linear model than to an exponential one.

To return briefly to the OP;

'grumble grumble, can't believe all these immature people trying to make this crisis political, so silly, grumble grumble. Oh whilst you are here let me take a quick non-political shot at Corbyn, that seems relevent.' 

Seems a little contrary perhaps? 

Well I think Chris Witty has a reasonable grasp of the issues. You only have to look at just some of his background..

Whitty is a practising National Health Service (NHS) consultant physician at University College London Hospitals (UCLH) and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, and Gresham Professor of Physic at Gresham College.[8] Until becoming CMO he was Professor of Public and International Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).[9] In 2008, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the LSHTM £31 million for malaria research in Africa. At the time, Whitty was the principal investigator for the ACT Consortium, which conducted the research programme.

Etc etc.

As a lay person despite his formidable CV I have become less impressed with Whitty; seems to me he has failed to clarify things or be particularly clear about what the strategy is or what the priorities are. I have a rule of thumb: if someone isn't very good at explaining stuff, maybe they're not quite as on top of it as they would like you to believe.

It will be interesting to watch the 'independent Sage group' midday on youtube. 

They advise, its the govt responsibility to come up with the strategy. Think you are looking in the wrong place for the answers......listen to the Welcome Trust guy who sits on SAGE to figure out the difference ( on R4 this morning)...well worth a listen... and as he says the advise changes as the science changes

He is pretty clear imho.

David King I who wil chair this alternative you tube is  you look at his science background a chemical physicst. His big thing was climate change., he really brough that to the fore.

Both are clearly top notch in their respective fields, but would consider Witty 's background is more  relevant at the mo.

Remember how they got elected. It is ALWAYS someone else's fault. Doesn't matter what it is. ALWAYS. That's the only way you can bullshit your way to power on the brexit platform. It's now a crippling barrier to moving forward constructively with public trust in our government.

jk