UKC

With the luxury of hindsight from hearing what Boris said on Sunday night about his plans to end the lockdown, and how world events have unfolded so far, what should Boris be doing right now and for the next 3 months?

Well for a start manufacturing and construction has always been allowed in the lockdown, as long as you followed the guidelines.It was a horrible confused message in that respect.

He should had juut waited until the 50 page document which is being released today was available and done the announcement at the same time. Pretty simple.

Me, I think he looks washed out and still ill, he should step back and recover for a few more weeks.

I dont think weeks is long enough for the poor man. Perhaps it should be months... No. Years. Years would definitely be better...

Entirely agree. Trying to set out a high level strategy, without releasing the detail that sits beneath it, is a recipe for disaster. It just creates confusion and questions, which lead to chaos. 

He needs to explain to the nation that it needs to accept risk as part of normal life. If we want any sort of prosperity, our children educated and houses built then the nation has to understand that life won’t be quite as safe as it was 6 months ago. Yes take steps to reduce risk but the risk can’t be reduced to zero.

I do have a pet theory that he is going to resign for health reasons and jack it all in. After all life was cushy a few months ago.Now it is a bit more difficult.

This!

What an absolute joke. Leak loads of stuff to the press, do a press conference that has lead to mass confusion and then give the guidance afterwards?! What a mess.

He could have tried this:

Stay home >protect the NHS > Save lives. 

Not ideal, but rather less ambiguity than last night

The government is pretty competent at propaganda and campaign tactics, not so much at leadership in times of crisis.

What should he be doing?

The first thing he should do is admit that policy has not been as effective as it needs to be as people are dying now who caught the virus mid April. 

With this in mind they should have a proper lock down, starting next week to allow time to prepare. This lock down will last 3 to 4 weeks and we'll stamp out the virus. Exact lock down rules specifically for different geographical areas as one size fits all doesn't work. Permits required to go out and a f*cking good reason needed too. Test and trace all keyworkers and chase the last infections until they're in the history books. 

Two different questions - your title asks what he should have said; your post asks what he should do.

The first is easy - he should have used the immense resources available to him to produce a clear, unambiguous statement of what the current rules are, and as much as he's able to say about what's changing soon, admitting the areas he does not yet know; then he should have said that. His speech should have been made AFTER the detailed guidance was released so that we didn't, for example, have people being told they have to go back to work the next day while their employer hadn't been able to prepare, and they had no childcare and/or transport available.

The latter is very hard. We need to start getting the economy moving again as soon as possible, but the lockdown hasn't really worked - we've been seeing something close to a constant number of deaths per day for the last few weeks, so relaxing the lockdown will very likely cause it to start rising again in a runaway manner. Other countries seem to have managed to get their daily deaths dropping before releasing lockdown, so stand a better chance of keeping them dropping as they relax (albeit at a slower rate than during their lockdowns). So I don't know.

His advice to return to work related to manufacturing and construction. Alot of manufacturing and also construction was already back at work anyway( and never stopped)......

Come out of this was never going to be easy, but his messaging was terrible.

I agree about what you call the campaign tactics, if you mean the techniques of deliberate ambiguity, distraction and spin that they regularly employ. It looks like they're trying to shift responsibility to the populace too, so there's a readily available scapegoat if it all goes pear-shaped. But I'm not so sure about their propaganda in that their comms have been bloody awful really. 

Yep. I don't pretend to know the best way forward, but the government communication has been absolutely atrocious, all in all.

He certainly doesn't seem to be relishing the challenge that he has been confronted with, in a way that others might - if it was me(!) my priorities would be to get a firm handle on the numbers, so we have consistent reporting and can begin to tell what's going in with infection rates in the general population, reinfection rates and so on; review PPE requirements for each different discipline and environment, compare that to current stocks and procurement, and fix the shortfall by procurement and manufacturing; and finally establish protocols for greatest at risk groups and care homes to minimise risk to them. E.g. by physically visiting all BAME and other at risk groups  with underlying health conditions, ensuring they don't need to go out e.g. to get food, and advise on isolation measures and why they are important. (We're supposed to have 750,000 volunteers raring to go - what are they doing at the moment?)

This would have been a big ask 8 weeks ago, but now it isn't; production lines for Lancaster bombers in the UK and tanks in the USSR were set up in less. I really don't think anyone from the hapless Johnson and his fall guy Hancock down has the slightest idea how to make things happen.  

'I do have a pet theory that he is going to resign for health reasons and jack it all in. '

I'm not sure how well his personal life is going either - even in these dire circumstances wouldn't the loving parents of a newborn usually be sharing the obligatory pose? The stress in No 10 must be horrific.

As much as I am not a fan of Boris, why does he need to go before the media and perform an obligatory pose with a newborn?

Because hat is the sort of thing that populist politicians and the supporters of politicians love!

Re number of deaths - looks like a clear declining trend to me, which graphs are you looking at?

AFAIKS the speech yesterday was mostly trying to encourage people to work within the current guidelines, announce some small relaxations, and set out a possible timeline. 
 

not dissimilar to what (say) macron did a couple of weeks ago.

Because that is the sort of thing that the happy parents of new born children usually want to do for their own sakes - share their bundle of joy with the world etc etc. To the extent that if/when they don't then that can indicate a whole variety of issues, none of which are much fun. If that is the case, and I would rather it were not so, then they have my heartfelt sympathy.

I would imagine that, by now, the novelty has worn off for him...

This one, disregarding the last few days as they'll be amended upwards as the figures come in.

It doesn't look like a clear decline at all, to me, perhaps a slight downwards slope. Is that wrong?

Ah, that's cases isn't it, sorry!

I would quite like to know how many of the people advocating the most restrictive measures are middle class, salaried and being paid.  I suspect many people who are not currently being paid would be keen to get back to work, whatever.

My proposed saying would be "If you cannot maintain 2 metres distance between you and the next person do not do it."  It being whatever it is you want to do. With the caveat that particularly vulnerable people should carry on as before.

Al

The other side to this is mainly the manual workers who are going back. What they see is Office workers working safe from home say crack on lads, let's have you out there whilst I'm safe in here. 

I suspect non salaried workers are the most keen to get back to work.  

Al

If I thought that would work, I'd support it, and I suspect the vast majority of the population would too. Sadly, I don't think I've seen any credible suggestion that it's possible from our current infection numbers. We're well past the stage where "stamping it out" is one of the options on the table.

There might be a good case for extending, or even tightening, the current lockdown. But false hope of elimination is not the right case to make.

"Everything I'm about to say applies to England only, not the UK"

Would have made things much clearer.

Well my team of manual workers do not want to be stuck at home... so are more than happy to come in. I had one person saying there is no way he wanted to stay couped up.

And the other side of the coin is that alot of those who work at home also get fed up and want to go into an office as there is a stronger sense of community etc etc.

So it is not black and white.

That's recorded cases isn't it? Given test numbers have grown a lot, there probably is a reduction, possibly a big one. 

yep - which is upset by the increased testing capacity - that graph with orange and green bars for NHS and additonal tests probably best shows whats going on with cases.

And going off statistics, especially male workers most likely to die from Covid 19 compared to other workers and genders.

But it's a matter of weighing up the odds and the odds of a young healthy male dying from this virus are still very low I would have thought.  The odds of losing your income for the foreseeable future may be much higher in some peoples opinions.

Al

But don't forget that the death recording has been notoriously inaccurate and understated at weekends  ever sinc the start of these records and graphs. The apparent decline has coincided with a 3 day bank holiday, so it would be unwise to draw any immediate conclusions from the last three graphs

Quite a lot of us on here saying what Boris and his government have done wrong, but what should they be doing in the short and medium term to help the nation?

And as somebody mentioned further up the discussion, why isn't the Home Sec fielding questions rather than the PM and Foreign Sec?

My thoughts are, accept where we are now, and what little PPE we have and work the problem from there.

Start some sort process of creating a manufacturing industry for producing PPE, and never let this be outsourced to another country again, ever! You don't need to have an industry for every form of PPE, just have something that can produce the essentials.

Focus testing to Nursing Homes and Rest Homes as a priority for staff and residents. Make them the focus for reducing the virus to zero or as near as possible.

Then focus testing to schools, as best as possible to try and reduce the spread of the virus among children and back to the home environment which will then go back to the working world if not kept under control.

Employers and workers can do the best that they can to reduce the spread of the virus with what ever tools and technique they can at their disposal.

Slowly as the virus reduces, consider opening the food and leisure industry.

And above all control our borders and implement quarantine of some sort for people entering the country. And no back scratching allowing people entering from certain ports such as France. With Eire, we just have to hope and accept that they will be vigilant with people entering through their borders. If some airlines go under then so be it. We may even be able to address Global Warming with this.

And finally have the mindset that we may never find a cure for this particular virus.

I agree, most of my guys have been begging to come back for weeks, once the novelty wore off (took about 2 to 3 days in the most part). 

Nothing is black and white but I have been hearing for weeks now from people out on site that they feel like cannon fodder when their manager, supervisors, team leaders etc are sending them out by remote. 

Just thought I'd share

youtube.com/watch?v=HgLijdwuCeg&

This, along with some education on what has a high risk of transmission versus low or negligible risk, so people can apply sense to everyday situations. 

Yes - we all do our own risk assessment - if it’s 100% chance of losing the roof over your head versus 0.1% chance of getting seriously ill, I reckon most people will go to work. 

Indeed; we can only reduce infection if we understand the transmission mechanisms. So I would like to see that work is being done to get a clear understanding on that, which would then lead to informed guidance.

Worryingly, I am seeing case studies from the US that suggest that the 2m exclusion isn't good enough in enclosed spaces, especially in the presence of forced air circulation (e.g. air con). So all those lovely air-conditioned offices could well be rather dangerous. The studies also suggest it is aerosol infection, rather than surface contact infection, that predominates.

Now, whether these cases studies are well performed, accurate, and globally representative, rather than merely anecdotal, is harder to determine...

My feeling is that, having looked at the approximate downward trend of death rate over the last month in the uk, it looks roughly like deaths per day are dropping by about 250 every 2 weeks. We're currently around the 250-500 mark. So I kind of think after another 3 weeks, we'd hopefully get to around the 50-100 deaths a day.

Flu apparently kills 17000 a year in the uk, so about 50 a day. That is a level of deaths from a preventable infectious disease that many people dont give a monkeys about (source.. my wife who's job it was to try and get people to have their annual flu vaccine).

https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-compare-influenza/

I cant see our CV numbers getting to zero, but maintaining an R1 at a level of around 50 deaths a day seems a reasonable compromise, particularly if we are potentially only 3 weeks or so away from that. Kind of feels we are so close! And I feel these stats could be sold on the uk public fairly easily.

But then again I have friends in the events industry who have described some of their friends and colleagues as being destitute, which is very difficult to hear.