Coronavirus - Overall
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@Billy-Tell said in Coronavirus - Overall:
Ironically his mistress is Ms Staats.
Always suspected Neil Fergusson was massaging and fiddling his Staats.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Billy-Tell said in Coronavirus - Overall:
Ironically his mistress is Ms Staats.
Always suspected Neil Fergusson was massaging and fiddling his Staats.
Well played
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This is not a glowing endorsement of Britain's covid-19 response.
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Just had the following comment on the Coronavirus crisis from a Facebook friend which struck a chord. (He recently retired as a v. successful CEO and is a seriously top bloke )
"Leaders make their decisions under time pressure and looking through the blurred front windscreen, obscured by bad weather and lots of fast moving obstacles.
Historians look through the rear windscreen with the benefit of all the factual information available with total hindsight.
Commentators criticise with minimal knowledge and zero consequences of action
Most journalists will just write any old crap."*
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I'm wary of reading too much into articles like this.
A lot of the people quoted criticising the government on Coronavirus too often turn out to have seriously political axes to grind and often what's said turns out to be laughable bollocks or so biased as to be useless. The Sunday Times article and the Panorama PPE programme being two cases in point.
Of course there have made fuck-ups and wrong decisions taken, but it's way too early to say if they should have been different based on what was known at the time or which politician was in charge.
Not that you'd expect don't expect the UK media to understand this or do much serious fact-checking or analysis......
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@antipodean said in Coronavirus - Overall:
This is not a glowing endorsement of Britain's covid-19 response.
Very interesting article, @antipodean . Touches on the obvious weak spot in UK response.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - Overall:
I'm wary of reading too much into articles like this.
A lot of the people quoted criticising the government on Coronavirus too often turn out to have seriously political axes to grind and often what's said turns out to be laughable bollocks or so biased as to be useless. The Sunday Times article and the Panorama PPE programme being two cases in point.
Couldn't agree more.
Of course there have made fuck-ups and wrong decisions taken, but it's way too early to say if they should have been different based on what was known at the time or which politician was in charge.
Not that you'd expect don't expect the UK media to understand this or do much serious fact-checking or analysis......
@Victor-Meldrew I entirely agree about the tendency of press to make Harry Hindsight judgements.
However, in this case, the vulnerability of care homes was apparent as far back as mid-March.
The most critical lockdown was to care homes. The plan should have been to test carers DAILY and eliminate visitors.
In other words to aim to keep CV right out of the system.
In practice, I suspect there were at least two problems:
- Shortage of testing materials; and
- Insufficient back up staff. On the basis a fair number of carers tested positive, where could the reserves be sourced from?
Nevertheless, the imperatives weren't hard to identify, so to my mind had the Government been on the ball (or not so focused on NHS) I'd have thought by Easter a proper plan could have been put in place.
That would have allowed a bigger relaxation now.
As is, it seems only yesterday that it was admitted at the daily briefing there WAS a problem.
Having said ALL that, care homes aside, I don't think UK has done a bad job.
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@pakman said in Coronavirus - Overall:
Shortage of testing materials; and
Insufficient back up staff. On the basis a fair number of carers tested positive, where could the reserves be sourced fromFair points.
I understand the problem is that care staff go from home to home - i.e care homes staff are shared - and that carers could be infected transmit the disease but not long enough to show up positive on a test, but I'm no expert.
They did announce that vulnerable people would be shielded early on and it does make you wonder if there was an assumption Local Government would be doing this for care homes and it kinda fell thru the cracks.
Having said ALL that, care homes aside, I don't think UK has done a bad job.
Read that Italy and other countries haven't included all their Care Home deaths yet. Even then, on a per capita basis, the UK has been about average.
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I want to be angry at the government. I want to hate Boris and stand from the rooftops stating he has blood on his hands. This country has suffered badly, very badly and they are the government.
But I just can’t. I feel a sense of duty to stick with them. Not because they’ve done a great job - I don’t think they have. But we are in this together. I’ve done my bit, as has most of the country. We’ve distanced, we’ve clapped, we’ve helped out others, we’ve done what’s been asked.
But most of all, two main reasons. Twitter and the media. Both have tried to divide at a time where unity is paramount. Standing by the government is my own protest against both of these despicable mediums. Both are cesspits with rare jewels, the inverse of what they should be.
It’s been quite an eye opener for me.
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The overwhelming majority of deaths in NZ have been in rest homes. My wife is in one run by the same outfit as one of the ones with fatalities. They instigated a strict no visitor policy two weeks before we moved to Lvl 2. All staff are in full PPE - all the time. Every staff member has their temperature taken at the start of every shift and the residents twice a day. Yet still they had an outbreak.
We've seen here that when there has been a rest home with an outbreak patients are moved into a public hospital because of a lack of staff resources in the rest home. We are lucky to have that option.
The article suggests things were much different in the UK. Looking from afar with hindsight it does seem like the UK wasted the little time it had to get its shit together.
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@dogmeat said in Coronavirus - Overall:
The overwhelming majority of deaths in NZ have been in rest homes. My wife is in one run by the same outfit as one of the ones with fatalities. They instigated a strict no visitor policy two weeks before we moved to Lvl 2. All staff are in full PPE - all the time. Every staff member has their temperature taken at the start of every shift and the residents twice a day. Yet still they had an outbreak.
We've seen here that when there has been a rest home with an outbreak patients are moved into a public hospital because of a lack of staff resources in the rest home. We are lucky to have that option.
The article suggests things were much different in the UK. Looking from afar with hindsight it does seem like the UK wasted the little time it had to get its shit together.
I hope your wife is heathy and well there, must be a scary time for everyone in Rest Homes at the moment.
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@MajorRage said in Coronavirus - Overall:
I want to be angry at the government. I want to hate Boris and stand from the rooftops stating he has blood on his hands. This country has suffered badly, very badly and they are the government.
But I just can’t. I feel a sense of duty to stick with them. Not because they’ve done a great job - I don’t think they have. But we are in this together. I’ve done my bit, as has most of the country. We’ve distanced, we’ve clapped, we’ve helped out others, we’ve done what’s been asked.
Pretty much sums things up, but I keep asking myself two questions:
First, could the government have done better?
In hindsight, absolutely. But they have followed the scientific advice they received, published that advice where possible and seem to have done the best they could. Some things have been brilliant (NHS capacity, ventilators), others impossible to get 100% right (testing & PPE), Care homes look to have been a mistake.
Second, would any other government done any better or worse?
Other than by luck, probably not.
But most of all, two main reasons. Twitter and the media. Both have tried to divide at a time where unity is paramount. Standing by the government is my own protest against both of these despicable mediums. Both are cesspits with rare jewels, the inverse of what they should be.
It's the sheer ineptitude of the the likes of the media, like the BBC & Times, thinking they can push out fake news and obvious political bias and not get called out, that gets me.
And Twitter can just go fuck itself.
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@dogmeat said in Coronavirus - Overall:
The article suggests things were much different in the UK. Looking from afar with hindsight it does seem like the UK wasted the little time it had to get its shit together
There's been a raft of stories on this. Much of it simply wrong.
E.g. the Sunday Times ran a story 3-4 weeks ago trying to make the point that the government had sat on its hands for weeks. The story proved to be bollocks after the government published a detailed timetable of the actions they took from mid-January - meeting dates, attendees etc. See link.
That said, it's fair to say that wrong decisions were made and the advisors have said that they got some of the advice they gave to the government wrong.
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@Victor-Meldrew My own pov is that the only countries remotely prepared for a pandemic were those that had been through SARS.
I know NZ's MoH had a pretty comprehensive Pandemic Plan (my company's plan references it consistently) but were caught out by the speed at which it developed. Which is why we went from nothing much going one here, look at the those poor buggers overseas to Holy Fuck LOCKDOWN in a matter of days.
The NZ Plan talked blithely about school shut downs, mass gatherings banned and thousands of body bags but clearly when it moves from an academic exercise to grim reality everything gets real.
I sympathise with how difficult it must be for any govt. Multiple experts taking totally contrary positions - often the same experts contradicting themselves and then suddenly every media commentator and poster on social media is talking as though they've been studying virology for decades.
NZ had the benefit of a couple of weeks - maybe a month that the UK didn't but we did go early and we did go hard. The UK had less time but for whatever reason flip-flopped and then had some mixed messaging. The second advantage NZ has enjoyed is clarity of communication. Clear, concise, consistent, constant. Everyone understood so almost everyone accepted - particularly in the early days.
I share your frustration with the media. We have the same issues here on a smaller scale. The real analysis of what went right and wrong will take time and will colour our preparation for next time. Which will be a mistake - fighting the last war... COVID has behaved differently to the Spanish Flu or rather we are radically different from out great grandparents generation. Not realising that was the first mistake everyone made.
I do hope that there is one similarity to a century ago - that those that went into lockdown fared better economically. the shit storm is only just getting underway -
so why is Russia's mortality rates so much lower?
Reporting massive numbers of infections, yet death numbers remain reasonably low...is it an anomoly that will correct itself in time, or is there something else?
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@dogmeat said in Coronavirus - Overall:
The article suggests things were much different in the UK. Looking from afar with hindsight it does seem like the UK wasted the little time it had to get its shit together
There's been a raft of stories on this. Much of it simply wrong.
E.g. the Sunday Times ran a story 3-4 weeks ago trying to make the point that the government had sat on its hands for weeks. The story proved to be bollocks after the government published a detailed timetable of the actions they took from mid-January - meeting dates, attendees etc. See link.
That said, it's fair to say that wrong decisions were made and the advisors have said that they got some of the advice they gave to the government wrong.
While that press release certainly lays bare some of the errors in the ST article, I get two main things from it. First, it consistently heaps praise on Boris like a campaign piece (which makes you feel that facts are being tailored to suit a narrative, just as the ST article itself). Secondly they refer a lot to meetings and discussions as claims of 'action'.
I agree that it isn't fair to claim that they were dismissing a threat but if you look at a chart of the 'R' rate in the UK, it was over 4 for a couple of weeks before lockdown. This is what caused the hurt. A length of time with a high transmission rate is the common factor in all countries with deep problems that are hard to shake off.
Speed of firm action is not what was shown by the UK Govt. They may have done lots of planning and talking but weren't decisive when it counted. -
@dogmeat there was certainly some shit communication but right leaning govt was never going to shut down everything the way NZ did. By nature most of their voters are business and they can’t just order people to stop.
Maybe that would have been a better response - time will tell, but they could never do it.
Reality is that with the airport hubs, demographics and London, the UK never stood a chance. Never. I think we would have needed to lock down mid Jan to get NZ results. The virus was already here snd in the public domain without question by Feb. I strongly believe in the COBR meetings at end of Jan, the scientists were saying it’s already here and in the people. All you can do is try to contain it.
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This is obviously all said with the experience of hindsight but have a look at this..
Estimates of the R rate at that date was between 3 and 4.
Potential for exponential growth throughout the country without immediate isolating action. Lockdown didn't start for another 11 days. That is 11 days of spread at a rate over 3