Coronavirus | Page 119 | Vital Football

Coronavirus

This is not my work, but it sums it up. Almost every single one of these failures was actually raised at the time on this thread.

Long term failures which left the UK vulnerable to the covid pandemic:

1. Failure to address problems of inequality and poverty (partly resulting from policies of austerity) which left millions more vulnerable to infection than they should have been.
2. Failure to improve public health in the wider population; life expectancy was dropping in the UK before the pandemic struck.
3. Failure to resource the NHS adequately.
4. Failure to integrate provision for the elderly in care homes with NHS services successfully.
5. Failure to realise that an ideological reluctance to trust local government and to rely on centralised consultancy and outsourcing compromised resilience.
6. Failure to take on board the lessons from preparedness studies such as the twenty two recommendations made by Exercise Cygnus in 2016.

Short term failures in the run up to and during the covid pandemic:

1. Failure of Johnson to attend the first five Cobra meetings addressing covid in late January and February, 2020.
2. Failure to initiate first lockdown soon enough to be effective.
3. Failure to cancel mass sporting gatherings (Cheltenham, international rugby fixtures and Liverpool vs Atlético Madrid) in a timely fashion.
4. Failure to exhibit any curiosity about the experiences of other countries ahead of the UK in the early stages of the pandemic and to learn from them.
5. Failure to police borders / international arrivals effectively (or at all) either at the beginning of the first wave or subsequently.
6. Failure to source effective testing kits.
7. Failure to introduce an effective test, trace and isolate system in spite of colossal expenditure levels.
8. Failure to supply personal protective equipment.
9. Failure to understand the seriousness of the early stages of the pandemic by flirting with the idea of herd immunity through infection.
10. Failure to prevent infected patients being sent to care homes.
11. Failure to sack Dominic Cummings for breaking lockdown regulations.
12. Failure to expand NHS capacity effectively – there were never enough staff to man Nightingale hospitals effectively.
13. Failure to prevent more than 8,000 people dying from covid infections acquired in hospitals.
14. Failure to address the inability of many poorer students to access online learning opportunities during lockdown.
15. Failure to award GCSE and A Level grades without discriminating against poorer students and without producing massive and unwarranted grade inflation.
16. Failure to come out of the first lockdown effectively and eradicate the virus; eat out to check out didn’t help out in this respect and suspending stamp duty on house sales was just an irrelevant sop to Tory voters.
17. Failure of Johnson to exercise effective judgement and leadership by, instead, delegating decision-making to an ill-defined process of “following the science”.
18. Failure to realise that the return of students to university in October would raise infection rates significantly.
19. Failure to understand quickly that high infection rates would increase the probability of the virus mutating in favour of making it more transmissible.
20. Failure to initiate second and third lockdowns as soon as they should have been initiated compounded, in December, by fantasy predictions of easing over Christmas.
21. Failure to manage government contracts effectively by putting them out to public tender; many were awarded to companies run by Tory donors, etc.
22. Failure to publish details of government contracts within the legal thirty day period – a failure about which Johnson subsequently misled parliament and, thereby, breached the ministerial code.
23. Failure to appoint to key posts as effectively (and as transparently) as should have happened with appointments to the Tory chumocracy being a key feature.
24. Failure to provide income compensation for those (supposed to be) isolating at home.
25. Failure to provide income compensation for the majority of self employed people.
26. Failure to ensure that payments to businesses (in the form of Closed Businesses Lockdown Payments) didn’t go to criminals.
27. Failure to ensure that furlough payments didn’t go either to very wealthy individuals (some of them billionaires) or to the enterprises which they control.
28. Failure to provide food for disadvantaged children during school holidays.
29. Failure to grant those working in the NHS an above inflation pay award on the first anniversary of the start of the pandemic.
30. Failure to add India to the red list of travel restricted countries when it became apparent that it was a source of an especially transmissible strain of the virus.
 
You can add:

- Failure of some of the population to adhere to pandemic covid restrictions.
- Failure of some of the population to realise that there was fake covid news, especially about vaccinations.

- Failure to read the lessons learnt on the last pandemic.. Hang on was there ever one written?
 
Michael Lewis' new book "The Premonition" is outstanding. I strongly suspect that you could apply some of the systematic failures of US Government health institutions in reacting to this crisis to our very own government and come away with some worrying parallels..
 
Michael Lewis' new book "The Premonition" is outstanding. I strongly suspect that you could apply some of the systematic failures of US Government health institutions in reacting to this crisis to our very own government and come away with some worrying parallels..

May read that.
 
This thread is a little technical, but gives some good news among the bad: people with double dose vaccinations accounted for only 3.7% of India infections, and only 5% of hospital admissions. Full-dose vaccines appear about as effective as they are against Kent variant, although single dose effectiveness appears to be down.


UK still wants to lift all restrictions on June 21. I have my second jab on July 2, so for me it's back to home deliveries and sitting in a room doing nothing but work for another month. Great.
 
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So this is the target that has been set for the UK in the additional 4 weeks, notice the boost to second vaccinations to hit the target!
 
Can you say: third wave?

Well fourth one...already had last spring, then last autumn, and then the Christmas into new year one. So now on the fourth one. Guess the media will keep calling all subsequent waves, the "third wave" as it saves them keeping count.
 
Scotland mega rampant again.
Don't know if brands of vaccines used is relevant in any way. Did Scotland get given mostly astrid xeneca for example and its not working too great against the deltic variant?
Or other reasons?
 
Surge testing accounts for the large risrs in reported cases today, apparently.

Although (and don't know about England and Wales) but in Scotland, the positivity rate from tests is also shooting up, around 2 to 3% a while back and now over 9%. So there are actually a lot more infected people out there.
 
Surge testing reveals a more accurate calculation of real cases because it picks up asymptomatics, so you can assume the actual daily case rate in the whole UK is currently in the 20000s.

Hopefully with the extent of vaccination the peak won't be too far off and this will be more a ripple than a wave.

The idea of what is a wave is a little arbitrary and can differ by region. For example where I live in the north east our second wave was October 2020 when we had some of the highest rates in the country (students, mainly). After that we were mainly in tier 3 so rates dropped and our January peak was only around 260/100K, the Alpha strain never really running out of control. We are about to exceed that rate now, however, as Delta runs through the un/partially-vaccinated.