My biggest issue with the way the whole thing has been handled is not Boris . Let’s be honest, our political system means that whichever leader had been in charge was doomed to fail. And that’s because the Department of Health, Public Health England and the NHS trusts, hospitals and care homes have been shown to woefully ill prepared for any such crisis.
If I ran an NHS trust (and they’re well paid to do so) I’d be embarrassed that I didn’t have business continuity / contingency plans in place for basic PPE. Ventilators, sure, I’d accept that might be out of scope. If I was a senior civil servant in the Department of Health / PHE I’d be embarrassed that I had no plans for a large scale transmissible disease (I didn’t expect them to have plans for this precise eventuality, but I did think they’d have plans...) I’d also be embarrassed that I had no established way of easily collating data from hospitals. If I ran a care home I’d consider myself negligent accepting a patient/guest/customer/inmate without a negative COViD test. Sure, they might not have been a protocol in place, but they are all aware of their duty of care, and of H&S obligations. It’s not rocket science to go, hang on, there’s a really infectious disease going round. I want a negative test before you’re admitted. All of these organisation will say they were just following orders, I’m sure. But that’s a poor excuse, and shows an endemic lack of both skills and leadership.
Sure, Ministers are ultimately responsible. But in the short term they can only work with what they’ve got. I’ve seen Yes Minister ;) And of course they’re swayed by public opinion and the media. It’s laughable that the data collation problem at PHE was because they were using an excel file format superseded in 2007...that’s not any politicians fault, just sheer incompetence ion the part of whoever specc’ed and runs IT for the civil service.
I think that had Corbyn been in charge his indecisiveness would have led to tens of thousands more deaths early on, and chaos later. Had Starmer been in charge then we’d have probably had different, more consistent decisions, based on more (not necessarily better) evidence, but later. Lawyers provide advice, when in possession of all the facts. They hate making decisions. We still wouldn’t have locked down earlier, we would still have had the issues in care homes and we wouldn’t have had as good a support package from the chancellor. We probably would have a better test and trace process. Though whether we’d have used it, or complied is a different question... I’m not sure about communication and messaging - I actually think that the nudge method was working pretty well, until they cracked under media pressure. The punchy three works slogan at the beginning worked well. To well. It scared everyone too much! We might have closed borders, though to little benefit. We’d have ended up with a different shaped curve but, I suspect, the same overall outcome. And that’s that’s because none of the systematic failings in any of the organisations involved would have been avoided. Let’s not forget that Sturgeons ‘decisiveness’ is what sent COVID positive patients from hospitals to care homes... Certainly those I know in Scotland are very unimpressed by her dictator like approach. Didn’t she say in august that they’d almost eradicate it from Scotland?
Last edited by: VxFan on Sat 10 Oct 20 at 21:05
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