>> Of course the government hasn't got everything wrong, even a stopped clock is right twice
>> a day
I think Manatee has hit the nail on the head. The greatest of the government’s failings is Testing and Track/Trace.
Testing seems to have been behind the curve from the word go. Whether the issue as administering the tests or getting samples analysed and the results back quickly enough to be useful or a combination of all three Johnson and Handcock have consistently over promised and under delivered. The supposed hitting of the 100,000 tests a day mark at end April was a bare faced deception with double counting and tests that got no further than being kits for posting out being added in. As of now they’re off beam for what’s been promised this month and the ‘Moonshot’ project has been scaled back.
On tracing there was, as I pointed out replying to Devonite, an established infrastructure for this in Local Authorities and the NHS. It’s long been used for dealing with notifiable diseases like TB, typhoid etc, for food poisoning and of course STDs. Instead of using and building on that they tried to re-invent the wheel.
A so called world beating app was abandoned after it failed the most basic testing. Even now we’ve got something based on the Apple/Google underpinnings the IT trade said would be required it’s still not working as it should. And what exactly is Lady Harding for?
There’s an article here:
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/13/what-has-gone-wrong-with-englands-covid-test-and-trace-system
It’s from The Guardian and you might discount for that paper’s slant but the basic facts it spells out seem beyond refute.
It’s very easy to try and blame the Care Homes, the NHS or the regulator for the early surge in cases where people were discharged without being tested. The direction to proceed rapidly with discharge of ‘bed blockers’ was made by Minsters. In and of itself that’s reasonable but the failure to ensure testing and indeed mandate it was again a deliberate decision. Amnesty International has produced a report on this:
tinyurl.com/y4osvwhx
I suggest reading the executive summary and in particular the debunking of the government’s lie that a protective ring was thrown around care homes. See also the bullet points on page 6.
While OFQUAL were responsible for the algorithm that crashed and burned the fact it was required rests at the door of Gavin Williamson and his political insistence on ‘no grade inflation’. He should have resigned over that. The fact that somebody with his record of prior incompetence and his probable dishonesty in his MoD role ever made Cabinet rank again speaks volumes about the sort of people Boris Johnson has been willing to elevate to high office.
I’d be willing to bet that there is another farrago around summer exams in 2021. The insistence that they go ahead, albeit with 3 weeks delay, beggars belief. The loss of three months of the eighteen or so of actual classroom time in a 2 year A level or GCSE course cannot be corrected over three weeks. That’s before the ongoing loss of teaching time since September as Teachers and whole cohorts of pupils have to self-isolate. There’s talk of tailored exams because of lost time. The schools teach a curriculum but approach it their own way; not every child doing A level Chemistry will have missed the same stuff between March and July. It won’t work. Of course if we had coursework that could mitigate but the above mentioned Gove, in a doctrinaire approach encouraged by his adviser Dominic Cummings abolished coursework.
Corbyn lost the election so it’s just speculation how he’d have coped. While he’s no more cut out for leadership than Boris he is at least a sincere and committed man. His team were far more capable than the present crew. Look at John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry, Angela Rayner and of course Starmer. Contrast with Raab, Pritti Patel and Suella Braverman.
If Johnson had been honest and published the Grieve Report on meddling in the referendum then maybe that would have been the jolt needed to get Jo Swinson to stop beggaring about and get a Unity Government in place a year ago. Then how might history have panned out?
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Wed 14 Oct 20 at 17:05
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