7 ms·

Government fell disastrously short in dealing with Covid – Cummings

43 points by mellosouls 5y ago

mellosouls 5y ago
Key Points from his evidence: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57254915 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57254915
foolzcrow 5y ago
Lockdowns dont work. Go to hell science deniers.
knorker 5y ago
So is going to acknowledge him singlehandedly torpedoing the clear and responsible effort, by violating the rules himself, and making up the worst BS lies about "I needed to drive because driving is how I check if my eyesight works"? No? He didn't do that? He didn't acknowledge that his personal choices that were completely bananas, with lies stacked on top, in violation of government orders, undermined the response and likely cost lives? I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that this asshole is the hero of his own story. > He added that "in a well-run entity", the prime minister could have appointed a "sort of dictator" to run the Covid response, with the power to "fire anybody or move anybody". Oh, and I bet that would be you, wouldn't it? You incompetent narcisistic muppet.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  1. He's obviously an asshole. 2. He's obviously right; the UK response was absolutely crazy. One thing that struck me is that he tweeted a picture of the graph[1] the government was using when they were going for the 'herd immunity' strategy. We'd seen that graph before, but the lines didn't have numbers on them. The government briefing graph had numbers, and their 'optimum' number was 250k deaths. Which is, you know, terrifying. [1] https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1396493979064094720 https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1396493979064094720
  - knorker 5y ago
    On (2), it's not that I disagree. But he's apologizing on behalf of the government, where he singlehandedly in his personal decision cost lives too. And that's in addition to the fact that as a member of that government he's also collectively responsible. Yes, both things can be true. He can be an asshole who singlehandedly cost lives by undermining what effort the government was making, AND he's right that the government didn't do enough. So he was part of poor handling of the fire, but then on his own time he went to the fire station and blew up some firetrucks for fun, while the fire was still raging.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      I actually think the just (although extremely unlikely) response to all of this would be to start a criminal investigation against the people involved in the response. If you run a factory which, by some accident, kills tens of thousands of people, you can expect a criminal investigation for gross negligence. The same rules should apply here. The vast gap between the UK's death rate and the death rates of similar nations must be explained.
      - Closi 5y ago
        This is a nice thought but applying corporate manslaughter charges in this way within government would have a raft of unintended consequences. The unfortunate reality is that governments have to make life and death decisions on a daily basis, so making it illegal for them to make decisions where more people will die would have a highly restrictive effect (examples below). If a reallocation of NHS budget funding in the future causes an increase in a certain illness, could the chancellor be sued? Could ministers be put in jail for smart motorways, where motorways have become more dangerous and cause more death in order to increase their capacity? (It was cheaper than doing a full widening) Is it possible for a president to declare a war, or push the red button, without getting put behind bars?
        pasabagi 5y ago
        There's a difference between policies that have unintended consequences, and simple incompetence, carelessness, or malice. I actually think heads of state should take a great deal more care when declaring wars, and Generals should take a lot more care in their prosecution - part of the humanitarian cost of essential legal immunity for heads of state is that a lot of wars are fought for essentially political reasons when a peaceful solution is absolutely possible, or the war itself serves no purpose. If the Blair administration had been put on trial for their actions in the run up to the Iraq war, for instance, there's no doubt that a reasonable court would frown upon the extent to which they mislead the public, and the disastrous effects of these efforts. Maybe they would be found innocent, maybe not, but a depoliticized analysis of the extent to which they were culpable for the outcomes of their decisions would be very useful to the public at large. In the case of the coronavirus response, the UK has double the death rate of similar nations (France, Germany), which are themselves not exemplars of a successful response. This is an extreme circumstance, on the level of a war, indeed worse than the second world war for british civilians, and it absolutely makes sense that people should be held accountable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Closi 5y ago
  Well he hasn’t even finished yet, so let’s wait until he is done before we blame him for stuff he hasn’t said.
  - knorker 5y ago
    Not holding my breath. This quote comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ps2lTqaVNw&t=331s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ps2lTqaVNw&t=331s
    - Closi 5y ago
      I wouldn't expect you to hold your breath for a few hours, but if you waited you woul dhave discovered that he did agree that his actions undermined public confidence and apologised calling it a “terrible, terrible, terrible mistake”, .
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  > He added that "in a well-run entity", the prime minister could have appointed a "sort of dictator" to run the Covid response, with the power to "fire anybody or move anybody". That was him basically, no? That’s what makes it all worse. “The government’s decisions [that I took/forced] were awful and someone [other than me] should be held responsible”.
- atc 5y ago
  He's right and he's a controversial figure. These two things are not mutually exclusive. Read something other than The Guardian or the BBC.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Deaths in Sweden: 5.7% higher in 2020 vs 2018: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... And that's after the lowest deaths in a decade in 2019, leaving a lot of 'dry tinder'. Same thing in Ukraine, with merely superficial lockdowns, and about a 6% increase in annual deaths. All of this is basically in line with the aging population. None of these places ran out of hospital capacity. Governments fell short of dealing with COVID because they embraced politics and fear for something which is basically a once-a-decade flu variant, like Swine Flu or the forgotten flu waves of the 90s, 50s and 60s which lead to the same death spikes as COVID (and given populations were younger and less obese back then, were probably actually more severe).
- Angostura 5y ago
  In April 2020 Sweden had 40% excess deaths. This is compared to the 2015–2019 average. > None of these places ran out of hospital capacity. My wife is a hospital consultant in East London, she was working volunteer overnight shifts on Sunday nights as a nurse, back in January - working to turn over ventilated patients and run paperwork about. The hospital had 4 floor filled with Covid patients needing intensive treatment or ventilation. Patients were being sent over 100 miles to find empty beds. We didn't run out of hospital capacity. We came this || close to doing so.
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    The same thing occurs each season for influenza. We don't build hospitals to have excess capacity sitting around unused. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572116 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572116 "Hospital bosses said they had run out of beds as they battle with "very high" rates of flu." Article from 2018. You can find the same articles from cities all around the world during regular yearly flu seasons.
    - rjtavares 5y ago
      What you're saying is technically true, but it's incredibly misleading. COVID redefined what "running out of hospital beds" in western Europe means. So you can go on looking for articles before 2020, if you ask any professional in a hard hit area if Covid is "the same thing" as a bad season of Influenza they will tell you no. Here's an example: in 2019 Portugal had around 500 ICU beds in the public hospital network. In February 2021 there were 900 people in ICU in Portugal just for COVID.
BlackVanilla 5y ago
I think the most valuable thing we can glean from this is the failure of systems. The focus by the BBC has been on transient matters. What will happen to Johnson and Hancock for instance? I think the focus on this is misplaced. If 'lessons are to be learnt', we must focus on systems and their failures too. Cummings mentioned the the example of PPE logistics. In February/March 2020, he asked what the plan was and an offical replied something along the lines of, "we should get the PPE shipped in a few weeks". Cummings said he was surprised that PPE was being shipped, rather than flown. PPE procurement had always been shipped, so the offical was simply following protocol even if it meant causing more deaths. Another issue he identified was the scattering of authority. It was not clear who was in charge of pandemic planning. Ministers decided policy, but could not hire and fire civil servants or move people who could effectively solve these sorts of issues to where they would be most useful. He said if Bill Gates were put in charge on 1 March, he would find it a nightmare. Obviously, this is one person's evidence and we should wait until hearing from more people before forming assigning blame. However, if we are to respond to the next big crisis better, we should look at our systems and not solely focus on the transitory state of politics.
- macspoofing 5y ago
  >I think the most valuable thing we can glean from this is the failure of systems. Is there a failure of systems? Government bureaucracies are huge with a lot of institutional inertia. They will never be able to move on a dime. And this was a situation where in a matter of weeks or even days, we had to realign not only the entire government bureaucracy but also the rest of the economy. Come on ... we have to give ourselves a little break. You cited a screw up with PPE logistics. OK. Sure. But there was a shortage of PPE equipment in _every_ country in the world. And we got through it in a matter of weeks. Is that really that bad? I understand you can pick apart individual choices but in the big picture, it's not clear that things would have been different if PPE shortage was curtailed a tiny bit quicker. And yes, it would have been nice to be prepared for something like this, but then again, there are lots of things that can go wrong. Are we really prepared, for example, for a major solar event? And we know it's only a matter of time before that hits.
- baybal2 5y ago
macspoofing 5y ago
Which government didn't? I mean, I look around, and nobody really has it figured out. Countries that did 'OK' with initial COVID infections, regressed when variants hit. India is the prime example (but Japan is also struggling) - and the most perplexing - why was the initial wave so light, and the current wave so destructive? It seems the difference is the variants. Speaking of which, it's not wholly clear that the discrepancy in outcomes between Asian nations (specifically Korea and Japan) and European/North American nations isn't a result of a more dangerous and virulent COVID strain being active in the latter.
- makomk 5y ago
  Yep. Last I heard, the country in Europe with the worst death toll wasn't the UK - it's pretty middle of the pack right now, though a lot of people here seem to believe otherwise. It was the Czech Republic, the big European success story the BBC and everyone else in the press pointed to a year ago as proof we should be able to do better if only we had a competent government. And as you say countries like Taiwan and Singapore are starting to struggle now with the first stages of outbreaks that are proving hard to control.
- BlackVanilla 5y ago
  Taiwan had pandemic plans. Many suggest that countries cannot be compared. While this is true in some instances, it is not a useful observation in this case. Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not. This allowed them to get started with contact tracing earlier and more effectively. The UK had to start from scratch. The UK would be best served to have detailed plans in the event of distasters (not just pandemics).
  - macspoofing 5y ago
    >Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not. This allowed them to get started with contact tracing earlier and more effectively. To be clear - this is you speculating and correlating two things that may or may not be causally related. India is a good example of a country that had a very light initial COVID wave last year, but is now drowning. What's the difference? Government policy? Maybe but India isn't exactly famous for having a well run government bureaucracy. Deadlier COVID variants? Maybe? What if how hard your population is hit really just comes down to the prevalent variant your population is exposed to. After all, there is evidence that the variants in Europe and North America were much more deadly and virulent than the strains in Asia.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
No kidding. The shocking thing is for him to admit it. Albeit for reasons of settling a personal score with Mr Johnson. > testimony from a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood challenging the record of a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood. https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1397460989277261826 https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1397460989277261826
- Tarq0n 5y ago
  This is a great summary, though I'm not a fan of the emotional commentary around it. What surprises me is that commenters in this thread seem to expect anything different. In a democracy, the leaders we end up with are necessarily ones that are used to balancing competing interests. Every highly politicized decision making process I've been near has been like this. Leadership will 1) favor delaying to get more information over making fast decisions 2) treat contradictory sources of information as equally valid because validity is hard to judge for them (though the status of the advice-giver plays a big role) 3) try to find a compromise between competing interests instead of strongly benefiting one over the other, for as long as possible. That's not even mentioning the general disempowerment of individual actors in a bureaucracy. And this is generally a good thing! This is what you get when you optimize your governmental structures to have broad-based support. And yes it has failure modes in extreme scenarios, but the opposite is also true, it prevents extreme responses when they are unwarranted. In more general terms I'm not sure how reasonable it is to expect a democratic institution, or any institution to find a policy global maximum. This means that policy outcomes should be weighed against a reasonable counterfactual outcome, not the ideal outcome. Given the complexity of the situation, most countries did about as well as can be expected.
kordlessagain 5y ago
The government falls short on a lot of things. The problem is systematically annoying.
LatteLazy 5y ago
Wait until you hear his revelations about the wetness of water...
- iso1631 5y ago
  I wouldn't believe him
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    That's fine, as long as you don't believe anyone else in this <explicit content redacted> excuse for a government...
open-source-ux 5y ago
If you don't live in the UK, it may be a bit difficult to understand just how badly the UK's Conservative Government handled the pandemic up until the vaccine rollout. The level of ineptitude, dishonesty and croynism is simply off the scale. How they got away with such incompetence remains utterly baffling and deeply depressing. (A largely Conservative-supporting national press probably helped to some degree.) The number of COVID deaths speaks volumes about the government's record in tackling the pandemic: more than 127,000 people dead. Back in March 2020, the medical director of National Health Service England, Stephen Powis, said that if the UK was able to keep deaths below 20,000 then "we will have done very well in this epidemic."
- kmlx 5y ago
  you would then be surprised that it's the same everywhere else.
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  I don't live in the UK and had no trouble understanding that. The UK and US were both terrible at it in the beginning (Q1 and Q2 of 2020). Afterwards, those countries did pretty much the same as everyone else and they ramped up vaccinations much faster than other countries, so the later response masks the total incompetence of the initial response.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    No, the UK was still terrible at it in Q4 2020. it was a grim winter, and actually largely avoidable. Lockdown happened anyway, but late in the day. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55379220 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55379220 https://www.itv.com/news/2020-12-20/covid-19-millions-in-england-and-wales-wake-up-under-new-lockdown-as-uks-christmas-plans-cancelled https://www.itv.com/news/2020-12-20/covid-19-millions-in-eng... https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-records-highest-ever-daily-coronavirus-deaths-at-1-325-fatalities-12182575 https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-records-highest-ever-...
- iso1631 5y ago
  > A largely Conservative-supporting national press probably helped to some degree. People don't really read newspapers any more. In Jan 2020, newspaper circulation was about 10% of the country [0]. In Jan 2021 this is down about 35% (far fewer people commuting or even going to shops to buy a paper -- the Metro lost 60% of its readers) The left always complain about the power of the Daily Mail - but it reaches fewer than 1 million people a day. How do you explain the other 67 million people in the UK? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation#2020_to_present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...

43 points by mellosouls 5y ago

Key Points from his evidence: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57254915 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57254915

foolzcrow 5y ago

Lockdowns dont work. Go to hell science deniers.

knorker 5y ago

So is going to acknowledge him singlehandedly torpedoing the clear and responsible effort, by violating the rules himself, and making up the worst BS lies about "I needed to drive because driving is how I check if my eyesight works"? No? He didn't do that? He didn't acknowledge that his personal choices that were completely bananas, with lies stacked on top, in violation of government orders, undermined the response and likely cost lives? I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that this asshole is the hero of his own story. > He added that "in a well-run entity", the prime minister could have appointed a "sort of dictator" to run the Covid response, with the power to "fire anybody or move anybody". Oh, and I bet that would be you, wouldn't it? You incompetent narcisistic muppet.

pasabagi 5y ago
1. He's obviously an asshole. 2. He's obviously right; the UK response was absolutely crazy. One thing that struck me is that he tweeted a picture of the graph[1] the government was using when they were going for the 'herd immunity' strategy. We'd seen that graph before, but the lines didn't have numbers on them. The government briefing graph had numbers, and their 'optimum' number was 250k deaths. Which is, you know, terrifying. [1] https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1396493979064094720 https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1396493979064094720
- knorker 5y ago
  On (2), it's not that I disagree. But he's apologizing on behalf of the government, where he singlehandedly in his personal decision cost lives too. And that's in addition to the fact that as a member of that government he's also collectively responsible. Yes, both things can be true. He can be an asshole who singlehandedly cost lives by undermining what effort the government was making, AND he's right that the government didn't do enough. So he was part of poor handling of the fire, but then on his own time he went to the fire station and blew up some firetrucks for fun, while the fire was still raging.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    I actually think the just (although extremely unlikely) response to all of this would be to start a criminal investigation against the people involved in the response. If you run a factory which, by some accident, kills tens of thousands of people, you can expect a criminal investigation for gross negligence. The same rules should apply here. The vast gap between the UK's death rate and the death rates of similar nations must be explained.
    - Closi 5y ago
      This is a nice thought but applying corporate manslaughter charges in this way within government would have a raft of unintended consequences. The unfortunate reality is that governments have to make life and death decisions on a daily basis, so making it illegal for them to make decisions where more people will die would have a highly restrictive effect (examples below). If a reallocation of NHS budget funding in the future causes an increase in a certain illness, could the chancellor be sued? Could ministers be put in jail for smart motorways, where motorways have become more dangerous and cause more death in order to increase their capacity? (It was cheaper than doing a full widening) Is it possible for a president to declare a war, or push the red button, without getting put behind bars?
      - pasabagi 5y ago
        There's a difference between policies that have unintended consequences, and simple incompetence, carelessness, or malice. I actually think heads of state should take a great deal more care when declaring wars, and Generals should take a lot more care in their prosecution - part of the humanitarian cost of essential legal immunity for heads of state is that a lot of wars are fought for essentially political reasons when a peaceful solution is absolutely possible, or the war itself serves no purpose. If the Blair administration had been put on trial for their actions in the run up to the Iraq war, for instance, there's no doubt that a reasonable court would frown upon the extent to which they mislead the public, and the disastrous effects of these efforts. Maybe they would be found innocent, maybe not, but a depoliticized analysis of the extent to which they were culpable for the outcomes of their decisions would be very useful to the public at large. In the case of the coronavirus response, the UK has double the death rate of similar nations (France, Germany), which are themselves not exemplars of a successful response. This is an extreme circumstance, on the level of a war, indeed worse than the second world war for british civilians, and it absolutely makes sense that people should be held accountable.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Closi 5y ago
Well he hasn’t even finished yet, so let’s wait until he is done before we blame him for stuff he hasn’t said.
- knorker 5y ago
  Not holding my breath. This quote comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ps2lTqaVNw&t=331s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ps2lTqaVNw&t=331s
  - Closi 5y ago
    I wouldn't expect you to hold your breath for a few hours, but if you waited you woul dhave discovered that he did agree that his actions undermined public confidence and apologised calling it a “terrible, terrible, terrible mistake”, .
rich_sasha 5y ago
> He added that "in a well-run entity", the prime minister could have appointed a "sort of dictator" to run the Covid response, with the power to "fire anybody or move anybody". That was him basically, no? That’s what makes it all worse. “The government’s decisions [that I took/forced] were awful and someone [other than me] should be held responsible”.
atc 5y ago
He's right and he's a controversial figure. These two things are not mutually exclusive. Read something other than The Guardian or the BBC.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Deaths in Sweden: 5.7% higher in 2020 vs 2018: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... And that's after the lowest deaths in a decade in 2019, leaving a lot of 'dry tinder'. Same thing in Ukraine, with merely superficial lockdowns, and about a 6% increase in annual deaths. All of this is basically in line with the aging population. None of these places ran out of hospital capacity. Governments fell short of dealing with COVID because they embraced politics and fear for something which is basically a once-a-decade flu variant, like Swine Flu or the forgotten flu waves of the 90s, 50s and 60s which lead to the same death spikes as COVID (and given populations were younger and less obese back then, were probably actually more severe).

Angostura 5y ago
In April 2020 Sweden had 40% excess deaths. This is compared to the 2015–2019 average. > None of these places ran out of hospital capacity. My wife is a hospital consultant in East London, she was working volunteer overnight shifts on Sunday nights as a nurse, back in January - working to turn over ventilated patients and run paperwork about. The hospital had 4 floor filled with Covid patients needing intensive treatment or ventilation. Patients were being sent over 100 miles to find empty beds. We didn't run out of hospital capacity. We came this || close to doing so.
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  The same thing occurs each season for influenza. We don't build hospitals to have excess capacity sitting around unused. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572116 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572116 "Hospital bosses said they had run out of beds as they battle with "very high" rates of flu." Article from 2018. You can find the same articles from cities all around the world during regular yearly flu seasons.
  - rjtavares 5y ago
    What you're saying is technically true, but it's incredibly misleading. COVID redefined what "running out of hospital beds" in western Europe means. So you can go on looking for articles before 2020, if you ask any professional in a hard hit area if Covid is "the same thing" as a bad season of Influenza they will tell you no. Here's an example: in 2019 Portugal had around 500 ICU beds in the public hospital network. In February 2021 there were 900 people in ICU in Portugal just for COVID.

BlackVanilla 5y ago

I think the most valuable thing we can glean from this is the failure of systems. The focus by the BBC has been on transient matters. What will happen to Johnson and Hancock for instance? I think the focus on this is misplaced. If 'lessons are to be learnt', we must focus on systems and their failures too. Cummings mentioned the the example of PPE logistics. In February/March 2020, he asked what the plan was and an offical replied something along the lines of, "we should get the PPE shipped in a few weeks". Cummings said he was surprised that PPE was being shipped, rather than flown. PPE procurement had always been shipped, so the offical was simply following protocol even if it meant causing more deaths. Another issue he identified was the scattering of authority. It was not clear who was in charge of pandemic planning. Ministers decided policy, but could not hire and fire civil servants or move people who could effectively solve these sorts of issues to where they would be most useful. He said if Bill Gates were put in charge on 1 March, he would find it a nightmare. Obviously, this is one person's evidence and we should wait until hearing from more people before forming assigning blame. However, if we are to respond to the next big crisis better, we should look at our systems and not solely focus on the transitory state of politics.

macspoofing 5y ago
>I think the most valuable thing we can glean from this is the failure of systems. Is there a failure of systems? Government bureaucracies are huge with a lot of institutional inertia. They will never be able to move on a dime. And this was a situation where in a matter of weeks or even days, we had to realign not only the entire government bureaucracy but also the rest of the economy. Come on ... we have to give ourselves a little break. You cited a screw up with PPE logistics. OK. Sure. But there was a shortage of PPE equipment in _every_ country in the world. And we got through it in a matter of weeks. Is that really that bad? I understand you can pick apart individual choices but in the big picture, it's not clear that things would have been different if PPE shortage was curtailed a tiny bit quicker. And yes, it would have been nice to be prepared for something like this, but then again, there are lots of things that can go wrong. Are we really prepared, for example, for a major solar event? And we know it's only a matter of time before that hits.
baybal2 5y ago

macspoofing 5y ago

Which government didn't? I mean, I look around, and nobody really has it figured out. Countries that did 'OK' with initial COVID infections, regressed when variants hit. India is the prime example (but Japan is also struggling) - and the most perplexing - why was the initial wave so light, and the current wave so destructive? It seems the difference is the variants. Speaking of which, it's not wholly clear that the discrepancy in outcomes between Asian nations (specifically Korea and Japan) and European/North American nations isn't a result of a more dangerous and virulent COVID strain being active in the latter.

makomk 5y ago
Yep. Last I heard, the country in Europe with the worst death toll wasn't the UK - it's pretty middle of the pack right now, though a lot of people here seem to believe otherwise. It was the Czech Republic, the big European success story the BBC and everyone else in the press pointed to a year ago as proof we should be able to do better if only we had a competent government. And as you say countries like Taiwan and Singapore are starting to struggle now with the first stages of outbreaks that are proving hard to control.
BlackVanilla 5y ago
Taiwan had pandemic plans. Many suggest that countries cannot be compared. While this is true in some instances, it is not a useful observation in this case. Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not. This allowed them to get started with contact tracing earlier and more effectively. The UK had to start from scratch. The UK would be best served to have detailed plans in the event of distasters (not just pandemics).
- macspoofing 5y ago
  >Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not. This allowed them to get started with contact tracing earlier and more effectively. To be clear - this is you speculating and correlating two things that may or may not be causally related. India is a good example of a country that had a very light initial COVID wave last year, but is now drowning. What's the difference? Government policy? Maybe but India isn't exactly famous for having a well run government bureaucracy. Deadlier COVID variants? Maybe? What if how hard your population is hit really just comes down to the prevalent variant your population is exposed to. After all, there is evidence that the variants in Europe and North America were much more deadly and virulent than the strains in Asia.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

No kidding. The shocking thing is for him to admit it. Albeit for reasons of settling a personal score with Mr Johnson. > testimony from a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood challenging the record of a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood. https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1397460989277261826 https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1397460989277261826

Tarq0n 5y ago
This is a great summary, though I'm not a fan of the emotional commentary around it. What surprises me is that commenters in this thread seem to expect anything different. In a democracy, the leaders we end up with are necessarily ones that are used to balancing competing interests. Every highly politicized decision making process I've been near has been like this. Leadership will 1) favor delaying to get more information over making fast decisions 2) treat contradictory sources of information as equally valid because validity is hard to judge for them (though the status of the advice-giver plays a big role) 3) try to find a compromise between competing interests instead of strongly benefiting one over the other, for as long as possible. That's not even mentioning the general disempowerment of individual actors in a bureaucracy. And this is generally a good thing! This is what you get when you optimize your governmental structures to have broad-based support. And yes it has failure modes in extreme scenarios, but the opposite is also true, it prevents extreme responses when they are unwarranted. In more general terms I'm not sure how reasonable it is to expect a democratic institution, or any institution to find a policy global maximum. This means that policy outcomes should be weighed against a reasonable counterfactual outcome, not the ideal outcome. Given the complexity of the situation, most countries did about as well as can be expected.

kordlessagain 5y ago

The government falls short on a lot of things. The problem is systematically annoying.

LatteLazy 5y ago

Wait until you hear his revelations about the wetness of water...

iso1631 5y ago
I wouldn't believe him
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  That's fine, as long as you don't believe anyone else in this <explicit content redacted> excuse for a government...

open-source-ux 5y ago

If you don't live in the UK, it may be a bit difficult to understand just how badly the UK's Conservative Government handled the pandemic up until the vaccine rollout. The level of ineptitude, dishonesty and croynism is simply off the scale. How they got away with such incompetence remains utterly baffling and deeply depressing. (A largely Conservative-supporting national press probably helped to some degree.) The number of COVID deaths speaks volumes about the government's record in tackling the pandemic: more than 127,000 people dead. Back in March 2020, the medical director of National Health Service England, Stephen Powis, said that if the UK was able to keep deaths below 20,000 then "we will have done very well in this epidemic."

kmlx 5y ago
you would then be surprised that it's the same everywhere else.
jonathanstrange 5y ago
I don't live in the UK and had no trouble understanding that. The UK and US were both terrible at it in the beginning (Q1 and Q2 of 2020). Afterwards, those countries did pretty much the same as everyone else and they ramped up vaccinations much faster than other countries, so the later response masks the total incompetence of the initial response.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  No, the UK was still terrible at it in Q4 2020. it was a grim winter, and actually largely avoidable. Lockdown happened anyway, but late in the day. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55379220 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55379220 https://www.itv.com/news/2020-12-20/covid-19-millions-in-england-and-wales-wake-up-under-new-lockdown-as-uks-christmas-plans-cancelled https://www.itv.com/news/2020-12-20/covid-19-millions-in-eng... https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-records-highest-ever-daily-coronavirus-deaths-at-1-325-fatalities-12182575 https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-records-highest-ever-...
iso1631 5y ago
> A largely Conservative-supporting national press probably helped to some degree. People don't really read newspapers any more. In Jan 2020, newspaper circulation was about 10% of the country [0]. In Jan 2021 this is down about 35% (far fewer people commuting or even going to shops to buy a paper -- the Metro lost 60% of its readers) The left always complain about the power of the Daily Mail - but it reaches fewer than 1 million people a day. How do you explain the other 67 million people in the UK? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation#2020_to_present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...