Ambrose lets rip. Key points from the article below:
Government’s handling of Covid-19 is a veryBritish disaster
British exceptionalism has brought an exceptional outcome. We have both an eye-watering number of avoidable deaths and a staggering amount of avoidable economic damage. The purported trade-off between lives and jobs – always a false choice – has instead spared neither. It is the worst of both.
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Prostrate Greece has done better than this country by orders of magnitude despite a decade of economic depression and deep austerity cuts to health care, hospitals, and the social welfare system, as well as having to cope with the burden of seething migrant camps on the Aegean islands.
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But claims by both Downing Street and Public Health England that they “got it right” cannot be allowed to stand. Nor can the pretence that each stage of the containment policy is being fed out at just right time and at just the right calibration under the Jupiterian guidance of behavioural theorists.
There was never anything to be gained from delaying the lockdown once the brushfire had slipped control due to lack of testing/tracing. Each three days of prevarication meant a doubling of the infection case load. It was to sink deeper into the quagmire. Nor did the SAGE committee ever have a sufficient grasp of the basic facts to fine-tune the timing, let alone to play God.
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[In the UK] Basically, every mistake that could have been made, was made. He likened the care home policy to the Siege of Caffa in 1346, that grim chapter of the Black Death when a Mongol army catapulted plague-ridden bodies over the walls.
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“When the inquiry comes, it will show that many people died for lack of oxygen supply in hospitals, and this led to early intubation,” writes the doctor. “Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
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Downing Street has now gone “Korean” with apparent gusto, belatedly switching to testing/tracing/isolation. But when it pulls the policy levers, precious little seems to be happening. Bureaucratic inertia seems to thwart action.
“Where is the testing and contact tracing capacity we should have built?” asks my cardiologist friend. “Are there mass sampling systems to give daily infection figures in every ward of the country? No. Is there an army of contact tracers to act on the results? No. The advert to recruit tracers only went out today, incredibly. And only 15,000. At minimum wage.”
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We are not yet close to achieving a viable suppression strategy. That is why the Prime Minister could offer no more than partial and unsatisfying liberation on Sunday night.
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“The striking thing is how consistently the government failed, in every single element of the response, everywhere you turn (the Army excepted),” writes the doctor. “This is probably the most expensive series of errors in the country’s history.”
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[Compared to other countries] Yet the UK is moving uncomfortably close to special status, with excess deaths above the seasonal average topping 42,000 up to April 24. It has undoubtedly surpassed 50,000 since then. We will breach 1,000 deaths per million before long, yet without reaching the safe uplands of herd immunity.
There is not much company – if any – at this Tibetan altitude. They are not all Covid deaths but they are all part of the Covid drama, all dating from the same original sin in February when the Government was asleep and temptress voices of behavioural theory went unchallenged.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/05/12/governments-handling-covid-19-british-disaster/