Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?

[Carana]

Just to clarify, I'm not overly impressed by any party in the UK - before I get bashed by the various factions on here.

At the same time, we're now in a global crisis, and the only way out is forward with what we've got.

[faithlilly]

Thanks for that Faith, I'd heard about it but couldn't access the article at the time.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/nick-ferrari/extraordinary-exchange-care-minister-coronavirus/

Thanks for that Carana. What a car crash of an interview.

[Venturi Swirl]

Thanks for that Faith, I'd heard about it but couldn't access the article at the time.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/nick-ferrari/extraordinary-exchange-care-minister-coronavirus/

As we have good capacity within the NHS currently I’m not sure where the idea that the NHS has been overwhelmed has come from?  I have yet to see terrible footage such as that coming out of Spain and Italy of victims lying in hospital corridors coughing and wheezing for example.  A new hospital was built in 9 days in London with thousands of extra beds, and several more coming on line soon, when should these have been built do people think?  When the first coronavirus case was announced in China back in December?

[Venturi Swirl]

Food for thought (sacrilege though some people will undoubtedly find it to read any criticism whatosever directed at the NHS):

The inflexibility of our lumbering NHS is why the country has had to shut down
CHARLES MOORE
Follow
 Charles Moore
3 APRIL 2020 • 9:30PM
Save
2188
 An illuminated sign thanking the NHS is pictured across Olympic Way the road to Wembley Stadium in London on March 26, 2020, as a sign of public admiration for the National Health Service (NHS). - Hospital bosses and doctors on Thursday warned of being swamped with a "tsunami" of COVID-19 patients in London, as Britain braced for a peak in cases and the government faced calls to urgently provide specialist kit and tests for frontline health workers. (Photo by Tolga Akmen / AFP) (Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images)
'NHS staff are dedicated people, but there are defects baked into our system of national bureaucratic command'

Why are we clapping the NHS? It is right and just to clap NHS workers, but that is not the same thing. Virtually everyone has reason to thank good nurses, doctors and paramedics. But if we are to praise large organisations for how effectively they have dealt with the coronavirus crisis, we should be clapping vigorously for Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons, who have responded nimbly to sudden extra demand for one of life’s basics – food. We should give only rather tepid applause for the efforts of the NHS to look after another of life’s basics – health.

As its name suggests, the National Health Service is there to serve the health of the nation. In this crisis, the roles have reversed – it is seen as the duty of the nation to serve the NHS. “Protect the NHS. Save lives,” says the slogan, in that rather surprising order. Children are made to recite it like a prayer. How are we to do this? We must help the NHS by avoiding hospitals and surgeries, we are told. The Government’s policy of lockdown is in significant part dictated by the demands not of patients, but of the NHS, and by its lack of adaptability and readiness.

In the most immediate sense, this mantra is justified. Too many patients in surgeries and wards will spread infection. Too many Covid-19 cases will overwhelm the doctors and nurses, the ventilators and the beds. We must all do as we are told, and stay at home. But isn’t there something wrong that the problem is so extreme?

We are trained, when we notice organisational or operational failures in the NHS, to blame the Government. This is partly reasonable: the Government is ultimately answerable for its existence, and no government has ever dared grasp the nettle of reform. But it misses out something important. When dissatisfied by other organisations – the police, the BBC, utility companies, supermarkets, banks, the Church – we arraign the people who run them. With the NHS, an unwritten law forbids this. It is treated like a God, even when it fails.

Take this week’s row about testing. A significant reason for the slow development, arrival and use of the antigen tests (“Have I got it?”) and the antibody tests (“Have I had it?”) seems to be the reluctance of the health service, and of Public Health England, to look outside their own spheres for help. In a culture almost proudly hostile to the private sector and mistrushut upl of independent academic work, the NHS’s first instinct is to defend bureaucratic territory. The extraordinary scene on Thursday when almost no health workers came for specially provided drive-in tests at Chessington World of Adventures seems to have resulted from a bureaucratic muddle about who was in charge.

In his skilful performance at the daily virus press conference on Thursday, the recovering Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, obliquely expressed his frustration. He exclaimed how well “non-ventilator companies” had come up with inventive solutions to produce ventilators fast. He issued a “call out” to British life sciences, laboratories and universities to do likewise for antibody tests.


Behind that ventilator comparison lies a story. Three weeks ago, the NHS belatedly admitted within government that it had failed to get enough ventilators. The Cabinet Office stepped in to help procure. Thanks in part to the energy of the distinguished surgeon Professor Lord Kakkar, University College Hospital, Formula I and Mercedes Benz got together to produce the CPAP (Continuous Positive Airways Pressure) machines that are one up on normal oxygen masks but less invasive than the full, intubating ventilators. Next week, the repurposed Mercedes Benz F1 factory in Brixworth expects to produce 1,000 CPAPs a day.

An equivalently brilliant initiative is urgently needed for antibody tests. At present, we are largely at the mercy of China (many of whose kits don’t work) to produce them. This is the embarrassment which Mr Hancock was gingerly admitting. It is why he cannot promise that antibody tests will be part of his 100,000 tests per day by the end of April. Or take the amazing 4,000-bed capacity Nightingale field hospital at the ExCeL centre in east London, opened yesterday by the Prince of Wales. For two weeks after it was proposed, NHS top brass opposed it. When they finally admitted they needed it, the Army and the private contractors were the ones who made it happen in nine days.

These are not one-off problems. Every day, scores of people with useful offers of medical supply get in touch with the Government. It filters these and passes on the best to the NHS. Too often, the offers get fobbed off or not even answered. Ten days ago, government contacts found the only company in Britain with expertise in making reagent for antigen swab tests. The firm was put on to the NHS, but at the time of writing, the health service had still not had a conversation with it.

Such rebuffs happen on the small scale, too. Yesterday, I received an email from the family of a couple of working medics recently returned from New Zealand. Both answered the call to rejoin the NHS, but have so far had nothing but a holding message. They see media stories of staff shortages because of infection and self-isolation, but still await the call.

Last week, I wrote about the construction of “hot hubs” where GPs could safely triage Covid-19 sufferers and decide whether to send them to hospital. The Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) had ordered its small rural GP groups to set up such hubs within a fortnight without means, skill or direction. When I emailed the CCG last week to get its side of the story, it replied after my deadline, and then only to refer responsibility to a higher power.


A week later, the local GP groups have finally persuaded the CCG that a hot hub must be erected next to the local hospital (only after the hospital tried, in a classic example of the destructive rivalry between primary and secondary care, to refuse because of parking problems). Even now, however, the CCG has not worked out who will actually run the hub once built. As the local GPs’ spokesman, Dr Camilla Pashley, puts it, “The system moves at an unbelievable snail’s pace, though better than usual.” Meanwhile, Dr Pashley and her colleagues have to see Covid patients in their cars in surgery car parks.

That system is the problem. Most NHS staff are dedicated people. The defects are baked into our system of national bureaucratic command. People have noticed that Germany has been more successful in managing the virus spread through testing. This is not a coincidence. Germany does not have our lumbering central diagnostic system, because it does not have, in our sense, a national health service. It has 176 testing centres, part of localised arrangements which mix private insurance, employer involvement and government funding. There are more than three times as many beds per 1,000 patients as in Britain.

It is probably also not a coincidence that Germany has a less draconian lockdown than we do: it can focus on the Covid problem more exactly.

We are locked down by the needs of the NHS in the face of Covid. If this goes on for, say, three months, we could well run out of money to answer those needs. Work matters urgently for the health and wealth of all. As soon as possible, we must get back to it

[faithlilly]

Food for thought (sacrilege though some people will undoubtedly find it to read any criticism whatosever directed at the NHS):

The inflexibility of our lumbering NHS is why the country has had to shut down
CHARLES MOORE
Follow
 Charles Moore
3 APRIL 2020 • 9:30PM
Save
2188
 An illuminated sign thanking the NHS is pictured across Olympic Way the road to Wembley Stadium in London on March 26, 2020, as a sign of public admiration for the National Health Service (NHS). - Hospital bosses and doctors on Thursday warned of being swamped with a "tsunami" of COVID-19 patients in London, as Britain braced for a peak in cases and the government faced calls to urgently provide specialist kit and tests for frontline health workers. (Photo by Tolga Akmen / AFP) (Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images)
'NHS staff are dedicated people, but there are defects baked into our system of national bureaucratic command'

Why are we clapping the NHS? It is right and just to clap NHS workers, but that is not the same thing. Virtually everyone has reason to thank good nurses, doctors and paramedics. But if we are to praise large organisations for how effectively they have dealt with the coronavirus crisis, we should be clapping vigorously for Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons, who have responded nimbly to sudden extra demand for one of life’s basics – food. We should give only rather tepid applause for the efforts of the NHS to look after another of life’s basics – health.

As its name suggests, the National Health Service is there to serve the health of the nation. In this crisis, the roles have reversed – it is seen as the duty of the nation to serve the NHS. “Protect the NHS. Save lives,” says the slogan, in that rather surprising order. Children are made to recite it like a prayer. How are we to do this? We must help the NHS by avoiding hospitals and surgeries, we are told. The Government’s policy of lockdown is in significant part dictated by the demands not of patients, but of the NHS, and by its lack of adaptability and readiness.

In the most immediate sense, this mantra is justified. Too many patients in surgeries and wards will spread infection. Too many Covid-19 cases will overwhelm the doctors and nurses, the ventilators and the beds. We must all do as we are told, and stay at home. But isn’t there something wrong that the problem is so extreme?

We are trained, when we notice organisational or operational failures in the NHS, to blame the Government. This is partly reasonable: the Government is ultimately answerable for its existence, and no government has ever dared grasp the nettle of reform. But it misses out something important. When dissatisfied by other organisations – the police, the BBC, utility companies, supermarkets, banks, the Church – we arraign the people who run them. With the NHS, an unwritten law forbids this. It is treated like a God, even when it fails.

Take this week’s row about testing. A significant reason for the slow development, arrival and use of the antigen tests (“Have I got it?”) and the antibody tests (“Have I had it?”) seems to be the reluctance of the health service, and of Public Health England, to look outside their own spheres for help. In a culture almost proudly hostile to the private sector and mistrushut upl of independent academic work, the NHS’s first instinct is to defend bureaucratic territory. The extraordinary scene on Thursday when almost no health workers came for specially provided drive-in tests at Chessington World of Adventures seems to have resulted from a bureaucratic muddle about who was in charge.

In his skilful performance at the daily virus press conference on Thursday, the recovering Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, obliquely expressed his frustration. He exclaimed how well “non-ventilator companies” had come up with inventive solutions to produce ventilators fast. He issued a “call out” to British life sciences, laboratories and universities to do likewise for antibody tests.


Behind that ventilator comparison lies a story. Three weeks ago, the NHS belatedly admitted within government that it had failed to get enough ventilators. The Cabinet Office stepped in to help procure. Thanks in part to the energy of the distinguished surgeon Professor Lord Kakkar, University College Hospital, Formula I and Mercedes Benz got together to produce the CPAP (Continuous Positive Airways Pressure) machines that are one up on normal oxygen masks but less invasive than the full, intubating ventilators. Next week, the repurposed Mercedes Benz F1 factory in Brixworth expects to produce 1,000 CPAPs a day.

An equivalently brilliant initiative is urgently needed for antibody tests. At present, we are largely at the mercy of China (many of whose kits don’t work) to produce them. This is the embarrassment which Mr Hancock was gingerly admitting. It is why he cannot promise that antibody tests will be part of his 100,000 tests per day by the end of April. Or take the amazing 4,000-bed capacity Nightingale field hospital at the ExCeL centre in east London, opened yesterday by the Prince of Wales. For two weeks after it was proposed, NHS top brass opposed it. When they finally admitted they needed it, the Army and the private contractors were the ones who made it happen in nine days.

These are not one-off problems. Every day, scores of people with useful offers of medical supply get in touch with the Government. It filters these and passes on the best to the NHS. Too often, the offers get fobbed off or not even answered. Ten days ago, government contacts found the only company in Britain with expertise in making reagent for antigen swab tests. The firm was put on to the NHS, but at the time of writing, the health service had still not had a conversation with it.

Such rebuffs happen on the small scale, too. Yesterday, I received an email from the family of a couple of working medics recently returned from New Zealand. Both answered the call to rejoin the NHS, but have so far had nothing but a holding message. They see media stories of staff shortages because of infection and self-isolation, but still await the call.

Last week, I wrote about the construction of “hot hubs” where GPs could safely triage Covid-19 sufferers and decide whether to send them to hospital. The Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) had ordered its small rural GP groups to set up such hubs within a fortnight without means, skill or direction. When I emailed the CCG last week to get its side of the story, it replied after my deadline, and then only to refer responsibility to a higher power.


A week later, the local GP groups have finally persuaded the CCG that a hot hub must be erected next to the local hospital (only after the hospital tried, in a classic example of the destructive rivalry between primary and secondary care, to refuse because of parking problems). Even now, however, the CCG has not worked out who will actually run the hub once built. As the local GPs’ spokesman, Dr Camilla Pashley, puts it, “The system moves at an unbelievable snail’s pace, though better than usual.” Meanwhile, Dr Pashley and her colleagues have to see Covid patients in their cars in surgery car parks.

That system is the problem. Most NHS staff are dedicated people. The defects are baked into our system of national bureaucratic command. People have noticed that Germany has been more successful in managing the virus spread through testing. This is not a coincidence. Germany does not have our lumbering central diagnostic system, because it does not have, in our sense, a national health service. It has 176 testing centres, part of localised arrangements which mix private insurance, employer involvement and government funding. There are more than three times as many beds per 1,000 patients as in Britain.

It is probably also not a coincidence that Germany has a less draconian lockdown than we do: it can focus on the Covid problem more exactly.

We are locked down by the needs of the NHS in the face of Covid. If this goes on for, say, three months, we could well run out of money to answer those needs. Work matters urgently for the health and wealth of all. As soon as possible, we must get back to it

Classic blame shifting from one of the government’s tame churnalists and a longterm critic of the NHS.

[Venturi Swirl]

A prolonged lockdown puts those in need of cancer treatments at much greater risk, and could mean more die of the disease than of Covid19. 

Coronavirus lockdown will cost the lives of cancer patients’
Delays to diagnosis and treatment will see survival rates drop, an expert warns, and could kill more people than Covid-19
Experts say delays in diagnosis or surgical intervention may render some tumours inoperable
Experts say delays in diagnosis or surgical intervention may render some tumours inoperable
PETER BYRNE
The chance of surviving cancer will fall if the coronavirus outbreak continues to put pressure on the NHS over the coming months, according to a leading cancer expert.

Professor Charles Swanton, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said some cancers will become “inoperable”, rather than survivable, if diagnosis or treatment are delayed by the pandemic.

Early stage cancer surgery, screening and diagnostic procedures such as endoscopies and bronchoscopies are being delayed by some NHS trusts in England, according to some anecdotal evidence.

“We know that if you operate in most early stage cancers, there is a high chance of a cure,” Swanton said.

“If we wait too long before we operate the disease may spread beyond the primary site rendering cures less likely. Delays to surgery are of huge concern for many cancer charities.”

[Venturi Swirl]

Agree with every word of this as well

Coronavirus: We are so afraid of death, no one even asks whether this ‘cure’ is actually worse
Jonathan Sumption
Sunday April 05 2020, 12.00am, The Sunday Times
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” The words are Franklin D Roosevelt’s. His challenge was recession, not disease, but his words have a wider resonance.

Fear is dangerous. It is the enemy of reason. It suppresses balance and judgment. And it is infectious. Roosevelt thought government was doing too little. But today fear is more likely to push governments into doing too much, as democratic politicians run for cover in the face of public panic. Is the coronavirus the latest and most damaging example?

Epidemics are not new. Bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, meningitis, Spanish flu all took a heavy toll in their time. An earlier generation would not have understood the current hysteria over Covid-19, whose symptoms are milder and whose case mortality is lower than any of these.

What has changed? For one thing, we have become much more risk-averse. We no longer accept the wheel of fortune. We take security for granted. We do not tolerate avoidable tragedies. Fear stops us thinking about the more remote costs of the measures necessary to avoid them, measures that may pitch us into even greater misfortunes of a different kind.

We have also acquired an irrational horror of death. Today death is the great obscenity, inevitable but somehow unnatural. In the midst of life, our ancestors lived with death, an ever-present fact that they understood and accommodated. They experienced the death of friends and family, young and old, generally at home. Today it is hidden away in hospitals and care homes: out of sight and out of mind, unmentionable until it strikes.


We know too little about Covid-19. We do not know its true case mortality because of the uncertainties about the total number infected. We do not know how many of those who have died would have died anyway — possibly a bit later — from other underlying conditions (“comorbidities”, in doctor-speak).

What is clear is that Covid-19 is not the Black Death. It is dangerous for those with serious existing medical conditions, especially if they are old. For others, the symptoms are mild in the overwhelming majority of cases.

The prime minister, the health secretary and the Prince of Wales — all of whom have caught it and are fine — represent the normal pattern. The much publicised but extremely rare deaths of fit young people are tragic but they are outliers.

Yet governments have adopted, with public support, the most extreme and indiscriminate measures.

We have subjected most of the population, young or old, vulnerable or fit, to house imprisonment for an indefinite period.

We have set about abolishing human sociability in ways that lead to unimaginable distress.

We have given the police powers that, even if they respect the limits, will create an authoritarian pattern of life utterly inconsistent with our traditions.

We have resorted to law, which requires exact definition, and banished common sense, which requires judgment.

These things represent an interference with our lives and our personal autonomy that is intolerable in a free society. To say that they are necessary for larger social ends, however valuable those ends may be, is to treat human beings as objects, mere instruments of policy.

And that is before we even get to the economic impact. We have put hundreds of thousands out of a job and into universal credit.

Recent research suggests that we are already pushing a fifth of small businesses into bankruptcy, many of which will have taken a lifetime of honest toil to build. The proportion is forecast to rise to a third after three months of lockdown.

Generations to come are being saddled with high levels of public and private debt. These things kill, too. If all this is the price of saving human life, we have to ask whether it is worth paying.

The truth is that in public policy there are no absolute values, not even the preservation of life. There are only pros and cons. Do we not allow cars, among the most lethal weapons ever devised, although we know for certain that every year thousands will be killed or maimed by them? We do this because we judge that it is a price worth paying to get about in speed and comfort. Every one of us who drives is a tacit party to that Faustian bargain.

A similar calculation about the coronavirus might justify a very short period of lockdown and business closures, if it helped the critical care capacity of the NHS to catch up. It may even be that tough social distancing measures would be acceptable as applied only to vulnerable categories.

But as soon as the scientists start talking about a month or even three or six months, we are entering a realm of sinister fantasy in which the cure has taken over as the biggest threat to our society. Lockdowns are at best only a way of buying time anyway. Viruses don’t just go away. Ultimately, we will emerge from this crisis when we acquire some collective (or “herd”) immunity. That is how epidemics burn themselves out.

In the absence of a vaccine, it will happen, but only when a sufficient proportion of the population is exposed to the disease.

I am not a scientist. Most of you are not scientists. But we can all read the scientific literature, which is immaculately clear but has obvious limitations. Scientists can help us assess the clinical consequences of different ways to contain the coronavirus. But they are no more qualified than the rest of us to say whether they are worth turning our world upside down and inflicting serious long-term damage. All of us have a responsibility to maintain a sense of proportion, especially when so many are losing theirs.

Lord Sumption is a former Supreme Court judge

[Venturi Swirl]

This exactly sums up my thoughts on the matter.  Well said Matthew Syed, you have firmly and squarely hit the nail on the head:

I challenge the online ‘experts’ so critical of No 10 on coronavirus: tell us, has Sweden got it right or wrong?
Matthew Syed
Sunday April 05 2020, 12.00am, The Sunday Times
Share




Save

The blame game is up and running. Hardly a person in authority has stuck their head above the parapet without receiving a chorus of vitriol. Chris Whitty, chief medical officer, trended online last week, despite suffering with symptoms of the coronavirus, his physical appearance cruelly mocked. Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser, has also come under fire, as has Matt Hancock, health secretary, whose sacking was called for by Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader. #BorisOut has trended so often that it is almost pointless to document the episodes. One occasion was on the evening he tested positive for the virus.

This isn’t just about hysteria on social media, however. It is deeper, more atavistic. We know from the reports of Hernan Cortes and other explorers that civilisations from the Incas to the Aztecs conducted human sacrifices, people cut open with a knife and their beating hearts ripped out, often after disasters such as volcanic eruptions and epidemics. The more threatening the event, the higher the emotional pitch, the greater the lust for a scapegoat.

The rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with their prohibitions on human sacrifice, slowly expunged such practices from the world, but I can’t help thinking that an echo of them remains in our collective psyche. Too often we engage not in a rational attempt to identify poor decision-making in pursuit of legitimate accountability but instead a lust to punish for its own sake. Some people seem to take pleasure from it.

Of course questions about shortages of tests, personal protective equipment and the like are valid and necessary. A lack of dissent is one reason disasters in totalitarian regimes, historically at least, have tended to exert a greater death toll. When Chairman Mao issued orders to kill sparrows, worried that they were eating grain, the fear of his authority delayed the feedback that the policy had wrecked the ecological balance. Locust populations, normally culled by sparrows, ballooned, intensifying a famine that would kill millions.

But I have been troubled by the tone of the criticism. Rory Stewart, London mayoral candidate, tweeted a message screaming “lunacy in the UK”. Some television presenters seem keener to provoke a car-crash interview than obtain information. Farage called for Hancock’s sacking while the latter was still in isolation. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, castigated the government for acting too late. “This is a national scandal,” he said. “We knew in the last week of January that this was coming.” But in late January he offered a very different view, tweeting that the coronavirus “has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. There is no reason to foster panic.”


I can’t help thinking that some scientists have learnt that in a time of hysteria you can gain a huge profile by using inflammatory language. Call it the Piers Morganisation of public discourse, a world of manufactured confidence and synthetic outrage. A world where the digital weighting placed on the extreme and dogmatic offers a distorted picture not just of reality, but of evidence itself. I would prefer experts to explain their views, along with the inherent uncertainties, so that we can properly assess them, rather than pseudo-positions tailored for maximum effect. Is such a hope forlorn on forums as glib as Twitter and much of modern TV?

We need a rational debate now about charting a wise exit from the lockdown, about how to distinguish between people who have died with, rather than from, coronavirus, and about whether the government would benefit from new expertise, not least from industry, as it confronts unprecedented administrative challenges. But this is being lost in a deluge of recrimination, amplified by wild gyrations on social media. There will be time later to learn systemic lessons — reforming quangos and the like. Making pre-emptive judgements now is a form of madness.

I can’t help recalling Peter Connelly, or “Baby P”, killed at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend and his brother but whose death was blamed on Sharon Shoesmith, head of Haringey children’s services in north London, before a proper investigation had taken place. Her fight against unfair dismissal was upheld by the Court of Appeal, but this isn’t my principal point. No, the point is the way the rush to blame creates unintended consequences. Social workers left the profession en masse. In one area, the council had to spend £1.5m on agency teams because it couldn’t handle referrals. Defensiveness infiltrated the profession. Social workers became cautious about what they documented, in case it came back to destroy them. As the bureaucratic paper trails got longer, children became less safe. The number killed at the hands of their parents rose more than 25% the next year and remained higher for each of the next three years.

I worry about the contagion of fear in government. Last week this newspaper quoted a source as saying: “Everyone knows there will be an inquiry at the end of this. Now some officials are in massive arse-covering mode. They’re refusing to do stuff because they think it will blow back on them.” Civil servants were “demanding instructions in writing so that there is an audit trail”.

Some may retort: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” This reveals not only a deficit of empathy but a misunderstanding of how a blame culture poisons agile decision-making.

Think, for a moment, of the future. Sweden has charted its own course, its citizens still going to schools and offices. In months to come the country may be held up as an exemplar of wise government — and we may feel angry that our ministers trashed the economy. But how sure are you of this future today, given that Sweden’s hospitals will be overrun if the virus spreads faster than predicted; that 2,000 scientists have signed a letter calling for an urgent U-turn; and that Sweden’s economy is already suffering because of the global downturn? Can you be certain, here and now, that Sweden won’t end up in the worst of both worlds, with huge numbers of avoidable deaths combined with economic damage wreaked by overspill from elsewhere?

If you are certain, you are either a genius or a dupe. But here’s the thing: in a few months you will face the temptation to reconstruct the past to fit the future, to “remember” feeling entirely sure, one way or the other, holding up the Swedish government, or the rest of the world, as fools. This is what we might call retrospective genius, the worst and most disreputable kind.

Criticism is necessary. Questions are necessary. But let us have this debate with a recognition that this is a crisis unprecedented in peacetime, with expert opinion divided. The blame game, here and now, is nothing less than a disgrace.

A disgrace that will, I fear, cost lives

[Eleanor]

A bit difficult for me because I haven't lived in England for a very long time and still didn't like it on the rare occasions that I have visited in the last 30 years.

I have also watched the rise of Social Media almost from the start and it is little better than Witch Hunting.  There are a lot of really horrible people out there who are not only ill informed but vicious in their ignorance.  It is always the fault of someone else when in fact the fault is theirs.

You can have Free Speech for me.  I don't need it.  I already know what is acceptable and what isn't.

I am a Monarchist, but I have to say that France beyond Paris is looking like a better place to be.

Old people are looked after and everyone is kind.  Good manners prevail and no one is fighting anyone for a packet of Toilet Rolls, there are simply enough.

When I first came here The Electorate in UK still largely believed that politicians knew what they were talking about and were doing this for the good of The People.  What a joke that turned out to be.  Since then I have watched a succession of Prime Ministers, most of whom were incompetent and self serving, whatever Party they represented.   

David Cameron was one such.  He never did have The Plot to lose.  But such fibs he told because he thought you were all stupid.  Fortunately, you weren't.

Boris Johnson has one abiding advantage.  He doesn't care for his own sake and he doesn't care if he fades into oblivion so long as he does the best that he can.  And with his Majority he will almost certainly have the means.

Brexit?  I think that this is the best for UK.  I don't care about how it will affect me personally.

Corona Virus?  Boris Johnson has got a lot more hideously self interested ignoramuses to deal with than Europe has.   

I haven't been out and about for nearly four weeks now because my generation were fast told to stay at home.  We do have Forms to take with us if we have to go out.  Although I don't take a form with me when I feed my neighbour's Cat across the road because they are trapped in Angleterre.  That might be a laugh and a half if I ever get stopped on the road.  Don't ask me to say it in French.  I could, but my French Spelling isn't good.

The Food Bank is still operating, but by appointment now, so as to avoid unnecessary contact.  How very brave these people are.  They are all knocking on a bit.  They know that we need the food we get.  There has never been any shame attached to Food Banks in France.

Sorry about this.  I still can't get into My Blog, so you will have to put up with the occasional need.

[Myster]

@Eleanor... Can no-one else reach your blog?  Is it possibly for you to post a link here or not?  I understand if you don't wish to.

[Venturi Swirl]

Apparently you can give your cat coronavirus and vice versa, however I refuse to stop stroking my pussy until BoJo tells me it’s bad for my health.

[Eleanor]

@Eleanor... Can no-one else reach your blog?  Is it possibly for you to post a link here or not?  I understand if you don't wish to.

I would love to post a Link to my Blog.  Presuming that this would be acceptable.  All Bloggers are self opinionated and while I do this for my own pleasure, I would like to think that it gets read occasionally.

I am having Computer problems at the moment but if you Google "Elena Mitchell's Blog" you might find it and then you could go back through the years of utter rubbish that I have managed produced.  It is all about Me.

Kizzy some how found my Blog quite some time ago, although I have never known how.  And I do have a few odd followers on this Forum.

Kizzy and I now have another relationship beyond this Forum.  Just as I had with Alice.

It's Words you see and they don't have to be Correct English.  You just have to love words and the putting of them on paper.

Mine are always halfy halfy.  An East End Londoner with pretensions.  So sometimes my grammar isn't all that good.

You could do this.  If you wanted to.

[Carana]

As we have good capacity within the NHS currently I’m not sure where the idea that the NHS has been overwhelmed has come from?  I have yet to see terrible footage such as that coming out of Spain and Italy of victims lying in hospital corridors coughing and wheezing for example.  A new hospital was built in 9 days in London with thousands of extra beds, and several more coming on line soon, when should these have been built do people think?  When the first coronavirus case was announced in China back in December?

I'm not convinced that any new UK government (from whichever party) would have taken decisive early action. Dealing with Brexit (in whichever way) was the original priority, and the Civil Service appears to have already been under stress over that.

I find it a great achievement to have converted a conference centre into a hospital in such a short time and no, there was no need for it back in December. The fact that they have been able to do so at short notice and so quickly appears as an indicator that that aspect of disaster planning had been well thought out and ready to execute.

The UK is by no means the only country in which the health services (and others) have been struggling with the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis and subsequent austerity measures. Most countries are in a mess, for a variety of reasons.

I'd still like to know what other measures had been taken in the UK or were ready to roll after the 2016 report on the pandemic simulation in October of that year, coincidentally just a few months after the referendum.

Televised scene of BoJo and Trump (and others from various countries) continuing to shake hands at a time when the official message was to behave responsibly and observe rules of social distancing may well have conveyed conflicting messages as to the severity of the situation.

[Myster]

I would love to post a Link to my Blog.  Presuming that this would be acceptable.  All Bloggers are self opinionated and while I do this for my own pleasure, I would like to think that it gets read occasionally.

I am having Computer problems at the moment but if you Google "Elena Mitchell's Blog" you might find it and then you could go back through the years of utter rubbish that I have managed produced.  It is all about Me.

Kizzy some how found my Blog quite some time ago, although I have never known how.  And I do have a few odd followers on this Forum.

Kizzy and I now have another relationship beyond this Forum.  Just as I had with Alice.

It's Words you see and they don't have to be Correct English.  You just have to love words and the putting of them on paper.

Mine are always halfy halfy.  An East End Londoner with pretensions.  So sometimes my grammar isn't all that good.

You could do this.  If you wanted to.

Ok got it, thanks for the info. Easy enough to find but can't understand why you're unable to log in.

Any blog at present is better than being driven doolally by the Bamber board and the plague.

Rob has a link to a facebook page and others have done similar before, so don't see any reason why you can't promote your own underneath your avatar.

Can your son not help you with the computer problem?  Is it not possible for you to log in with the Apple button here?...

https://wordpress.com/log-in?redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Felenamitchell.wordpress.com%2Fwp-admin%2F

[Carana]

Apparently you can give your cat coronavirus and vice versa, however I refuse to stop stroking my pussy until BoJo tells me it’s bad for my health.

There is a lot of mis (dis) information doing the rounds.

I don't find it impossible that a pet could presumably have traces on its fur if someone comes home without washing their hands, then strokes the pet, who then cuddles up to the next person. Probably no more of a risk than plonking your shopping on a kitchen counter and not wiping it down afterwards.