[SA Chris]

I agree with JJR. Like when someone says "Well I'm sorry you feel that way about what I've done, but...." Which at first impression would seem like an apology for dong something, but blatantly isn't.

[TobyD]

I am probably being a bit harsh but if you analyse it carefully, you'll see it is an elegant piece of fence sitting which invites the perception that she is somewhat critical whilst absolutely not saying that, nor deviating from the gov line.
A bit of politics, all things to all people, open to more than one interpretation and impossible to pin down.

I don't know about it being elegant but otherwise I agree. It's typical professional political bullshit. I saw what Theresa May of has said to her constituents on the news. She might have been a rather poor PM but at least she's honest.

Nigel, I generally agree, although I'd wager it's pretty possible that Johnson wouldn't have cared very much about exactly where Cummings was at that time as he went into hospital not that long afterwards. He was probably mainly worried about his health and the imminent birth of his son.

[tc]

She might have been a rather poor PM but at least she's honest.

 

[ali k]

When I checked BBC earlier today the top 4 UK news stories were:
1. Statistics watchdog calling out the test numbers false accounting.
2. Govt now ignoring their own alert level system as it doesn’t fit with their lockdown relaxation (All 4 CMOs vetoing lowering from level 4 to 3).
3. Quarantine u-turn now in the making.
4. Parliamentary voting system chaos and discrimination.

What an utter shambles.

[tomtom]

You missed Prof Fergusson telling the lords it’ll bumble along at these levels until sept - and CV19 is leaking out of hospitals and care homes into the wider public.

[Ged]

I'm sure Johnson et al are relieved to see the goings on Stateside taking a bit of front page space, and temporarily distracting everyone from the shit show that is their government.

Has any explanation been given for the contact tracing app being brushed under the carpet?  I've heard several scientists talking about how it would be way more effective, and way cheaper, than using people.  Is testing just proving too difficult?

[Stu Littlefair]

I may be reading too much into a single sentence from Matt Hancock during Fridays 5pm briefing about the isle of white pilot. But I’d guess it’s because people are refusing to self isolate when the app asks them to. Perhaps there are too many false alerts, perhaps people just need an actual person to tell them to stay home.

Really good deep dive into the SAGE minutes by the FT, with a focus on why the govt made several calls that initially seemed nonsensical.

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/06/01/1591001732000/Making-sense-of-nonsensical-Covid-19-strategy/

[stone]

I'm sure Johnson et al are relieved to see the goings on Stateside taking a bit of front page space, and temporarily distracting everyone from the shit show that is their government.

Has any explanation been given for the contact tracing app being brushed under the carpet?  I've heard several scientists talking about how it would be way more effective, and way cheaper, than using people.  Is testing just proving too difficult?

I don't understand. The App is to help trace contacts isn't it? Whether contacts are traced by bluetooth phone interactions or by interviews and looking up CCTV, payment card usage etc etc, it still needs the same amount of testing to see which contacts are COVID19 +ve. If tracing is delayed because there is no app to help, that means more not less testing is needed.

What seems deranged to me is that once traced, contacts are just being asked to isolate. They are only tested if and when they develop symptoms. I thought the point of this was to get ahead of outbreaks and quash them. That necessitates identifying virus shedders who are pre-symptomatic/asymptomatic so that their contacts can be tested and isolated and so on.

The UK approach seems totally at odds with https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-how-to-do-testing-and-contact-tracing-bde85b64072e 

[TobyD]

I may be reading too much into a single sentence from Matt Hancock during Fridays 5pm briefing about the isle of white pilot. But I’d guess it’s because people are refusing to self isolate when the app asks them to. Perhaps there are too many false alerts, perhaps people just need an actual person to tell them to stay home.

It's absolutely bonkers that our government is banking on just asking people to isolate. I'm not suggesting going as far as China, who actually sealed people physically in their houses, but every other country with a similar system has a pretty severe penalty for infringement: imprisonment or a bloody massive fine. Clearly the situation demands this otherwise people won't bother.

[tomtom]

Indeed. Why are the contacts being told they HAVE to be tested. That way you catch it.

Week and a half ago I drove past two large outdoor testing stations in the middle of the afternoon (Manchester and Bolton) and they were both dead. People working there but no cars for testing. We would appear to have capacity...

[Ged]

I'm sure Johnson et al are relieved to see the goings on Stateside taking a bit of front page space, and temporarily distracting everyone from the shit show that is their government.

Has any explanation been given for the contact tracing app being brushed under the carpet?  I've heard several scientists talking about how it would be way more effective, and way cheaper, than using people.  Is testing just proving too difficult?

I don't understand. The App is to help trace contacts isn't it? Whether contacts are traced by bluetooth phone interactions or by interviews and looking up CCTV, payment card usage etc etc, it still needs the same amount of testing to see which contacts are COVID19 +ve. If tracing is delayed because there is no app to help, that means more not less testing is needed.

What seems deranged to me is that once traced, contacts are just being asked to isolate. They are only tested if and when they develop symptoms. I thought the point of this was to get ahead of outbreaks and quash them. That necessitates identifying virus shedders who are pre-symptomatic/asymptomatic so that their contacts can be tested and isolated and so on.

The UK approach seems totally at odds with https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-how-to-do-testing-and-contact-tracing-bde85b64072e

I meant testing of the app

[Oldmanmatt]

I see the BMJ are in full support of the government position...


Um...


Or, not...

https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2102

[Sidehaas]

[quote author=stone link=topic=30554.msg610451#msg610451 .

What seems deranged to me is that once traced, contacts are just being asked to isolate. They are only tested if and when they develop symptoms. I thought the point of this was to get ahead of outbreaks and quash them. That necessitates identifying virus shedders who are pre-symptomatic/asymptomatic so that their contacts can be tested and isolated and so on.

[/quote]

This question has been asked a couple of times by the daily media. Both times the scientists answered that in the period during which a contact is pre symptomatic after catching the virus from a known positive test, they themselves are still highly? likely to test negative, is there are lots of false negatives in that population - enough that in that population they need everyone to assume they are infected and isolate even if they get a negative test result. Presumably, the logic goes that you can't really realistically expect people to do that and therefore it is better not to give them the test.

[TobyD]

I can't disagree with any of this really:


Keir Starmer has accused Boris Johnson of causing a collapse in public confidence over the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, saying No 10 will be directly responsible if the infection rate starts to rise again.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Labour leader launched a stinging attack on the the prime minister, accusing him of “winging it” over the easing of the lockdown and making an already “difficult situation 10 times worse”.

He also questioned whether the timing of some decisions over the relaxation of the lockdown rules had been taken “to try to deflect attention away” from the Dominic Cummings affair – an episode, he said, that showed Johnson was too weak to sack his chief adviser.

Keir Starmer warns PM: get a grip or risk second wave of coronavirus

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/02/keir-starmer-warns-pm-get-a-grip-or-risk-second-wave-of-coronavirus?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

[stone]

Really good deep dive into the SAGE minutes by the FT, with a focus on why the govt made several calls that initially seemed nonsensical.
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/06/01/1591001732000/Making-sense-of-nonsensical-Covid-19-strategy/

Don't those calls still seem nonsensical? Contrast with how Mongolia went about COVID19 response https://medium.com/@indica/covid-underdogs-mongolia-3b0c162427c2

I think we need to have a long hard look at what cultural/political/whatever factors have made us as a nation so utterly shite on this. And then change -massively.

[Stu Littlefair]

Many of them do, but most of them folllow on logically from the initial position of SAGE that containment wasn’t possible. In fairness to them, at the time they could have been right.

If you believed that, then efforts to lockdown were just economically painful ways to guarantee everyone died in the second wave.

But a strategy of mitigation also means there’s no sense in building up certain PPE stocks or test/trace capacity. So a late switch of strategy finds you with insufficient resources to do all the things you know you SHOULD do, and desperately scrabbling to catch up.

I know lots on here want to believe the govt are incompetent and malevolent, but really most of what has happened has resulted from that one error of judgement right at the start. 

The thing that has depressed me the most about subsequent months is how poorly our system of contracting out govt responsibilities to SERCO, Deloitte etc has performed. It really has been a shambles and the whole system needs a very hard reassessment.

[mrjonathanr]

The thing that has depressed me the most about subsequent months is how poorly our system of contracting out govt responsibilities to SERCO, Deloitte etc has performed. It really has been a shambles and the whole system needs a very hard reassessment.

Not surprising, as they have no existing infrastructure, expertise and experience, unlike localised occupational health. Cummings - as well as recent administrations in general- has built his whole career around destroying local structures and accountability. His time in DofE was a massive exercise in attacking Local Authority delivery of education, with predictable results.

It is the normal story of privatisation where companies with a profit motive and little incentive to see whole picture are performing poorly. Ideology, meet pandemic.

[Stu Littlefair]

Totally agree, but I'm not so quick to lay the blame at recent administrations in particular. This has been going on since Blair/Brown. It seems to be a whitehall disease...

[Offwidth]

Many of them do, but most of them folllow on logically from the initial position of SAGE that containment wasn’t possible. In fairness to them, at the time they could have been right.

If you believed that, then efforts to lockdown were just economically painful ways to guarantee everyone died in the second wave.

But a strategy of mitigation also means there’s no sense in building up certain PPE stocks or test/trace capacity. So a late switch of strategy finds you with insufficient resources to do all the things you know you SHOULD do, and desperately scrabbling to catch up.

I know lots on here want to believe the govt are incompetent and malevolent, but really most of what has happened has resulted from that one error of judgement right at the start. 

The thing that has depressed me the most about subsequent months is how poorly our system of contracting out govt responsibilities to SERCO, Deloitte etc has performed. It really has been a shambles and the whole system needs a very hard reassessment.

That's because SAGE believed in less than ideal modelling and were not listening to the too few members who knew about fighting outbreaks. Most of mainland Europe seem confident the lockdown route was the way to go and that recovery was to be expected, even those hit early and hard in a flu peak have done better than us. Why assume the worse while you can still fight for much better? In the UK cascaded covid cock ups, the best data indicates we have only infected 7% of the population so far... 15 times the deaths to go then. There is still no proof herd immunity will even work... yet there is a strong hope that containment will be rescued by medical advances (vaccine or ither treatments to reduce mortality).

It's morally reprehensible not to protect workers at the front line of this horrendous trauma even if you don't give a shit about more than slowing the spread. The viral load/dose issues almost certainly means risks are higher for them. We now know the extra risks for BME staff  (a much higher proporton in the NHS and care than in the general population). Plus even for Cummings style inhuman machinations it's hardly like we have masses of space capacity in the health workforce that we can afford deaths permanent health issues and mass mental trauma.

I think posters here who openly admit they can't stand the government have been broadly fair in discussing evidenced based failure. As one of those I'll happily repeat the financial response is good so far (way better than I expected) and lockdown timing was clearly the fault of SAGE and not Boris. As such I'm disappointed you: would unfairly malign those posters: and say most things arose from one error when so many errors have happened. Maybe most deaths arose from that one mistake (I'd say failures in care home action must be equal at least)  but there is more to this ongoing government fiasco than the headline numbers. The latest news is Parliament will be like some mad satirists theme park with queues through the corridors to vote and those MPs forced to self isolate denied a vote on behalf of their constituents...  plus a bit more boundary change gerrymandering given they have the power to do so.... the threat of Boris to UK democracy should not be underestimated.

Why on earth did you expect better from contracting out? It was one of the most predictable mistakes they made.

[ali k]

So a late switch of strategy finds you with insufficient resources to do all the things you know you SHOULD do, and desperately scrabbling to catch up. I know lots on here want to believe the govt are incompetent and malevolent, but really most of what has happened has resulted from that one error of judgement right at the start. 

I think that strategy switch has been clear to anyone paying attention from early on, and personally I would have cut the govt a lot more slack if they'd just been honest about it at the outset. I understand the argument for not admitting every mistake at a time when the govt needs to maintain public confidence but what has followed on from that decision has been an exercise in reputation management over and above any concern for public health as far as I can see (prioritising NHS capacity by pushing the problem unchecked into care homes is just one example). There has been not a shred of humility or contrition from any govt minister throughout the epidemic and instead they keep insisting they're following a clear strategy which is working well. The consistent manipulation of data to support this argument is also unforgivable to me. Well-intentioned mistakes can be forgiven, but constant deception and misinformation just leads to a collapse in public trust - which is exactly what's happened.

[stone]

Many of them do, but most of them folllow on logically from the initial position of SAGE that containment wasn’t possible. In fairness to them, at the time they could have been right.

If you believed that, then efforts to lockdown were just economically painful ways to guarantee everyone died in the second wave.

But a strategy of mitigation also means there’s no sense in building up certain PPE stocks or test/trace capacity. So a late switch of strategy finds you with insufficient resources to do all the things you know you SHOULD do, and desperately scrabbling to catch up.

I know lots on here want to believe the govt are incompetent and malevolent, but really most of what has happened has resulted from that one error of judgement right at the start. 

The thing that has depressed me the most about subsequent months is how poorly our system of contracting out govt responsibilities to SERCO, Deloitte etc has performed. It really has been a shambles and the whole system needs a very hard reassessment.

Wuhan had a totally out of control mess of an outbreak (as we have had) but they then got ahead of it, cleared it up and stopped it taking off in the rest of China. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/house-was-fire-top-chinese-virologist-how-china-and-us-have-met-pandemic

Best explanation I've seen for why SAGE had such a roll over attitude is that neoliberal mind rot has imbued our whole nation with the deeply held ideology that the state can't do anything.

[tomtom]

Meanwhile - it seems Boris was wearing an earpiece in today’s PMQ’s... according to twitter...

https://twitter.com/andyconner67/status/1268177326187196417?s=21

[ali k]

Not confirmed as covid yet but it wouldn’t be a shock if it is. You really couldn’t make this up
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52910303

[Nigel]

I know lots on here want to believe the govt are incompetent and malevolent...

Fair enough Stu, but if we put covid to one side for a second and look at pure politics, they have just yesterday held a vote on whether to keep the virtual parliament, or return to voting in person. This was done in person and therefore automatically excluded anyone shielding or performing care duties i.e. a lot of MPs who would have definitely voted against. It was also biased against MPs from Scotland and NI (not Tory strongholds) because of current travel difficulties. Unsurprisingly given all this the government won the vote 261 to 163. https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/794

That's 424 out of approx. 626 voting MPs. Of course even if every MP could have voted online the government may have won anyway as they have a majority of 80, but they went for loading the deck instead. There are now constituencies in the UK with no effective representation in parliament because the MPs there are following the UK rules on shielding etc. The new situation of in-person voting also goes against their own UK rules on working from home if you can - the virtual system worked. It has also received a rebuke from the EHRC as discriminatory. Not to mention that in the 21st century they have to form a queue a mile long and it takes 45 minutes for one vote. Or that they recently all received £10K to allow them to work from home.

Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed it was in voters’ interests to get parliament back up and running as legislation had been “clogged” with “no detailed, line-by-line consideration of bills that will affect people’s lives”. This is the same guy who lied to the Queen in order to shut parliament for an unprecedented 5 weeks only a few months ago, when there was also some quite important stuff happening. Found unlawful by the Supreme Court.

As an added extra on the same day the ONS had a go at them for fiddling stats.

Whatever the above is, its not competent or benevolent, to me at least. As Kier Starmer said at PMQs, even if you want to support the government, they are making it very difficult to.

[TobyD]

I know lots on here want to believe the govt are incompetent and malevolent...

...
Whatever the above is, its not competent or benevolent, to me at least. As Kier Starmer said at PMQs, even if you want to support the government, they are making it very difficult to.

I don't think that the current government is malevolent in that I don't think they're actively willing the deaths of thousands of people, but I think that they're virtually inarguably incompetent. I really don't think that one mistake really sums it up. Appointing a third rate, massively inexperienced cabinet before the crisis, who then bicker with each other about whose departmental interests should take precedence or who should be held responsible for the latest screw up, was perhaps the first error. A showman prime minister close to morbid obesity with a shockingly poor grasp of any details... They've repeatedly tried to pander to a libertarian ideal of minimal state intervention in public life when that's exactly what is needed in spades. We've barely had a proper lockdown at all compared to most badly affected European countries, and now even that's being eased too early.
I'm not opposed to the conservative party; I'd vote for them if they were any good, as I would almost any party. However this lot are truly dire.