Did hasty decisions need to be made?
No, there was plenty of notice through Operation Cygnus. The report on Exercise Cygnus, the simulation of a fictitious influenza pandemic, warned that the UK’s preparedness and response, in terms of its plans, policies, and capability, was not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic that would have a nationwide impact across all sectors.
On 9 June 2020 Lord Bethel told the HoL that, “All the recommendations from Exercise Cygnus were accepted and taken on board. Many of these proved invaluable for informing the response to Covid, including plans for legislation that would assist in response measures, for bringing back retired clinical staff, for flexing systems beyond normal capacity and for establishing a group of expert advisers on moral, ethical and spiritual issues.”
This simply wasn’t true. Like much other information about the pandemic response, it was a lie.
One only needs to consider the care sector to understand the devastating impact of this. To deal with the expected surge of NHS patients expected in the event of a pandemic, the exercise identified that extra capacity was required in care homes. Why was that not heeded? Instead PPE redirected away from care homes and the NHS was given a clear instruction to send vulnerable people to care homes despite no testing for infection being available.
That is one of the reasons for our genocidal excess death rate, one of the highest in the world. We all know Boris Johnson said he didn’t mind seeing bodies piled high. Tragically, each one of those bodies leaves behind devastated family and friends, it was individuals who died, real people and not just statistics.
Was it very different to flu - the subject virus of Cygnus? In some ways, yes. However we have seen previous epidemics of Coronavirus origin -SARS and MERs. Countries that have successfully managed these had strategies based on detection and containment, and they fared much better in terms of mortality and preservation of social structure during the COVID epidemic. Meanwhile our unimaginably expensive and failed track and trace system encouraged the spread of the Delta variant.
Johnson is leading by creating three word straplines he sings out in his faux bumbling bloke type way. The majority are sucked in. People say he’s getting things done when nothing can be further from the truth.
Surgical standard gloves are surgical standard gloves. The gloves don’t know what which virus it is. Unfortunately contracting with your mates from the pub, through a few emails and directing our civil service to bypass usual tendering processes meant the PPE was (and still isn’t) delivered or was unfit for healthcare settings. Meanwhile companies used to providing PPE were not offered contracts. Frontline staff in hospitals, GP practices and care homes had to source their own, make do and mend, or place themselves at increased risk. Many tragically died because of exposure at work.
The Nightingales were another nonsense. Stacked high with equipment, including PPE, but only used for publicity in most cases. The government were told they couldn’t be staffed, but wanted the public to be in awe at the speed of their response. Like Johnson’s garden bridge, they were vanity projects. They detracted from the actual battle staff were having to find intensive care beds every day. It was hard to find staff to transfer patients to an available bed, let alone staff a warehouse style ‘hospital ‘ that want fit for purpose.
Whole thing has been an unmitigated car crash from start to finish - when we could have done so well.