UK Government knew the risks and did nothing

[Cam77]

Between July 2016 and January 2020 the British government spent three and a half years talking about and furiously negotiating Brexit - three and half years trying to solve a crisis completely of its own making.

In December 2020 in the weeks before the election, Boris Johnson, a chief architect of Brexit, did speak a couple of times about the NHS, a few vague promises about future nurses (who they had just months before gleefully blocked a pay rise for) and future hospitals.

In October 2016, three months after the Brexit vote, the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise, codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, but the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016.

“We’ve just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu, on a pandemic that killed a lot of people,” she told the World Innovation Summit for Health at the time. “It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies,” Davies said. One conclusion was that Britain, as Davies put it, faced the threat of “inadequate ventilation” in a future pandemic.

Despite the severe failings exposed by Exercise Cygnus, the government’s planning for a future pandemic did not change after December 2016 – at least not formally. The government’s roadmap for how to respond to a coronavirus-like pandemic has long been available online, and the three key documents – the 70-page “Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy”, 78-page “Health and Social Care Influenza Pandemic Preparedness and Response” and 88-page “Pandemic Influenza Response Plan” – were published in 2011, 2012 and 2014 respectively. These plans were tested and failed, yet these documents were not rewritten or revised.

They share a glaring shortcoming: not one of them mentions ventilators, which are now in such high demand that Matthew Hancock, the Health Secretary, told British manufacturers on 14 March, “If you produce a ventilator, we will buy it. No number [you produce] is too high.”
www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2020/03/government-documents-show-no-planning-ventilators-event-pandemic

Jeremy Hunt was in charge of Health then, wasn’t he? Correct me if I’m wrong. The same man who has criticised the Govt’s slow response to readiness (PPE/ICU capacity/staff shortages/ventilators)?

They (and we) will quickly forget. Boris Johnson has been turned into some kind of f*g hero. He is not. He is a man who flouted his own advice and chuckled when his own father protested “if I want to go to the pub, I jolly well will”. BJ will be Lord Johnson at the end of all this. We allow our elected Govt. To literally, get away with murder.

YANBU.

When did they start scrabbling around for extra PPE?
In January, when we saw what was happening in China?
In February, when it was spreading around the globe?
When we saw what was happening in Iran?
When we saw what was happening in Italy? In Spain?
When our numbers were rising (but they still denied there was community transmission, and did very little to contain it, let alone any checks at airports)?

Or was it March when they could not ignore it any longer?

A lot of PPE has to be replaced every couple of years apparently, so that would make it even less viable to have massive stocks 'just in case'.

People keep voting for the Tories despite knowing their attitude to the NHS... go figure
Probably because the Labour party rendered themselves unelectable by ignoring and belittling their base support, leading to the Tories winning by default.

This is a very good, researched summary of the Governments response to the global crisis.

The Telegraph, a big supporter of the Conservative party, wrote a piece on Exercise Cygnus that a couple of weeks ago. Even government sources were quoted as acknowledging the govt didn’t act on the Exercise Cygnus findings because paraphrasing ‘these things are expensive and it was a time of austerity.’ The least govts can do is have sufficient PPE available.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/exercise-cygnus-uncovered-pandemic-warnings-buried-government/

A quick note for the people commenting on death figures only being those recorded in hospitals - the Office for National Statistics are reporting all deaths for England and Wales, including those at care homes and in private residences where Covid19 is listed on the death certificate. However, the delay in deaths being registered means the stats are not timely.

This was discussed in the news earlier in the week in relation to the variation in reported numbers.

Nothing really to say except that no government has a bottomless pit of money. They have more worthy things to spend on than they have money to do them. So they can only fund select things. Buying 200,000 ventilators and such “just in case” when they may be obsolete or have rotted away before they can be used would always stay below already present priorities like stopping knife crime or improving education or ending homelessness. They’re diverting money now that a pandemic is happening from emergency funds always kept aside for things like floods or here in France wildfires.

Cam77
This getting obsessional now. You have posted similar posts on a regular basis.

Yes the scientists made some mistakes.

Yes NHS procurement and logistics is shit but this is not new.

Other countries have also struggled

The official death rate in China raises serious questions about the quality of information

This is not over by a long way and nobody can assess strategies until we see what happens in the Autumn, with the Spanish Flu the second wave was bigger.

And tory-haters will never give praise where it's due, such as getting the Nightingale hospitals up and running, or the ££££££ of support for businesses

They refurbed an existing building, equipped it by running other hospitals short of staff and ventilators and despite the press saying its a 4000 bed hospital, its in fact 500, there just isn't the staff, hence screwing up the education of fee paying year 2 healthcare students.

But their support for business is correct as is the furlough scheme, i feel Sunak is actually quite good and understands the crisis we are in.

If some PPE stocks have to be replaced every couple of years it doesn’t mean govts shouldn’t bother. It should be part of the accepted costs

Cam77 YADNBU

Fuck sake, it's not just about stockpiling equipment it's about crisis management and government prepairedness for a foreseeable event. This was a known threat. It's about having a plan in place and following it - like knowing that testing is important and prioritising that, foreseeing that equipment would become an issue quickly and preparing for that as soon as the threat was recognised.....

Let's be clear. Winding down the NHS was a bad move in my eyes, but presumably private hospitals rose to fill the gap and get the profits? And wasn't the NHS deteriorating long before that? When did we decide to give up training people for example and just steal staff from other countries?

As for preparations for a pandemic Governments and people leave things and then say "Oh I wish I'd seen to that before". When labour were last in power did they spend a lot of money on ventilators? Perhaps someone could check as I genuinely don't know.

And what about flood defences? We need to spend any money we have on that. Also on preparations for X, Y and Z. If Z happens next year someone will say "we wasted all that money on the bloody ventilators and no one thought to prepare for THIS!"

I think we need to rejuvenate the NHS. A massive increase in spending, but should Labour get in next time we will be in debt so they will have to say "we can't spend money on the NHS just yet as we have other things to pay for"

It would be interesting to know in due course of time whether actions coming from this report included planning for where the additional capacity/ supplies etc could be sourced at short notice, agreements in place for potential supply, etc. and that these agreements and plans were kept up to date, so that they could be activated quickly should the need arise.

For me it's less whether you have stockpiles of kit and more why there is no plan. If you run a model and it doesn't work, you amend the plan. What is irritating about this government's response is that they had no plan and do not appear competent to make one. Planning is not an impossible challenge. It's about how to govern; get the information, evaluate it, make a plan, execute the plan. Or in our Government's case, ignore the information, fail to take even precautions and contract the virus you are supposed to be managing. #inspiringleadership

I've just been in hospital (Plenty of PPE available to staff. Gloves, aprons etc fully stocked and all staff changing as and when required.

How also would you plan for procurement of a limited resource when global demand spiked so dramatically?

Personally, I think the government have done a pretty good job. They've closed the country down as much as realistically possible and have opened the coffers up.

Labour lost because they continued to ignore their core voters. (the fact they've just chosen another London based human rights lawyer as leader speaks volumes)

Final one, how much money do some people want to chuck at the NHS? Assuming the extra funds would help paying off Labour's PPI liabilities though?

The government were late to lockdown - should have done it at least a week earlier. Their messaging was weak and contradictory - e.g. the ‘handshaking’ PM. The government have deliberately underfunded the NHS, privatising parts of it by stealth. They have got rid of nurses’ bursaries. They fail to provide adequate PPE. They cheer the decision not to give health workers a 1% pay rise. They are still talking about not extending the Brexit transition period- despite the fact that our economy can not withstand the double whammy of Covid 19 and a crash out Brexit. They need to sort it out ... and fast.

It doesn't matter how much money the NHS had it would still waste it ,until something is done about the mismanagement of the NHS nothing will change

Gleefully?

The gleefully blocked pay rises for nurses did they?

Can you explain what you mean by gleefully? Thanks awfully,

Don't worry. Next crisis we have it's all going to be fine because all these people who know what the Gov should have done will have stepped up and become MP's and enable us to benefit from their wisdom. Or not....

To reply to a few points:

• Don't compare with Spain/Italy/France. They are all considerably ahead of the UK timeframe. We are likely to have fared worse than all of them given that our peak is still perhaps two weeks aways. (announced by government spokesman today).

*The mainstream British media by and large do a pretty rubbish job of holding government to account. Therefore I think it is vital that normal citizens also try to highlight their failings occasionally.

*There is nothing "party political" about this. I am critiquing the failings of the British government which holds power. Yes, other countries have also had multiple failings and they too should be criticised. Very few countries will come out of this smelling of roses. (though if countries were football clubs, the UK's performance would see it languishing in League 2.)

If governments are not criticised for oversights, failures of planning and implementation etc it will happen again and again*. A key reason countries in Asia have on the whole dealt with this far more effectively than those in Europe is because they did take on board some lessons from failures in handling previous Asia specific outbreaks.

How can our peak be two weeks away when we’ve been in lockdown for nearly three? In other countries, the effect of the lockdown (i.e numbers levelled out and dropped) was evident after 3-4 weeks of it.

Peak deaths lag the slow down in cases by a couple of weeks. People dying now were probably infected before lockdown.

Cases maybe starting to slow.

Should have locked down 2 weeks earlier than we did. Boris was ineffective and not listening to experts/WHO, favouring his idiotic friend Cummings.

Still have done nothing to close airports and quarantine people coming into the country. This is going to go on for a very long time thanks to this.

Look how New Zealand have handled this if you want an example of how to handle a pandemic.

Doctors and nurses going to work without PPE, a lack of testing, a lack of ventilators, is not the fault of the Govt. Its um, the NHS's fault and anyway, its fine. They've got everything they need.

They think ignoring the result of the pandemic exercises 2016 must be Corbyn's fault too, at some level, surely. Why would you pay attention to it, really.

People dying is probably because they aren't fighters like good old Boris who was still shaking hands in hospitals on March 2nd.