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

PPE is quick to make, after the exercise I would have stockpiled materials (which in their original form don't expire anywhere near as rapidly as PPE does once it has been made), and identified factories here which would be capable of manufacturing it if needed. Come to some sort of agreement ie in case of x you will produce y, rather than have stocks every few years being chucked away as they have gone out of date- quick and abundant supply, probably cheap materials too as demand would have been normal. I don't think anyone is revering Boris are they? Lots of people seem critical, even ardent Tories.

It seems the government did stock pile some ppe,this is why so many hospitals are being sent ff3masks,all with out if date stickers on them.
And now,after we've sourced our own face protectors/goggles which were reusing,the public have helped make scrubs we are being told not to waste the ppe .
Thanks to the public staying at home we are no where near running out of ventilators ,long may it last.

Just piss off and go join the Labour Party. You are very tiresome.

It says more to me about a particularly pathetic feature of the british psyche MarieG. Give somebody a posh voice and the newspapers and they can come in and burn your house down and successfully blame it on immigrants and poor people

Whilst I'm not sure any government could have been completely prepared, I certainly agree that Brexit was a huge distraction to normal governmental life.

Why ever didn’t they just bring in Mumsnet to do everything for them? After all so many people here seem to know how it should have been done and how much better it would have been if they had their way.

So very easy to criticise how a country is being run when you’re not the one running it.

I am in Switzerland. There are full shelves in the supermarkets. There are hospitals with testing, PPE and ICU beds available. No politician proudly shook hands with everybody to then use up precious resources for themselves.

Of course the UK government could have done better. It is obvious, anyone who can‘t see that just doesn‘t want to see it.

user1471565182

It says more to me about a particularly pathetic feature of the british psyche MarieG. Give somebody a posh voice and the newspapers and they can come in and burn your house down and successfully blame it on immigrants and poor people

By the time of the next election, Labour will have been out of power for 14 years. Hateful attitudes like that will help bring it up to 19!

I am in Switzerland. There are full shelves in the supermarkets. There are hospitals with testing, PPE and ICU beds available. No politician proudly shook hands with everybody to then use up precious resources for themselves.

The UK is 7th in death rate per capita. Switzerland is ... 8th. Try not to do yourself an injury while patting yourself on the back.

It’s one thing to blame the government.

But what are you doing?

Here we have school staff track and tracing,
Engineers are redesigning ventilators
Schools and works are using their 3D printers to make masks
Alcohol manufactures are making hand sanitizer
Volunteers are delivering food to elderly
Farms are supplying veg boxes
Butchers are delivering
The colledge have coordinated scrubs to be made by textual students - locals donating material.
The scouts are making bands for masks
And lots more

What are your communities doing to help?

SantiagoSky
Supermarket shelves are pretty full in the U.K., there is currently excess capacity in ICU, distribution of PPE was definitely a problem and will need looking at as will testing capacity.
Boris Johnson paid a pretty high price for his handshaking so I think every gets it now.

The British Press has a tendency to be a bit sensationalist especially with the advent of rolling news. The vast majority of British people are taking this extremely seriously and no one is panicking.

Senior Government ministers and scientists are giving a televised press briefing every day and facing scrutiny. So people are already being held to account and will continue to be held to account.

Cheering when nurses payrises blocked, for those who say because they didn't see it, it didn't happen.

Just piss off and join the Labour Party.

Boris Is on mumsnet

Excess capacity of icu beds ? If there is it’s because every free space is now designated as ICU, ventilators from anaesthetics and theatres are being utilised which few of the icu nursing staff are au fait with and often staff who aren’t icu trained are looking after very sick patients. Not as hunky dory as you portray

distribution of PPE was definitely a problem and will need looking at.

Uh, distribution of PPE IS currently a massive problem. It is not sensationalism to talk about the death of doctors and nurses from lack of appropriate equipment.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/nhs-doctors-lacking-ppe-bullied-into-treating-covid-19-patients

Thanks for the info Chazs! I hope PPE and testing will be available soon. At the moment the testing rates in the UK are comparably low.

Switzerland is right next to Italy so was badly affected too. The death rates in the UK are still going up, that is something to keep in mind.

There seem to be paid bots on these threads who keep bringing up irrelevant stuff to distract from the real problems.

Appropriate PPE is still a problem. Dh is a hospital Dr and the level of PPE he’s being told he can wear doesn’t protect him to a high enough standard - they are clearly rationing the full PPE.
Testing is a huge issue and his hospital only has capacity to test 6 members of staff a day!!

@SantiagoSky

Do you really think playing "my country is better than your country" is the appropriate thing to do at this time?

I think comparing and critiquing the different responses by Govts to an international crisis is exactly what we should be doing.

I am really interested in this idea that the NHS have all the PPE they need now. The BMA certainly aren't saying that.

I did this in response to people pointing out that there is no way the UK government could have done better.

www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opinion/doctors-forced-into-impossible-situations-as-nhs-staff-report-dangerously-low-levels-of-ppe

Still a problem - over three weeks after we were told it was not a problem.

Santiagio does it not concern you that a country as wealthy as Switzerland should have done better.

A lot of tax money has left the UK and other European countries due to companies relocating to Switzerland.

That money could have helped fund the NHS.

The UK govt has an awful lot of questions to answer but we are nowhere near the end of this so it's hard to say who has best approach.

And yes supermarket's well stocked.

“It’s unclear whether the lack of PPE is directly linked to the recorded deaths of doctors so far, but we know that no healthcare workers have been infected in a hospital in Italy precisely because their PPE supplies are sufficient and of high-quality. From the BMA press release

Italy, the worst-hit country by the coronavirus pandemic by far, has lost over 60 doctors and other healthcare professionals, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Two directly contriadictory statements both from 'reliable' sources. Don't believe everything you read.

so is the argument

we have plenty of ppe in uk hospitals now
or
ppe doesn't matter

This is typical of our Weasel Tory Government. “We want to thank our wonderful NHS and volunteers and retirees coming back to help in this crisis/we’re all in this together/it’s a great leveller”. And now, they’re shitting themselves because the viral overload with the lack of PPE (and let’s not forget the transport drivers etc) will have led to deaths. I’ll bet Gove was sat at the table when they were working this one out. As an ex nurse (now retired) I’m fucking furious.

They can shove their hand clapping and pot banging Thursdays up their arses for me, now. Shame on Hancock and Johnson et al. They should be dragged out and pilloried for that statement.