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

Bill Gates on BBC that should have read.

Pointless to try and blame countries and discuss who passed it to whom. We are living in a globalized world. It was clear that there was a pandemic that needed to be dealt with. The countries that acted the latest will suffer the most.

Oh, we’re “heading for” it, are we? We have to catch up to overtake Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all of whom are ahead of us. No doubt Boris is running those countries too, right?

A lot of anger there.
Apparently we are 2/3 weeks behind mainland europe or so we've been told and our daily death toll is higher & we far less restrictions.

As i said, "probable" and as he boasted of shaking the hands of hospital patients then its a reasonable assumption to make.

He is a fool and as i said the only world leader to have contracted it, now why would that be?

Justin, you’re absolutely right, it’s tragic

Johnson treated this pandemic with abandon in Jan/feb, that his advisors also went along with his cavalier attitude is even more shocking

And yet we've seen footage of Angela Merkel and the Dutch PM laughing and joking as they shake hands (or attempt to shake hands) in March.

And how do you excuse the SNP and the Labour Party agreeing the Government's course of action at cross party talks on the 12th March?

And let's not forget French President Macron actually kissing the Italian Prime Minister when meeting him in Milan, right at the heart of the worst outbreak of Coronvirus in the fucking world.

YANBU. A catalogue of failings by our govt.

Many of us were on here in January calling for action. If we could see the train coming, why couldn't all the so called experts?

We had a gift of time and a window into other countries. A wicked waste of lives.

Yet the PM said "take it on the chin."

It's an unforgivable and avoidable mess.

But no, apparently it's only us, Boris and the UK government who are getting it all wrong.

With hindsight I wouldn't done a lot of things In life .

Yes this is true of all of us. But there is making a decision which turns out to be wrong, and sitting on your backside doing nothing. Would you let someone drive a car if you knew its brakes were in danger of failing? Most of us wouldn't.

We don't know what the Government were doing, but we do know that they were aware that the NHS had been run down, which is what the 50,000 new nurses and 40 new hospitals was about. There would be no need to boast, if we had sufficient well staffed hospitals.