You've got really low standards if you think Boris is doing well/okay

[flashbac]

Day by Day it just gets worse. Bodies piling up, lies being denied or covered up, blatant and shameless cronyism and corruption yet Bojo fangirls and fanboys keep lapping it up. What does he have to do to blow it huh? How can your standards be so flipping low?

Agree 100%

Trump keeps saying he's doing a fantastic job!

Boris is just as bad.

Interesting on the news tonight they were speaking about how the UK and Boris are discussed in the Media of other countries.

When they talk about us in other countries they are SCATHING.

General consensus around the world is our government is a joke!
I agree!

So many people either like Boris or won't concede they voted for a bumbling fool.

Awful choice as party leader. Awful party. Labour weren't much better

but I'm in the minority of people who had the same interpretation of the rules as DC - i.e. minimise transmission in usual circumstances, but if there was a reasonable chance that childcare would be impossible, other rules had to be broken

Are you also in the small minority of people who think he should have gone back to work after leaving to go and look after his wife who was ill with symptoms? Or the minority of people who think his jolly to Barnards Castle was within the rules? Even if driving to check your eyesight was a reasonable thing to do (it fucking isn't), it certainly wasn't when were in lockdown and were being told in no uncertain terms to not drive to tourist places over the Easter weekend.

@Mumratheevergiving (great user name btw - takes me back!)
Honestly - I think only after the epidemic is over will the number of excess deaths be comparable. (And even then it's difficult to compare different countries with different age structures and population denisities) so I haven't yet really decided what a good quantitative measure of success is. It is totally tragic, but pretty much from when the virus jumped to humans, it was inevitable that it would cause some deaths. For example, thinking that checking temperatures at airports would have stopped it getting into the UK is not imo realistic. It's now a matter of minimising the number and I don't see much that the government could have done differently. I also think that deaths caused by someone not accessing healthcare because of lockdown is just as tragic as someone dying from Covid, so I don't yet know how the final statistics will be compared.

The type of thing which would make me say that things were going badly would be if scientific advice was being ignored (for example in the US and Brazil).

I think that going to the NE to use family for childcare when there was a reasonable chance that you would be unable to care for children yourself is sensible contingency planning. I'd say that to anyone - politician or not. I think the 260 mile trip is a red herring. Whether you travel 10 miles or 260 is not particularly important (Assuming, as I do, that DC was not patient zero in the North East. )

Going for a 30 mile trip to see if you can drive safely is, however, fairly ridiculous. I'm not going to defend that. If it was a pleasure trip, that is reprehensible. If it was, as claimed, a test journey then that is just a bit weird. Having said that, I do know some people who would do just that...

I've never known a government so bad and I'm in my 50's. I'm not a tory voter but I can still see some tories I admire. There's no one in the cabinet that I don't utterly despise. They couldn't do worse.

I'm actually so angry at Corbyn. And I supported him. Why did he decide to go for an election and let these clowns get a majority?? I know he could never win, the media was totally against him and vilified him at every turn. But he should have stepped down and let Starmer lead.

@Meredithgrey1
My understanding was that his wife was ill, but not with COVID symptoms - she was vomitting. I don't think that this would have triggered isolation.
The journey to Barnard Castle is not really defensible. It's more the trip to isolate close to family which I have sympathy for and believe were a reasonable interpretation of the rules.

I think sometimes people also need to consider the huge efforts that have been made and the amazing achievements that have taken place before they are so quick to entirely criticise a government. Yes of course tragic numbers exist, mistakes and delays took place and other countries took different approaches which may now look more measured.

However, this is a NEW disease, of which we received relatively little notice and little detail before it arrived in our country. At a time when the entire world was panicking and buying up PPE and ventilators, the UK government managed to action several national companies to design and build extra ventilators, the UK government built several Nightingale hospitals, fully equipped and staffed and ready to accept any excess of patients from existing NHS hospitals. Thankfully they weren’t needed and this was due in part to the action taken by all of us and also by the UK government which meant that NHS hospitals did not exceed capacity. As far as I’m aware no UK doctor had to make a decision about which patient would be admitted into an ICU bed when there were more patients than beds, like we heard about in Italy.

The UK government also announced the furlough scheme and help for businesses and the self employed - the administration and delivery of which was all rolled out in less than two months.

Then there was the immense job of setting up the army of volunteers to support those shielding and trying to source PPE and reliable tests during a worldwide pandemic and subsequent worldwide shortages. Any extra safety measures put into place at supermarkets and in workplaces operated by key workers will have to have used guidance first designed and issued by the government.

Recently I was asked to apply for a home coronavirus testing kit as part of a research study and when I saw what went into organising the setup for that, I realised that the UK government have also been extremely busy getting that system up and running and all once again within a very limited time scale. The kit itself requires a very efficient courier system which operates nationwide for both delivery and collection and there are around 10 components contained within it including a very detailed and clear set of instructions that must have taken some time to design, print and mass produce.

I am not saying the UK government are perfect nor infallible, nor that they shouldn’t be challenged when appropriate. However, I would like to offer this alternative angle to the doom and gloom and negativity sometimes so prevalent on here and to perhaps think about a lot of the things that they have got right. No human is infallible and the balance between protecting the nation from coronavirus and protecting the nation from mental and economic ruin is a heavy responsibility to bear.

Malteserdiet it was a new disease in New Zealand, a new disease in Australia, in South Korea, in Austria..
We had the benefit of hindsight, we saw what was happening in Italy & our government failed to act fast enough. People died because our government dithered.

He’s a blithering idiot, it’s embarrassing watching him speak, he can hardly put an articulate sentence together

I thought he was meant to be this amazing, charismatic public speaker

@nancy75 You make a valid point. However, if a vaccine can not be achieved, how can those countries remain locked down forever to ensure that they don’t suffer the same fate but at a later date? Stipulating two weeks of quarantine for all arrivals into their countries is not sustainable long term.

Malteserdiet are you under some illusion that other countries didn’t expand their healthcare provision or support their economies?

Looking at it from the outside, people here (Ireland) are open mouthed that anyone would find Boris’s leadership anything other than a disaster. Are these people lacking critical thinking skills? Are they really that stupid?

They’re also shocked at the Cummings shenanigans. Are people happy to be played by fools like that? Pretend to believe the fairytale that a six year old would see through?

You could do better, could you?

Do you know what, actually, I think I could.
I saw what was happening in China in January and stocked up on essentials like hand sanitizer and easy food.
In February I started nagging my husband to arrange to work from home (he did in late Feb/early March). I bought a medical kit including oxygen and started reducing social contact. I also bought extra tech I thought we might need. Meanwhile Boris was on holiday for two weeks in Feb.
By March I'd finally had enough of government inaction and kept my children home from school a week before they closed.

I read an article a while ago by a mathematician/statistician or something who worked out that if we'd locked down one week earlier (as many were screaming at Gov to do, including plenty of posters on here) we would have had half the cases and deaths.

@LaurieMarlow
Not under any such illusion. I’m sure most governments have done what they thought was best. But the OP is referring to the UK government and so I have chosen to highlight some of the more positive aspects of what has taken place in the UK.

I just had at a list of population densities. Out of the 194 countries in the list, the UK is the 34th most densely populated, NZ is 166th and Australia is 192nd. Population density is hugely important in epidemiology. I think there are lots of factors outside of government policy which need to be considered when looking at these statistics. I don't think the UK goverment can take credit for some of the advantages we've had (lots of research capability and stellar public health people) but nor should it be condemned for factors outside of its control.
I've seen some of the research which suggests that deaths could have been much lower if lockdown had been implemented earlier. Personally, I think that it is both using estimates of parameters which were different from the best estimates at the time, and it makes some pretty huge assumptions about compliance which are not justified.

Calm down op, calm down

@KenDodd
Ooh - I think we've seen the same paper.

And how fucking shit must Boris be if I do genuinely think somebody like me could do better.

Where was South Korea on the list of population densities?

How is population density worked out for Australia? Is it land divided by people? If yes that’s a totally incorrect number, given that the majority of the country is uninhabited/ uninhabitable.

I actually think anyone with half a brain cell could have done better. Shame Boris couldn’t be bothered to heed the warnings or actually attend any of the cobra meetings in the early days when it mattered. Why people still stick up for him is beyond me. So many deaths that could possibly have been avoided and our elderly people In care homes have been totally thrown under a bus.

It’s not political point scoring to hold our government up to scrutiny. Their response to this crisis has not been good enough & a lot of people have died because of it.

This.

Dominic Cummings has shown extremely bad judgement. This is an extremely serious fault in a Special Adviser. And Boris Johnson is a complete liability and totally out of his depth. It would be funny if these men were not in charge of the country at a time of global emergency. I hope to heaven that somewhere in the Conservative Party there are enough sensible people to send the pair of them packing at the earliest opportunity.

Hong king and Singapore have extremely high population densities but have managed CoVId 19 crisis much more successfully. One of the reasons for their successes (as in other countries that have managed it significantly better than us) is widespread testing, something that we are still not managing to do in the U.K., even now.

I voted liberal so am neither a Boris nor Corbyn fan. I think much of the handling of this crisis by the govt has been piss poor.

However I think people quoting (yet again) incomparable death rates is not helpful in having a sensible discussion of what could be done differently and I'd also extend that to the DomCum situation. Yes it's massive hypocrisy and major lack in judgement but honestly I'm seriously more wound up about testing, PPE, clarity on education etc. than that eeediots movements. It seems people and the media are more annoyed about officials not following 'rules'. Bigger picture and some perspective? Great way to deflect questions away from the real issues though eh.

@nancy75
You're absolutely right that population density at a whole country level is a bit simplistic, but it is an important factor. Having some of your cities spaced out by several days road travel does make for a very different situation. Equally, population density is not the only factor - South Korea has done very well, but I think the consensus was that the UK population would not accept the monitoring which is the norm there, and where they had a much better infrastructure set up for tracing.

He caught the virus by shaking hands with patients that he knew had it...says it all really.