That Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock should be prosecuted for the avoidable Covid deaths

[LlynTegid]

The part 2 report of the Covid inquiry finds that at least 20,000 deaths were avoidable, had restrictions come in a week earlier.

Various other findings confirming the failures of Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock.

I think they should face criminal charges, such as corporate manslaughter given government is an employer. AIBU

I do wonder if things would have been better if Hunt had still been in charge at DHSC at the time. He would certainly have been more competent than Hancock. Probably less dishonest too.

Evidence to the inquiry showed that care homes did not have the training, staff, PPE or set up for the infection control needed, when they were being forced to take Covid infected patients from hospitals.

Care workers are not trained nurses. They were terrified. I attended Module 6 on care homes, and I discussed with the lawyers, who’d attended throughout, why care home managers were so awful in keeping residents isolated, even as they were dying from their families and there was a one word answer -“Fear”!

It was not the responsibility of the care sector to solve the problems in the NHS, especially while the NHS took all their PPE, and left care home staff to be infected instead. I heard one nursing home owner talk about how she’d always sourced her own PPE for her staff; and every business refused to supply her, citing the NHS as being given preference.

Yep. Just like the figure of 100,000 deaths for which Saint Boris made his staged grovel.

Anyone would have handled it better than Johnson and his cronies, another Tory leader would.

A “toxic and chaotic” culture inside Boris Johnson’s Downing Street – which it said the then PM. actively embraced – in which loudest voices held sway and women were sidelined.

How does it help? It’s so hard to summarise. The conclusions are not useful for another virus.

Care homes never had the means to isolate, shared washing and toilet facilities, no air ventilation facilities and no PPE.

Plus staff had no training on any of this.

But most important, they were never told the patients coming to them had any risk of Covid.

In fact this was actually stated to CH's "that these patients had a very low risk of Covid"
This advice was given out for many months after LD.

I find it extremely odd that people are so fixed on the idea that in this scientifically and technologically advanced day and age, no-one "knew" or "could predict" what to do.

Infection control is very well understood and managed on the daily in medical settings, which is why many illnesses / diseases don't run to pandemic levels regularly.

History has given us the lessons of the plague and Spanish flu. Governments run planning exercises and predictive planning simulations regularly.

While Covid was "new" (and likely manufactured / manipulated to a degree in a lab) many aspects of it mirrored other contagious respiratory illnesses. Yet it was treated as something completely novel and with an irrational level of suspicion and paranoia.

There are globally agreed pandemic strategies too.

The bottom line boiled down to money I think. In the first weeks of 2020 it was obvious that there was a problem, yet no-one wanted to interrupt the economy, with sensible measures such as border controls or minimising big gatherings. Ironically in bringing in lockdown, and applying disaster capitalism, the economic impact was even worse.

You can understand why people were driven to conspiracy theories, which again could be seen as representative of a world focused on never letting a good crisis go to waste in terms of profit (for a few) and where the unspoken rule is that how you make money is secondary to the opportunity to do so. The mixed messaging and authoritarian stance was absolutely designed to keep people in a "state of fear" and provided fertile experimental ground in behavioural psychology by the government. Even experts working for the government at the time have said they went a bit far.

As to the human cost - well, we're talking an unnecessary number of deaths obviously, from both Covid and things left undiagnosed / untreated because of Covid, psychological effects and a cynicism about our democratically elected leaders that will probably never go away. I mean, no-one really trusts politicians as a rule in general, but the pandemic really showed how unprincipled and self-serving they can be.

No amount of inquiries or dissection or "lessons will be learned" will undo or excuse the flagrant failures of our government when the shit really hit the fan, but didn't need to if they'd just taken their heads out of their green back lined arses at the earliest opportunity.

I was lucky. My Mum died from ovarian cancer in my home in April of 2020. She didn't have to die alone. District nurses were great for daily ascites draining and pain management, but as for the GP, prescription shenanigans and the vanishing of all other support, that was a shitshow indeed. And I know others experienced far worse. It's not something you can expect people to just get over. It changes you fundamentally and erodes any sense of security in the world.

As for accountability? Never mind prison, I say make the perpetrators live in austerity and paranoia for two years under threat of fines and incarceration in some sort of pandemic enclosure. Because they weren't in it with us, they were protected, and then complained when we didn't "pandemic right" when they'd stripped the country of sensible means to do so. For money reasons.

And don't get me started on wealth transfer.

No one forces anyone to take patients <for thousands of pounds a month..>.

Strict training was not required, basic infection control protocols would've sufficed. Most care homes offer private rooms, all the care home owners had to do was tell their staff that any new admissions treat as they would any discharge from hospital when there is an outbreak of anything.

If well enough people had to be discharged. They couldnt have stayed for weeks there'd have been outrage that people's relatives couldn't be treated in hospital because discharges had stalled. Care home owners need ro be held accountable too.

Why? That is how the inquiry is conducted all day:

1. a camera on Lady Hallett
2. a camera on the barrister doing the questioning
3. a camera on the witness giving their evidence

There are big televisions, hanging down from the ceiling with three showing each of the above on film and another for the written transcript being produced at the same time, certainly in front of the public gallery and in the viewing room.

There must have been at least 50 lawyers in the room, acting for the core participants, who had computer screens in front of them, showing Lady Hallett, the barrister and the witness as above. There is also an area of the room for the media, who I assume also had the big television screens, hanging from the ceiling.

It’s all on YouTube. The witness statements and written transcripts are available online.

Lady Hallett, as a previous president of the Bar Association, was chosen for the empathy and integrity, she had shown in a previous public inquiry. She said something nice and personal to the impact witnesses (ie the ordinary members of the public, such as the bereaved), before and after they gave their evidence.

I don't dispute cameras are present and the whole thing is of course available to view.
My actual point was I found her delivery of their opinions weird.

Personally I think the £220 million spent on this is criminal. Lawyer bonanza, at least they’re happy.

So far it seems to be lockdown earlier but we don’t know if the overall number of deaths would change anyway.

It would cost more in furlough etc though and lockdown damage

And you could have avoided lockdown, maybe.

All that time and money for those conclusions.

How could they enforce infection control, when they’d go into one room to look after a patient with Covid, and then go look after every one else with no effective PPE? Asymptomatic transmission wasn’t even recognised early on.

The government was fundamentally wrong in not recognising Covid was an airborne virus only. Surgical masks did not count as PPE (see the BMA’s evidence to the inquiry), only FFP3 was reckoned to be really effective against it.

Death rates among NHS staff were higher among those on ordinary wards, than the staff who were doing aerosols generating procedures, because they had FFP3 masks, etc. If hospitals couldn’t stop COVID from killing their staff, when they had more training, resources and PPE, why are care owners at fault?

As I said, the owner of a nursing home, herself a nurse, who understood infection control protocols, couldn’t stop half her residents from dying of Covid.

Care home residents were always going to catch Covid off the staff, even if patients with Covid were isolated in their rooms. The bigger the care home, the more staff (and therefore viral contacts), the quicker the residents were going to get it.

The enquiry heard how one care home, which refused relatives to be in with a dying resident, then asked those relatives to go in and disinfect the bedroom, a few days after their relatives’s death. What do ordinary people know about disinfecting a room of what was then a new, unknown virus, which the government itself didn’t understand?

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

I think it’s difficult for ‘lessons to be learned’ because events like this do not happen a vacuum.

so if we had a new coronavirus tomorrow the message would presumably be lockdown immediately.

but whereas last time we had very high levels of compliance I don’t think we would now. There would be a huge push back. Also, given the perilous state of the nation’s finances could we really afford to?

if it’s happens in 20 years time when everyone’s about the impact of lockdown maybe things will be different. But who knows what the world will be like in the 2040s?

'How could they enforce infection control, when they’d go into one room to look after a patient with Covid, and then go look after every one else with no effective PPE? Asymptomatic transmission wasn’t even recognised early on'

Same as if someone was discharged during an outbreak of anything. Hand washing, limit staff not use aganecy staff trooping about from care home to care home,

Care home owners hide behind the 'we were forced to take them' and 'we didn't know' excuses when in fact they weren't forced they obviously wanted the fees. Implementing the most basic of infection control procedures would've limited the spread. I know someone discharged from hospital one morning and sat in the day room that very afternoon. Seriously.

Care home owners need to be held accountable too.

Perhaps @BIossomtoes, but Hunt as Health Secretary at the time (2012-2018) was aware of the key findings of Exercise Cygnus a 2016 government simulation of a flu pandemic, which exposed severe weaknesses in the UK's pandemic preparedness.

Yes, you’re right. Unfortunately we don’t know what his response to it was and how it differed from Hancock’s approach and I don’t suppose we ever will. I do feel inclined to believe that Hunt took the job seriously while Hancock palpably didn’t.

I think we need a pretty good gap. If another virus necessitated the same I doubt the ability to support financially would be there, at all really.

I agree. I'm pretty sure that Theresa May would have handled it more seriously, honestly and diligently. I bet she'd have attended COBRA meetings for a start

Which would not have made the bllndest bit of difference she'd have followed the same advice from the very same medical and scientific experts.

I don’t think any medical or scientific experts advised partying at Downing Street while instructing the public to observe the lockdown regulations

Yes I agree with you on that. Hancock disgraced himself in the high public office he held. I would find it unbelievable for Hunt to have behaved that way so at least he would have acted honourably had he been Health Minister.

Also it Just shows you though that the old saying fail to plan, plan to fail is true. It would be good to know why the recommendations of Cygnus weren’t fully implemented. One area that could have been in a preparedness plan would be advance contracts so to speak with providers of key services or equipment, including PPE. It was criminal that those in this country who could have helped the supply were sidestepped for the so called VIP lane and Mone. When these companies could have been pre-screened and referenced in the emergency plan. A thorough emergency plan for a pandemic should surely cater for these essentials. I wonder what the state of the current plan is.

It Is very unlikely that we will get another virus like Covid.

It hit the sweet spot for being hard to formulate the correct policy response. If it were significantly milder than Covid, we could take no action. And, if it had even a little bit higher mortality rate, say 3% including children, people would very clearly follow government guidelines, and probably even go beyond them.

I am still fairly convinced that, certainly in London, we would have ended up locking down regardless of early measures. A combination of population density and lack of medical facilities would have ensured it.

Theresa May would not have spend her time shaking hands, watching rugby or go off to Chevening during half term writing a book or finalising a divorce.