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 don’t see the moral justification for saying:

”We have an elderly patient in bed here, who we suspect has Covid; and a patient in an ambulance outside with Covid. I know, we’ll discharge the elderly person into a care home, where elderly people (other people’s spouses, parents or siblings) are living in close proximity with usually the bare minimum of staffing, no PPE (because the NHS has commandeered it) and no testing. We know respiratory viruses will spread, so 20 more people will die as a result of discharging one person to save one other person’s life!

Then those 20 elderly people will be denied an ambulance to take them to hospital even if they are critically ill. They won’t even get oxygen; they will be left to die, gasping for breath like a fish taken out of water.”

I am sure some hospital doctors understood how respiratory infections are infectious, particularly among vulnerable people?

I was sent a DNACPR on DD in her 20s, by her GP, and asked if she got ill, did we want her to stay in the care home for “comfort care”? I heard at the Covid enquiry, the last thing people dying of Covid got was comfort care? Anyway, what if she just had appendicitis? Were we supposed to let her die an avoidable death, because the DNACPR didn’t specify if she were ill with Covid?

In normal times, if she had got appendicitis and we had not taken her to hospital, I assume we’d have been charged with neglect, if not manslaughter; so why was a GP recommending it?

There was no adequate stockpile of PPE as the government had ignored the recommendations and the testing capacity was insufficient at the beginning of the pandemic

Have they benefited from the spaffing of £200M the enquiry cost?

I think we could have all said "They could have done things better" but actually people objected to lockdown so saying it should have been harder is not an option.

Oldham and Leicester were subject to much harder lockdowns than anywhere else for a longer time.
We were part of an experiment.

Classic

There were long threads on here that actually were looked at by the enquiry. It was obvious to many people at the time that locking down earlier was necessary and would have meant a short duration. Sports clubs were cancelling fixtures, firms telling people to work from home - it's not hindsight.

Also there was discussion about the restrictions often making little sense - like the delay in allowing garden centres to sell plants when they could have done so outdoors, or the delay in allowing people to visit gardens. Those decisions meant entirely unnecessary economic damage. Eat out to spread covid was just stupid. They didnt do sensible things - like sending mobile vaccination units to firms with covid outbreaks.

They insisted people with covid should be sent from hospitals to care homes, for that they should face justice.

Wales too. It did stricter lock down and restrictions and had higher death rate.

Failed covid contracts £1.4b makes £200m on an inquiry pale in comparison

Test and Trace on Excel spreadsheets for £35 billion makes £200 million immaterial!

The people running the Covid enquiry are nobody’s fools. There’s a number of senior and junior barristers pulling the evidence apart, which is what they trained to do. They’ve had all the big agencies and the top professionals give their opinions, such as health and safety experts on the PPE, experts in dementia and the effects of the Covid regulations, etc.

The lawyers won’t have just taken at a face value, a care home owner saying in their witness statement “I was put under pressure”.

They’d have been asking in writing, before it even got to the hearing and the oral evidence “What dates? How many times? Show us the emails. Did you put your concerns in writing back to them? Send it to us. Then what happened?”

No they should not.
Nobody had felt with Covid before this. It was all new.
I expect it to be different if it happened in future though.

Would you like to be prosecuted if it was on charge, how do you know what you would have done?

I think Starmers alot worse.
She he be prosecuted for letting unchecked men into the country who have gone on murder and rape people.
Should social workers be prosecuted when they fail to prevent children's deaths?

"Spaffed" is a very Johnsonesque turn of phrase

Johnson also let 'unchecked men' into this country.

Absolute waste of money - everybody thinks they know a better way to fight a pandemic but there was no rule book and the next one will be completely different - and still no rule book!

Test and Trace on Excel spreadsheets for £35 billion makes £200 million immaterial!

To be fair, the Test part must have been hugely expensive - all those testing centres, labs, millions of lateral flow kits etc. Shame the Trace bit was crap...

The people I would really love to see prosecuted are those who spread misinformation during the pandemic

Yes, that's fair @Longtalljosie - just so long as it included all those who encouraged panic by spreading false images and stats of every type: https://factcheck.afp.com/Covid-19-Real-images-wrong-context

On this very thread several have mentioned "seeing what was happening in Italy", and while the country undoubtably experienced difficulties quite a number of things they probably saw are included on the list

There are very well known and tested public health protocols on dealing with pandemics.

Govt prioritised the economy but in doing so, cost us even more.

Why have France and especially Germany had much lower death rates? of comparable countries, economy and size, only Italy is just above us, they got hit first, we learnt nothing from Italy's experience.

I hate to break it to you, but the inquiry found that not locking down fast enough in the first wave and and then relaxing restrictions too early and not locking down again quickly enough during the second wave contributed to Wales having a higher death rate.

So using what happened in Wales to imply that swiftness and length of lockdown/restrictions didn't have an impact on death rates doesn't quite wash, I'm afraid.

"The Welsh government's initial response to Covid was "inadequate", with ministers in Cardiff "overly reliant" on the UK government to take the lead, according to the public inquiry into the pandemic"

"It also said decisions taken by Welsh ministers in the final months of 2020 - during the second Covid wave - were the "likely" reason why Wales had the highest mortality rate of the four UK nations at that time.

"It is likely that this was the result of a combination of failed local restrictions, imposing the [two-week] firebreak too late, and the decision to relax measures more quickly than scientists advised," the report found."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c15p5d04j9zo.amp

For the first lockdown, the narrative of "if we'd locked down earlier, we'd have had a shorter lockdown" is interesting. Cases were extremely low by late May 2020, yet most restrictions remained in June and crucially, only a couple of year groups were allowed to return to school before September.

So it doesn't feel like a given at that time that low cases thanks to an earlier lockdown = open up sooner. The government were waiting for something more than low cases at that time - I wonder what it was? Zero Covid? In any event, they definitely squandered the opportunity to get all children back to school for a few weeks before the summer holidays.

Shoehorning immigration into a thread about the Covid inquiry is quite a feat.

I recall that we had a longer lock down because we locked down late.

Death rates in May were twice as high as they had been in March, i checked the figures.
Only in June did they drop below that of March.

But totally agree on schools, terrible what they did to children, an afterthought, zero planning.

Did you notice the bit where I gave my opinion though in the first line or two?

This

What was the point of the extra circuit breaker and closing off supermarket aisles if you got worse results from it

That's a very long list of fake photos/videos but I took the time to look at it all - there are only 17 from Italy and none of them are the stark images I remember

Also when PP say "seeing what was happening in Italy" it's not necessarily meant literally as in viewing images but also means all the many news reports about the situation there

It's not about hindsight though.
The UK was in a privileged position purely because of geography.
Italy mainly, but other countries around there too got the Covid "wave" about 2-3 weeks earlier.
If Johnson had even an ounce of sense of responsibility he would have locked down earlier.
But he's an arrogant peacock and as far as I remember, he went to a rugby match at a time when this was very symbolic for the public - along the lines of... well.. he doesn't take it seriously why should I!?

I'm absolutely not saying they were right to do it the way they did. But there was so much moaning and not a lot of compliance when lockdowns were implemented.
I don't think 200 million on this is a good use of public money. It won't change anything.