Is Johnson doing the right thing?

[jasjas1973]

Is he? i've changed my view on this recently.
Do we just have to accept some very harsh truths?
Getting some very clever people to advise him and judging by how successful partial lockdowns in other European countries have gone, these don't seem to work.

We haven't got an NHS that is anything like as well equipped/staffed as say an Italy, France even Spain and they are not coping, maybe he is just (for once) being honest?

Just seen this:

WHO questions UK response to coronavirus

World Health Organization spokeswoman Margaret Harris has questioned the UK’s approach to developing “herd immunity” against Covid-19.

Dr Harris told BBC Radio 4’s Today: “We don’t know enough about the science of this virus, it hasn’t been in our population for long enough for us to know what it does in immunological terms.

“Every virus functions differently in your body and stimulates a different immunological profile. We can talk theories, but at the moment we are really facing a situation where we have got to look at action.”

Can I just remind those who say it is mild, that the medical definition of mild is "not requiring hospital treatment". Not that it's just like a cold.

Indeed. I had flu last year and if that's the mild version then anything else is utterly terrifying.

Do the supporters still back him? Even though he has went back on a lot of his measures after just 3 days...?

I think trying to keep as much business going as possible makes sense so only restructing those which particularly encourage spread makes sense. I think he's a fucking coward for killing businesses by stealth rather than ordering closures and supporting them.

I'm not a supporter, never voted for him, broadly in favour of the approach of not just shutting everything down though

I think it’s because he knows the scale of the problem and the length of time it will last, it may not be possible to stop it tanking.

No agreed Marshabradyo, but there's things they could do that would offer some support to people and businesses and be relatively efficient. At the moment if someone is made redundant of they have to individually claim benefits. That's time consuming and resource consuming.

So they could, for example, say that all businesses are allowed to use layoff (as opposed to redundancy) if affected by coronavirus even if it's not in their contracts, but that the government will provide statutory guarantee payments for as long as required. Set up a phoneline/online process so that it can be claimed by the employer for all their staff at once and then paid out through the usual payroll processes. That would get people an income, and reduce the number of claims to be processed and handled as it would be one per employer rather than one per person.