Our government have messed up. What would you have done?

[Concerned7777]

So many posts about how the government have messed up, not handled things well, they're a shambles etc
I'm interested to know what people would have done in they was the PM or what they would do now/next ?
What has been done wrong and what has been right?
disclaimer I'm not suggesting the Gov are right or wrong just after peoples thoughts

The issue with schools is lack of social distancing requires track and trace to be extremely effective.

Schools are already virus hotspots. Look at nuro outbreaks.

Covid secure workplaces mean isolation not required. Same with SD in shops and outdoors.

I think schools should return as usual in September if T and T is working well. But.... a system in place that any positive case closes whole school population for 14 days isolation. And government plan to cover wage/ sick pay etc for a parent to stay home if needed. But expectation that parents can wfh where possible if child's school is closed.

It happened in S Korea. A nightclub opened. An infected person attended. Whole club cleaned and all people who attended had to isolate. It immediately stopped mass transmission in its tracks.

Schools are already virus hotspots. Look at nuro outbreaks.
Covid and noro act very differently. Children are much less likely to be affected by covid and evidence suggests they aren't "silent spreaders". There is no reason they have to be off school, when it's considered safe enough to go back to work

The very first suggestion requires going back in time 10 years. There's never a TARDIS around when you need one.

There have been minor things I might have done differently but for the most part the whole world did similar things and every country was guessing.

I would have used the full force of the law to enforce the lockdown. It would have been more effective and could then have been shorter, but as it is people are saying the government should be facing criminal charges for violating our human rights. Just as some here want them facing charges for not locking down enough.

This is my first apocalypse, but I've heard that this always happens after. We survived WWII and then people started saying "well that wasn't so bad. You needn't have maliciously killed so many Germans"

I would have been taking it seriously much earlier (and I was). I would have been seriously looking at setting up track and trace in January to implement asap and expand as/if necessary.

I would have locked down at the same time as Ireland following the news coming out of Italy and the U.K. was only just advised to isolate households for seven days for a cough or fever. That was our biggest lost opportunity as far as I’m concerned.

I would have been making face coverings mandatory around the same time whilst encouraging people not to try and obtain hospital grade masks.

Pointless because we all have the benefit of hindsight and how many can truly say what they would have done with the information they had at the time not knowing what the outcome would be

My friend's family live in northern Italy and she was horrified by how long it took before we went into lockdown. She was getting first hand reports from her family about the situation over there and she felt the government were sleep walking into a disaster.

One of the main misunderstandings about Cheltenham is that people saw it as an 'outdoor event' however It was more the huge scale of people coming to the town and spending a lot of time in the pubs and bars in Cheltenham. A friend went into the town in the evening during race week and is sure that he and his friends all had coronavirus. They never actually went to the races themselves.

Many countries who have had less deaths did a 'fast and hard' approach to lockdown and that is what we should have done.

With regards to schools when they first went into lockdown the government should have met with unions and a diverse range of head teachers to discuss an 'exit strategy'. The list of key workers and students considered vulnerable should have been released early with plans to increase the students on these lists gradually. The plans SAGE looked at with students doing part time on a rota should have been what schools were given to work with so that all students would have had at least some time in school.

Schools are already virus hotspots. Look at nuro outbreaks.

As were hospitals and care homes. Seems we've had a serious lack of proper hygiene and cross infection controls in our public services. Not surprising when there was that big push a few years ago for doctors & nurses to wash their hands between patients (shouldn't it have been obvious!) and not to wear long sleeves which pick up viruses/bacteria and spread between patients.

People are saying the government should be facing criminal charges for violating our human rights. Just as some here want them facing charges for not locking down enough.

Exactly this. Sounds like they hit things right when it seems half of people think they went too far and the other half saying not far enough/not quick enough.

What I would have done ... given full attention to Covid instead of brexit. If it wasn’t for all the attention to brexit they might have restocked the out of date PPE when they were warned of it. They might have picked up the email from the EU and worked with the EU instead of going solo.

Without the lack of PPE, they wouldn’t have needed to downgrade the PPE requirements. They would have had enough for care homes as well as the NHS.

But if it wasn’t for the lies, spin and deceit I could get behind them.

The big thing that really stuck out for me was the week government ministers were repeating the statement that we were 4 weeks behind Italy which was clearly wrong to anyone who looked at the stats. It was obvious we were just over 2 weeks behind. I absolutely couldn’t understand why they were saying it at the time, and why journalists didn’t challenge it. Whoever came up with that had a lot to answer for. It was a clear lie designed to hold off on lockdown and er are paying for it now.

I wanted to add to my earlier post. A channel 4 tv prog last week highlighted some of the mixed messages.
I am against lockdown because it is so damaging to the economy, and the tv prog was totally that the gov should have locked down earlier, with no alternative views.
However, the prog DID highlight the mixed messages being given ie. Dont shake hands, elbow bump, but I (Borus Johnson) have been shaking hands with everyone. So it came across as a bit of a joke. Look, elbow bumping, what a laugh, etc.
Re lockdown. I said to family that they did not have the police to enforce it, and therefore relied on neighbours reporting each other, and overly made people afraid to go out. Then some police forces were interpreting the guidelines too enthusiastically. Checking shopping? etc
The guidelines meant that sunbathers on Brighton beach were told to go home. Yoga exercises on the beach would have been ok.
I was surprised to learn that family members were going for 10 mile walks, etc. I was told to actually check the Gov website, not words spoken by Gove,etc
So mixed messages.
I would not have closed schools because it is extremely damaging to children and has a really bad effect on the wider community, especially as nurseries were closed and child minders.

Quentin workplaces must be Covid secure. A full return to school won't have the same protection. That's why infection control needs to be improved (whoever said that a few posts down was spot on) and track and trace and a plan for isolation needs to be drawn up.
We have to remember that kids may not be known to be super spreader or silent spreaders of Covid (but there's not absolute assurance this) but schools also have adults. Those adults can spread it. That's parents and teaching staff.

I'm all for schools returning. I think it has to happen from September without a doubt.

But we cannot compare school environment with an outside space, shop with CV secure policies in place or a workplace with CV secure working.

Money should be pumped into schools to try and help them open sooner/safer rather than setting out guidelines that are unattainable within current budgets. Money for portakabins for extra classrooms, for more supply staff, for more cleaners and sanitizer products, renting local empty halls or conference centres for extra teaching spaces, for more individual desks basically anything they needed that meant schools could be a safer environment.

The idea of extra spaces solving the problem of schools returning fully with the current restrictions of 15 to a class is unfortunately flawed. I live in a very large village with three primary schools so there are 7 classes per year group so 49 classes. I am struggling to work out how you would get 49 extra rooms in our village. We have 1 village hall, 1 church hall and 1 community centre. The village hall is used for a pre school. Then you would have to look at the secondary school with nearly 2000 pupils many bused in from the surrounding area.

Either the current restrictions end or the children go back part time on a rota.

@lorisparkle ok that wouldn't work in your specific village but theres probably many schools that it would of been effective. Money was thrown at the NHS money thrown at businesses money thrown at furlough employees and self employed all of them rightly deserving it yet no money has been thrown at education

Yes imagine yo hdo that and next thing parents loan that they are too far, cant seal with one child one place and the other in another parents moan when they cannot even get places for second child in same school before covid.

Locked down as soon as we ran out of track and trace capacity until we got capacity up.

This government have made so many mistakes, except they weren't mistakes, they prioritised ideology and Tory donors over the public. Maybe that's why BJ says how proud he is of his management of covid?

Once the virus hit Europe, I knew that we were going to be affected.
We should definitely have had lockdown in February.
Schools should have been shut earlier. I actually took my dcs out of school one week earlier .
Testing , testing , testing.
The sad truth is that we were unprepared. This government let us down

Oh I would have screwed up worse than govt That's for sure.
I would have tried for Sweden model. However bad you think that is.

2nd choice Netherlands or South Korea models.

@cyclingmad- the government ignored the advice from the WHO about steps that should be taken. My dh’s Spanish relatives couldn’t believe that our government was pursuing herd immunity and ignoring the steps that other countries were taking

I and my friends were convinced he'd lock down by early March, by the 15th, we were incredulous he had not.
We started prepping for CV by mid February, as far as we could see, this was obviously going to get far worse.

The 3 unforgivable things Johnson did was: Publicly ridiculing how serious CV might be :forcing the elderly from Hospitals into care homes, without isolation: Keeping borders open..... ALL allowed the transmission into the wider community and goes against basic infection control.

He is a idiotic gambler and if there was any justice, he (and others) would be put on trial.

If l was PM,

Once Italy was hit, (end of Jan)
Reconvene the commitee responsible for Pandemic planning, stock up PPE/hospital supplies in epic quantities in warehouses close to every major hospital.

Set up a commitee of senior consultants, Hospital trusts managers, nurses and cleaning staff and planned what would be required and sourced it FAST. With their input rearranged hospitals to allow for offsite testing (carparks) splitting covid and non covid patients into either different hospitals or different sites on hospitals.

Taken over a hotel close to each hospital to allow enough staff to move in for the duration.
Set up a fund and help service to help essential hospital staff to prepare for Pandemic impact on their families.

Then....

Give all a week to return to Uk before closing borders, all returnees to have 2 week quarantine strictly enforced and supervised.

Total border shutdown, ferries,flights,eurotunnel to people.
Essential supplies coming in managed by army, and quarantined and disinfected.

For emergency travellers, diplomatic etc 2 week quarantine after coming in on special flights only.

If this had been in place by the 2nd week of Feb things may have been different..
We could have,
Track and trace the far fewer cases, children stay at school, most industries to continue as normal, jobs as normal, army to manage essential goods incoming.
Ruthless sticking to the closed borders.

as you can tell l have had far too much time thinking about this......!!

The government where never going to have contained this because there was no testing from the start. Laboratories along with the NHS had been 'rationalised' ie underfunded for 10 years with tests being centralised to a few laboratories, leaving most in house labs with limited facilities on what they could test outside normal routine hospital bloods.

They didnt have the equipment or tests to carry out the contract tracing that would be needed, thats why they rationed it to people who had been to Wuhan or in contact with someone from Wuhan. even though they knew it was already in Europe as could be seen by Italy.

Its why it has taken so long to get track and trace up and running. because they have basically had to start from scratch. In the early days I have heard they only had the facilities to carry out 5 tests a day. it very quickly got past that and was therefore rationed to hospital inpatients only. We had to wait nearly a week for results at the start of the outbreak.
Seems like everyone could see this coming from January apart from the government.
They have lied and covered up the truth from the start.
They thought they would just let this spread through the community and save the economy. so what if a few old/disabled people die.
Even now they are only reducing lockdown at a controlled rate, not because they care about your health, but because the NHS now has capacity to deal with more illness and death. They are aiming for a steady trickle of illness rather than a deluge. They will release lockdown bit by bit to see how much they can get away with before numbers rise too much.
In the end they will blame the scientists who they ignored on the whole and the public for going the beach and protesting, despite the fact they have sent wishy washy messages which were open to personal interpretation from the start.

In trying to save the economy and fudging the issue they have left us ina worse position than a lot of other countries who took this seriously.

January they should have been identifying lab testing facilities and getting PPE supply lines sorted.

All inbound flights should have had some basic monitoring like temp controls and self isolation for people arriving from known hotspots.

The inital outbreak that came from the ski trip to Italy should have had thorough contact tracing to identify any others who might have been incubating this virus and not just leave it to let rip in the community

We missed the opportunity to limit the viruses impact when they stopped testing too early and refused to test people with obvious symptoms if they werent hospitalised.

Sounds like they hit things right when it seems half of people think they went too far and the other half saying not far enough/not quick enough

Who says it's half and half? In any case, those who think lockdown 'went too far' are talking about the effect on those who were not likely to be vulnerable to a life-threatening effects of CV. I've never heard anyone question the good sense of advising vulnerable groups to go into self-isolation - which should and could have been done far earlier.

Those who think it didn't go 'far enough', who think the government has been actually negligent in it's response - I think there's a lot more than half these days. There's just no excuse for this government's catalogue of incompetence and lies

Yeah watching how they've struggled with PPE and panic over beds and having to ship our elderly in droves etc I bet they wished their big red bus promise was actually true?

Certainly the nhs does need that funding and also so does social care and education.

Many of the UK's problems have been exacerbated not just by the governement's idiotic decision-making but also the long-term effects of the austerity governments of the last ten years.

Underfunding of the NHS - meant that the failings highlighted by Operation Cygnus were not not corrected. They knew we didn't have adequate PPE for example. Also, insufficient staff and beds meant that older people not tested for the virus were discharged into care homes, people with the virus were severely triaged by ambulance services and 111 which meant some who could have been saved with earlier treatment were not admitted to hospital. Lack of funding for GP and community services meant that it wasn't as easy for patients to be monitored at home and given earlier treatment such as oxygen, which was successful in Germany.

Underfunding of science laboratories as PP said, so that we were incapable of implementing a succesful mass testing programme in the early days.

Underfunding of education - most schools are so poorly equipped technologically that they can barely provide devices for their staff to use at home, let alone any for pupils who don't have their own individual device to access remote learning. Inadequate, cramped school buildings that make social distancing more difficult. Remember the Building Schools for the Future infrastructure programme that was underway under the last Labour government and was immediately scrapped in 2010?

Lack of investment in technology structure across the country. Remote learning and home working could have worked much better if everyone had access to decent Wifi. In South Korea, the government pays for internet access for low income households.

The current government has made a total balls-up, but its been made worse by some of the actions of its predecessors.