With the benefit of hindsight.....

[LilBlackLab]

What should our government have done?

People are saying ‘this shit show of a government have let us down’

How would labour have dealt with this any better?

I strongly believe lockdown and subsequent adjustments were not clamped down on hard enough. Early days the police were out, checking journeys and shopping habits..... there was a bit of an outcry so police were then stopped..

. Saying ‘don’t swamp the seaside towns’ was never going to work Boris! Boris should have been shouting louder through this whole period imo

What should we have done?

Testing in March - ramp it up not abandon it
Get track and trace and the app working much earlier
Learn from other countries who are far more expert in this than we are

Lockdown a week preferably 2 weeks earlier.

Used January and February to prepare stocks of ppe.

Have a decent testing ability in place from March.

Not give up on track and trace so early back in Feb/March, instead it should have been ramped up.

Not send untested patients into care homes. Unless they could guarantee they were covid free they should not have been sent to care homes.

Enable care providers earlier access to testing.

Have clear guidance. Not the you may be able to do this, but not that, but you can do this shit that they came up with.

Party is irrelevant here (I don't vote Tory, have never voted Tory). Labour with Corbyn as leader wouldn't have done any better, they might have done with Starmer, but who knows.

In my opinion, it was messaging that fucked up here.

Imagine the same message coming from any past Tory PM - Cameron, May, Major, even bloody Thatcher. So much better.

'People'* are now in the 'fuck Johnson I'm doing what I want' brigade, or the 'yay Johnson said we can do x and x camps', neither of which are sensible.

*I'm not saying the whole population, I'm mostly talking about people who just aren't that invested in politics, and so on. Enough people to cause ongoing problems.

The Johnson (and Cummings if you like) approach was gung ho, and probably incorrect, but if they'd just got the messaging right even qith their gung ho ideas, it would have been better.

Individuals other than Johnson have made errors too. Patel and her numbers, Hancock laughing, but they are irrelevant in the face of the messaging.

I think sending elderly patients from hospital without testing for corona back to care homes should not of been guidance tbh.

Everything you have said, OP.

It's the Great British Public cannot be left to make their own decisions.

It's not really hindsight, is it, when it was quite clear at the time that we should have locked down, continued testing and tracing, quarantined returnees from Italy and France, ordered ppe in february etc.

Agree with all you've said @LilBlackLab , the only thing I would add is that face coverings should have been advisory from early on. Also the borders should have been closed earlier.

The lockdown was too liberal imo.

Hindsight measures would be maybe more things that weren't widely suggested at the time. Measures around keeping carehomes safer eg no agency staff moving between homes, full sick pay if needing to self isolate, not taking their ppe for the nhs.

Not send untested patients into care homes. Unless they could guarantee they were covid free they should not have been sent to care homes.

But where else could they go?
Even if they were tested and their results came back positive they would still have to back to the care home wouldn’t they because that is where they lived.

I completely agree they should have been tested but the most that could have been done was isolate them in their bedroom until results came back as negative and staff be very vigilant with PPE and standard infection control procedures.

I think the lockdown was 'fine'. It was very limiting to lots of people. The only thing that would have made it stricter was stopping any outside movement for exercise, which is counterproductive. People behaved for the most part.

The minute things started to loosen up, the messaging went horribly to shit. The word 'alert' for example. Stupid.

I'm an educated person, interested in politics and am a key worker so have been out and about all along - I haven't got a bloody clue what's allowed at the minute in the guidance. It's way too confusing.

I think they should have shut down earlier.

They should have tested everyone that had symptoms and introduced the track and trace app early on.

No one should have been discharged into a care home unless certain they were Covid free.

We should have had community Covid teams as they did in Germany assessing all patients in the community to ensure those who needed it were admitted to hospital quickly.

But what's done is done. Having made mistakes going into lockdown they should have done their best not to repeat them coming back out but they appear to be. Scientists apparently recommended staying in lockdown for just two weeks longer which would have significantly reduced rates but they didn't do that. Too many things seem to be opening too quickly. The five tests haven't been fulfilled. We don't have track and trace running. Yet still we are ploughing on. Now holidays abroad are given the green light and no quarantine on return - what could possibly go wrong?

staff be very vigilant with PPE and standard infection control procedures

There wasn't the PPE, there weren't the protective procedures either. Care homes were talking about 'it' coming down the corridors, with 'inmates' just waiting for it to get to them.

The NHS have admitted the error here. They could have kept them in hospital too. There were options for clean areas of hospitals. We didn't protect the NHS, it wasn't ever full. We just closed it. Which obviously will have an impact too.

Pretty much what @Jumblebumblemess posted although I’d add (with the provision of hindsight) paid much more attention to the outcomes of various emergency planning committees over the past couple of decades. There shouldn’t have been such a mad panic over ventilators or PPE considering the advice that’s been given regarding terrorist attacks.

I also wish they’d not stopped to smearing face coverings because of PPE shortages. They’ll never undo some of that damage and there is so much evidence in existence from previous SARS and MERS outbreaks to show it’s a really valuable tool.

Just done what others did. Locked down a week or two earlier to stop it getting out of hand, more widespread masks, avoided the care home massacre and kept the travel restrictions of Scotland and Wales.

We would have been in a position of opening up a lot sooner with lower infection rates than now.

We should have had community Covid teams as they did in Germany assessing all patients in the community to ensure those who needed it were admitted to hospital quickly.

That would have been key. As it was, the NHS was closed to all but the 'nearly dead who were caught in time'. People were dying at home practically on hold to 111 or whatever the line was.

If we're really talking about hindsight though, not cutting funding to public bodies would be the key thing. 10 years of austerity left us in a poor position to be able to run this effectively. Which is where I suppose party politics comes in to it.

Stopped = stooped

And while I get that we have to get things going again now for economic reasons, we're making mistakes again. Because Johnson and his populist bollocks. YAY HOLIDAYS.

When the Italy cases started going up in late February they should have asked people to work from home if possible. They should have said there is a possibility of schools closing earlier and asked schools to put some sort of remote provision in place just in case.

It’s too early to say:

Vaccine in the autumn - should have lockdown sooner. Should never allowed air bridges over the summer etc (as I am sure will cause an increase in cases). We should have followed New Zealand.

Vaccine not developed till at least next year (or never) second spike over winter which coincides with flu season. Lockdown for months in coldest/winter/shorter days. Lockdown at Christmas, “we should have ridden it out”. Not lockdown as severely. Protected vulnerable. Go for herd immunity. Government should have not listened to panickers. We should have followed Sweden.

Communication has been the downfall in my eyes. The whole 'stay safe' message was ridiculous and has backed them into a corner they're desparately trying to dig themselves out of.

As the wonderful Jacinda Ardern, PM of New Zealand put it...

"We go early, and we go hard".

If we had done the same, we'd have had a fighting chance of controlling it MUCH better than we have done. Admittedly, we were never going to eradicate it as NZ has done, because it's a small population which isn't a major travel hub. But we could have done MUCH more, MUCH earlier, and stuck at it for longer.

These half-arsed knee jerk policies have been pathetic.

Mass testing early on, track and trace from the first known case, adv9ce to self isolate with symptoms from the start (ie from the start of our cases) regardless of whether you had been to china or other high risk area. Quarantine upon entering the country from the start. Our biggest failure in my opinion everything was done too late, many, many lives could have been saved had we implemented safety measures early on. We had warning, we knew what was coming, we saw the numbers climbing exponentially elsewhere yet we dithered and as such we have paid the price in lives lost, economy trashed (I don't think this is half as important as saving lives and fully agree with lockdown in the circumstances and the situation we were in due to mass failings, but still it could have been managed better if the disease spread had been managed better).

We needed to be proactive, unfortunately we were reactive.

Tested like they are now from the start.
Locked us down 2 weeks earlier.
Thought about care homes before it was to late.
Ordered more ppe when this started leaving China.
Sacked Dominic Cummings.

But where else could they go?
Even if they were tested and their results came back positive they would still have to back to the care home wouldn’t they because that is where they lived.

Yes, and what are they supposed to do with Covid+ residents with e.g. advanced dementia? Lock them in their rooms?

asked schools to put some sort of remote provision in place

Yes. They should have been throwing money at schools for laptops and work books for kids at that point.

All primary schools have websites that they could have put work on. If they had Google Classroom or Teams already set up it would have given them time to make sure kids knew how to use it (lots of secondaries have an option for homework, so could have expanded it).

As it was I spent the last morning in school teaching my class how to use BBC Bitesize as a project resource, and talking them through work packs prepared 2 days earlier in a massive photocopying panic. By then I had less than half a class. We spent the afternoon making mother's day cards as if it was completely normal. FFS.

My friend at a big posh private school sent me a photo on 14th March showing pupils in a lecture theatre with their own laptops, being taught how to log in and use remote learning options. State schools just didn't have that time or resource available.