Tiering up the Covid elimination strategy

[dancemom]

Sadly the end was not as close as we thought so new thread required ....

I'm not saying that bad decisions weren't made.
I'm saying that you can't cut off the main food supply route! Which means that the UK could never have had a fully shut borders policy like NZ or Australia.

The best we could have done is a Norwegian or Scandinavian approach which allows for limit exemptions including sea farers, oil and gas workers and food supplies with a better testing strategy.
Quarantine in Norway can be done at a private residence though.
The difference is that Scandinavians typically follow the rules and keep distance but also have more space to live so less close transmission risk.

@ssd

When you think of all the months in lockdown, peoples mental health stretched to the limit, in order to try to keep infections down.....and meanwhile people flying in here from all over bringing new infections in....

But to me, whats even worse than that, is the voters mainly in England, who vote for these clowns and always will.

We're not an island nation. Part of our nation shares a border with Ireland.

Look, I'm not a Boris fan. But he's an easy target and I don't think there is a single world leader who has dealt with this well. Everyone would make different decisions if they had their time again because at the time they were making decisions in the dark with zero information. Except perhaps the saintly Jacinda, who has the advantage of a tiny population and geographic remoteness and seems to be Queen Nicola's bff girl crush.

I know lots of people in the UK like to think we've had it the worst, our politicians are the worst, our death toll is the highest - I think decades down the line when all the numbers are crunched using the same ways of counting, every country is going to be much of a muchness.

The UK government have played a blinder with the vaccines though, we are streets ahead of everyone else in Europe with the roll-out which is something to be very grateful for.

Anyway, I'm done with it all now - not intterested in variants which don't cause any more deaths, not interested in cases which are mild illness and don't end up in hospitals. Not doing lateral flow tests, only wearing my mask in supermarkets because I have to.

Scottishskifun when DC is describing in great detail how the negligence of the government he used to work for led to tend of thousands dying needlessly, do you not think, well maybe it's time to stop defending them?

We're not 'streets ahead of everyone else' actually - we're vey much in the middle of the table when it comes to vaccines.
They obviously don't bring back the dead either so I can't join in with the jolly 'aren't the Government great, we've got vaccines ' rhetoric.

Come on Starry, I know you really struggle to say anything positive about the UK. But just run your eye down that list of countries and see how tiny populations most of them have compared with our 61 million.

@StarryEyeSurprise

Scottishskifun when DC is describing in great detail how the negligence of the government he used to work for led to tend of thousands dying needlessly, do you not think, well maybe it's time to stop defending them?

Where have I said that I defend BJ?! Or delayed lockdown decisions?! Oh that's right no where!

Simply stating that it's not possible to fully close UK borders as some posters think is not the same thing its having a understanding of how logistics and food supply works!

Also wouldn't take everything that DC says as gospel the man is a snake out for revenge!

I never suggested completely closing the borders. I fully understand how food production, importation and exportation works. My point was around unrestricted travel being a mistake.

If the UK Government had closed the borders like nearly every other country affected by covid did, thousands of lives would have been saved. End of. We are not the only country that imports food. Z imports more than we do.
Lorry drivers through the channel tunnel were not the problem. Thousands stepping off planes with no checks or controls were.

Anyway, this was the pandemic preparation. See 'Who do we not save ' . Chilling, no? Failure on a colossal scale. Surely grounds for criminal negligence.

Before you agree with everything that comes out of DC mouth it's worth remembering that he changed the civil service structure so that every dept special advisors reported directly to him.......
So if you believe the well people like me shouldn't have made decisions..... It was him that changed it to be the case so pretty difficult for him not to know exactly what was going on!

Yes it's chilling but it's not unique in disaster planning.

Hello. Thanks for new thread @dancemom. The title gives me hope 😃

@Scottishskifun

Before you agree with everything that comes out of DC mouth it's worth remembering that he changed the civil service structure so that every dept special advisors reported directly to him....... So if you believe the well people like me shouldn't have made decisions..... It was him that changed it to be the case so pretty difficult for him not to know exactly what was going on!

Yes it's chilling but it's not unique in disaster planning.

Grand.

I can't see that whiteboard without thinking of

I'm also shocked it was allowed to go into the public domain. I'd have thought strategy meetings or whatever it was would be strictly covered by the OSA or whatever - for precisely this reason! We don't know how the discussion went, and of course written as bullet points it sounds chilling. It looks like it was spoken about alongside the graph to the right, which would mean the discussion could have been who made up the bit of the curve above the "NHS collapse" line (and possibly how that curve could be lowered through different kinds of lockdown, or NHS capacity increased). Though we don't know, because we weren't there. As point 1 on the board (no vaccine in 2020) has been proven to be wrong, I'm not sure we can say the rest of the assumptions in the meeting were correct or whether they were morally good or bad. But I don't think it's fair to assume that a scotgov strategy meeting would have been substantially different or that their bullet points would have had anything less for us to be disgusted by.

There have undoubtedly been serious mistakes, like the seeding of care homes, full of what was known to be the most vulnerable population to this disease, with untested or even known positive cases. Note that everyone in the UK was doing that, even NS, in what I can only presume was a desperate move to empty hospitals as soon as possible. Around this time, if DC is to be believed, they had just discovered that their scientific advice/modelling was spectacularly off, we were already in our peak we just didn't know it because of lack of testing capacity, and they were looking at imminent overwhelming of the NHS. There were undoubtedly structural/cultural issues that exacerbated the problems including the lack of external scrutiny of SAGE and the lack of adequate pandemic preparedness plans. I'm not convinced that we could have just closed borders though for all the reasons described above.

I'm also not convinced that countries like Australia/Taiwan etc. will end up better off in the long term. They have avoided mass COVID deaths thus far by basically hiding from it, but as a result they have essentially zero population immunity. So they face a future of being cut off from the world indefinitely unless they implement some kind of mass vaccination programme, but this doesn't seem to be happening quickly and there are reports that the populations of these countries aren't always on board with this. This is avoiding the problem rather than dealing with it. We have had more deaths than we needed to (thinking particularly of the care home seeding), but thanks to an undoubtedly very successful vaccine programme (and to anyone trying to argue this is not a great success) we are practically out the other side now. The 'successful' countries haven't even started.

My goodness, the poor Australians (!) They've been able to carry on as normal, bypassing the huge loss of lives and economic devastation we've had in the UK.

'This is avoiding the problem rather than dealing with it.' Don't make me laugh. They were and are dealing with it by keeping their population alive.

Vaccines don't bring people back. They're a bit late in the day when 100,000 have died. They're not just numbers though. They're people who were loved and their families will never see them again. Children without mothers ( which is why I am so angry about this - I know a few through my work).

I'm going to come off this thread for a bit as the excuse making 'but we import food' or ' but we have vaccines now' really gets to me. So, so many have lost their lives already. It's a bit like sending an army into battle and after making horrendous decisions which cost thousands of lives, calling a ceasefire . Lives cannot be brought back. Border control is the number one catastrophic error the Government made and continues to make.

@Y0uCann0tBeSer10us I think you’re right on Australia and NZ. Not a long term solution without huge vaccine take up.

Nobody is saying the deaths aren't horrific.

What is said is that due to geographical location, economics, food supply etc it would not have been possible to replicate New Zealand or Australia and get it down to nothing. There are loads of threads on this on the coronavirus boards which go into the full details.

My biggest bug bear is that we don't use full backwards tracing that's how countries control outbreaks quickly we are simply too slow and lack that instead we rely on lockdowns as a primary method rather then last resort.

We are dead lucky to have the vaccine in plentiful supply though

@WouldBeGood

We are dead lucky to have the vaccine in plentiful supply though

I can't believe you just wrote that.

Yes we are!
We got a vaccination appointment for our friend who used to live with us but is now based in France.
He's 5 years older he seriously looked into if there was a way to get over to simply get his vaccine as he has zero idea when he will get done he hopes it will be around November time. It wasn't possible.

I don't think the success of the vaccination roll out and development should ever be underplayed. It's a game changer for all of us!

@Scottishskifun totally off on a tangent but I seen Nuffield health are trialling long covid clinics this morning on Facebook. I know you have still been struggling so might be worth a look. I didn't read as I was heading into gym but might help.

Im very grateful for the vaccine. Very very grateful and if Johnson had anything to do with it I'll kiss him.
Ok well maybe not

I’m very pro vaccine (so I can get out 😃) and am
absolutely amazed that those useless fuckers down south managed to play a blinder on this. It’s incredible 😂

@ssd 🤣

[quote IsurviveonCoffeeandWinein2021]@Scottishskifun totally off on a tangent but I seen Nuffield health are trialling long covid clinics this morning on Facebook. I know you have still been struggling so might be worth a look. I didn't read as I was heading into gym but might help. [/quote]
Thanks it's not at my closest one I have the page marked though to keep checking it. There are only 10 spaces it appears on each one.

I am investigating all options to try and get over this but so frustrated with information and options from NHS Scotland.

Well done @Scottishskifun helping your friend out. 👍

My French neighbour called last night to rant about Macron and their current situation over in France. It’s such a shame the EU ballsed up their vaccine order in August ‘20 (we want it, no we don’t, give us yours but we don’t want it) looking at you UvDL.

So many are suffering business’s workers elderly schools, at one stage during this the French took covid patients to Germany by train for medical attention.
Their support package is not as good as ours it’s truly hard over there.

French data is showing 1.2M more cases than UK, deaths are still in the hundreds every day. Italy is just below us in deaths now, both countries have similar populations.

Even Germany who were looking to cope better than anyone in Europe 1st wave, with its fantastic health service more ICU beds than any country in Europe, is going through a high incidence this wave.

Yes every EU leader could have done better that is crystal clear from the figures.
However, I for one am so glad I live in the UK and the PM was ahead of the curve with vaccine backing (remember they didn’t know if they were backing a donkey) and its subsequent roll out. The scientific therapeutics brought in, huge Covax donation, furlough, the genomic testing UK does is 50% of the world total.

There will be a time for a rightful investigation, though you need to be alive to see it.

Oh and DC showed us who he was last year, believe him.
I still believe he is a liar.