A lot of people, including myself, got some aspect of the Covid pandemic wrong. Whether it be the efficacy of lockdowns, the speed of spread of covid or infection fatality rate or Covid’s similarity or not to other infectious diseases, a lot of the public who commented on Covid got things wrong. I’m pleased to say that I got one thing correct though and that is that vaccination was the only effective way out of the Covid crisis, the other non-pharmaceutical tactics to fight Covid were not practical in the long term. But for the public there is an excuse for being wrong. The vast majority of the public are not trained in epidemiology or medicine or infection control and did not have the knowledge or resources to judge matters effectively. There is less excuse for such failure when it comes to Government which has vastly more resources and access to knowledge than the average member of the public has.
We are now, in the UK at least, at the stage where Parliamentary committees are starting to assess how Britain did when compared to other countries when it comes to tackling Covid. So far things do not look good.
I’ll do a proper evaluation article if I can get time to digest the whole interim report from Parliament but in the meantime there are several takeaways from what has been released to the Press that should be a cause for concern. These are:
Public Health England failed dismally in preparing for Covid. From what I can gather PHE put far too much emphasis on the arrival of a killer influenza strain than it did on the arrival of a novel disease. Maybe if PHE had been less concerned with less important matters such the amount of sugar in chocolate and more concerned about potential viral threats this might not have happened.
PHE failed to learn from the countries that had previously been afflicted by Covid’s related diseases SARS and MERS. Maybe if they had done then the situation might not have been so bad for Britain. As someone who lived through the SARS epidemic at the turn of the century it should have been obvious to those in Government that the likelihood of a return of SARS or something like it was quite possible.
Although the Parliamentary report is not aiming criticism at the NHS, after all the Government has made the NHS an object of idol worship, I can see that the NHS failed badly. It failed to prepare for a pandemic in terms of staff and facilities. It also failed dismally to provide a healthcare service for those not afflicted by Covid. The pandemic revealed the structural and organisation failures of this expensive and ineffective method of providing comprehensive healthcare for a nation. Sadly there’s no sign that the NHS is learning any lessons from Covid. The GP service is still mostly inaccessible for the public and the NHS is still wasting millions of pounds on guff like ‘diversity and inclusion’ posts when it should be spending that money on providing proper healthcare for Britons.
Testing for Covid was a mess. Some community testing was abandoned too early which meant that there was doubt as to the extent and severity of the spread of Covid.
The Government did not close Britain’s borders. Other nations instituted border controls in order to prevent more Covid or new strains of Covid from entering but Britain just kept its doors propped open. We kept on accepting people into the country whether they arrived legally or illegally and this must have made the job of controlling Covid much more difficult. Britain had the lunatic policy of ‘pubs closed but borders open’.
Older people were dumped on care homes causing a massive rise in infections in these places. Maybe less older people in care homes might have survived had not the Government discharged elderly hospital patients suffering from Covid into these homes.
The Parliamentary report states that there was poor communication between national and local government which made a bad situation worse. Personally I’d have gone further than that and I say that the communication between the Government and the people, not just between national and local government, has been piss poor and confused from the start. A lack of clear information, or at least as clear a form of information as the Government could get, not only caused confusion and cynicism of Government messaging among the public but this confusion was also exploited by Covid deniers and the lunatics of the anti-vaccination movement. I believe that better, more comprehensive and honest information being supplied by the public might have ensured more voluntary cooperation from the public, less need for coercion and also less influence for the Quacks and lunatics who thrived in the confusion.
From what I’ve seen so far it appears that those such as Dominic Cummings who, after his resignation heavily criticised the Government’s early response to Covid have been vindicated. There was indeed no plan to deal with a novel virus, no proper chain of command for decision making, no way of keeping ministers on track, no emergency purchase order system for PPE and a governmental management system that can fairly be called a mess.
The way that the Government has handled Covid needs to be scrutinised and the crisis management procedures need to be reformed. This is because Covid is not the only nasty virus out there. There’s always the possibility of another lethal strain of influenza coming out and devastating the world as it did in 1918 /1919 along with other nasties such as Pneumonic Plague, haemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola and Marburg. Some of these diseases such as Pneumonic Plague are treatable with antibiotics whereas others such as Ebola and Marburg have no real effective cure. It’s obvious that the UK government was not ready for Covid and badly prepared for it. It makes me shudder to think how unprepared the UK government is for some of these other often easily spread, in the case of pneumonic plague or untreatable infections like Marburg or Ebola.
