10 May 2020

Coronavirus #8: A failure of imagination

In the final outcome of this pandemic, we are likely to have the worst outcome in terms of lives lost in Western Europe, with 40,000 dead overall a reasonable estimate.

There seems to have been major failings in preparation for this pandemic going back over a decade. A public inquiry is needed to answer some key questions.

It is tempting to blame Boris Johnson solely for this. He has a degree of responsibility, but the issues go back deeper to before his premiership and beyond elected politicians.

There seems to have been a general acceptance that when a pandemic did occur, a lot of people were going to die. The leaked Exercise Cygnus report suggests that lockdown was an idea that did not arise in people's minds.

PPE seems to have fallen off the radar - we should have had a bigger stockpile before this crisis. Why this wasn't done needs to be investigated. Also, those who have engaged in profiteering need to be named, shamed and if possible prosecuted.

Border closures, which a lot of countries were slow in implementing, would have definitely helped back in February/March. Now, it looks like action for action's sake. I would support a quarantine period, but there needs to be testing available to let people out of it and exemptions for low-risk countries, or you will finish off much of our tourist industry.

But the issues are wider than that. We have the most obese population in Western Europe and that is largely down to poverty; where junk food is cheaper than the healthier stuff. Tory underfunding of the NHS and misallocation of resources has meant that we are the 'sick man of Europe'. 'Austerity' has led to major issues of social deprivation, especially in the BAME community.

Major disasters tend to be multi-level failures; Chernobyl, Hurricane Katrina and the Great Leap Forward come to mind.

Ministers are not psychic; they cannot be expected to see everything that goes in vast departments. However, they dropped the ball and it may well very much be due to Brexit.

Moving forward, we need to ease up as fast as the science says - no faster and no slower as this situation is damaging health in other ways - then put in adequate measures for the next pandemic.

In a way, we were lucky this wasn't the 'Swan Flu' of Cygnus or something worse, otherwise we'd be digging plague pits now.

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