I'm all for criticism and investigation. But it seems so early to make these kinds of definite proclamations. There is so much about the virus and how it's transmitted that we still don't understand. The UK government had no idea what they were doing, but really neither does anyone else. And until we are a little further along in successfully containing this epidemic, it's not going to be clear what the best course o…
I'm glad the Nightingale hospitals were not used, as they were set up if we had to scale response massively.
But I think we really need to look at the deaths and where they occurred. I have a feeling in some areas they've pushed people out of hospital to keep the hospitals ready for the worse cases. A neighbour works in a hospice and she said her place and the local hospital do not have patients. So we need to look at the balance of avoiding sending people to hospital which could make it worse vs being in hospital with the virus. - Has this made the death rate worse than it could have been? - Has this made the care home issues worse as well? - How has this affected the accuracy of the reporting of deaths
Testing, to me appears to be an absolute joke, I think they are defining tests as having taken the swabs and not processed it. (as the 40k of tests were home tests that had been sent out) I saw my nearest test station (Portsmouth) last Sunday, the only cars there were the people that worked there. I'm wondering what the hell the government has done to increase the actual capacity from taking the test to processing it. I feel this is being avoided in the media, we just hear we're doing X tests a day.
Now I can understand if people are showing the common symptoms of covid-19, then testing isn't much help unless you want to know the strain etc. But if we're talking about people with mild symptoms that aren't on the government symptom list, then that's could be a big issue for the R value. The government only just updated that list yesterday. I had a slight cough and had breathlessness, my peak flow was around 650, doctor doesn't think it's asthma or covid, but then went on to talk about how his colleagues had mild symptoms and didn't feel right. The right thing would be to just test. Without testing we could be missing out on a lot of information that could shape how we respond to covid-19 in the following years.
Personally I think it will be quite some time before we get a better understanding of the deaths. People will be needing to go through the death and medical records to understand why patient X died. My mum has a friend who father died out of the blue and it classed as covid, despite no symptoms.
As for PPE, the government has failed, we've seen the interviews with suppliers who have been ignored by the government. It wouldn't be that hard to get someone to inspect items initially, then have it sent to some location for further distribution. Seeing hospitals wearing home made masks and 3d printed face shields isn't right, the NHS/government purchasing/logistics has failed here. The government should have taken a larger interest in the production and distribution of PPE early on, even having control over the export. I'm all for free market but we need some centralisation to know what we have and capacity to produce so we know it's going to the right areas.
