I’m so angry I could spit into me tea.
I’ve just been watching “Vital Global Information” video by an ‘expert’ putting out in that ever so calm, condescending British way, absolute bollocks, to use the technical term. It amazes me that this mouthpiece can put out pure codswallop which even a little analysis could unpack, and yet because of his ‘soothing’, ‘expert’ tone, people in the US somehow think that the government here is handling the crisis competently.
We’re now officially past the “Containment” stage 1 of the “government plan” in the UK, where the government made some performative gestures towards testing people with COVID-19 symptoms — the level of testing not amounting to much, hard-to-impossible to access, but hey, at least the government here pretended to test for a while. The US is the standard of comparison for most folks on Daily K, so stones and glass houses, I get that.
We’ve now moved into the “delay” phase 2 of the plan so that the pandemic in the UK will conveniently and considerately “peak in June or July, when there is more capacity in the NHS.”
Let me be blindingly clear: the NHS does not have adequate capacity. It does not have it now, it will not have it in June, nor has it had anything approaching adequate capacity, decent facilities, or appropriate training and staffing in the thirty years I’ve survived here.
This isn’t just me venting. From the BBC
Health expert brands UK's coronavirus response 'pathetic'
Prof John Ashton, a former regional director of public health for north-west England, lambasted a lack of preparation and openness from the government and contrasted Britain’s response to that of Hong Kong.
“Right at the beginning of February, they [Hong Kong] adopted a total approach to this, which is what we should have done five weeks ago ourselves. They took a decision to work to three principles – of responding promptly, staying alert, working in an open and transparent manner,” he told the Guardian.
“Our lot haven’t been working openly and transparently. They’ve been doing it in a (non) smoke-filled room and just dribbling out stuff. The chief medical officer only appeared in public after about two weeks. Then they have had a succession of people bobbing up and disappearing. Public Health England’s been almost invisible.
“Boris Johnson should have convened Cobra himself over a month ago and had regular meetings with the chief medical officer with the evidence. The thing should have been fronted up nationally by one person who could be regarded as the trusted voice and who could have been interrogated regularly. That’s not happened.” ….
He accused the government of failing to understand public health, which has been undermined over the past 10 years by cuts in funding of 30% [emphasis added] to local authorities….
There were no strategies for protecting the vulnerable and there had been a failure to engage the public. “We have a superficial prime minister who has got no grasp of public health,” Ashton said. “Our lot are behaving like 19th-century colonialists playing a five-day game of cricket.
“This virus will find the weak points. You can’t just plan this from an office in Whitehall. It’s pathetic. The government doesn’t seem to understand classic public health. You need to be out and about. You need to get your hands dirty – though preferably gloved and using frequent gel,” he said.
He warned that the NHS was not in a position to cope with the large numbers of people who could become seriously ill. “It’s a joke when they put up people to say they are really on top of it and if it spreads at a community level the NHS will cope, it’s always coped. The hospitals are full at the moment, A&Es are full, beds are full, intensive care is full.”
Current contingency plans assume that up to 80% of people could get infected and 4% of those are likely to have serious illness. “That translates into big numbers and there will not be enough intensive facilities for them and people will have to be home-nursed,” Ashton said.
“What the government should have been doing over these last weeks, which they’ve thrown away, is to encourage neighbourhoods, communities, supported by the local public health directors and a joined-up NHS.
“They should have been encouraging people to have their own family plans about how they will maintain the family show on the road, who will be taking the kids to school, how do you entertain them in the Easter holidays? They should have been much clearer, sooner, about making it clear that people shouldn’t be travelling so they could cancel their holidays and get their money back on the insurance.
“They haven’t done any of that. Who’s going to look after elderly people – stop them having to go out, do their shopping for them? People should have been doing that planning – they should have been pointed in that direction by the government. There’s been no discussion about that at all.”
The population here is getting soothing noises instead of effective testing, aggressive planning, or even strong social messaging. My Ocado grocery delivery guy has a better handle on reducing exposure and risk than the current UK government approach. Seriously. Ocado has a plan and has started to action it to reduce contact during food deliveries and rationing food. The government doesn’t.
I am absolutely committed to all people having access to actual medical care, rather than performative substitutes. I’m not committed to or against any particular means of ensuring universal access. I consider universal health care a moral necessity, a basic human right, and a pragmatic social essential (our society is only as healthy as its members).
However, I have 3 decades of horrific, life-destroying experiences with the NHS, so I tend to express concern with the unthinking enthusiasm people display for complete socialisation in a unitary, government driven system. The US health care system is catastrophically broken. So is the UK system. Both systems are in free-fall. They desperately need fixing.
It kinda amazes me that people who find the current government an unmitigated disaster are all hard-over for complete government provision of health care. That enthusiasm more or less presupposes a benign and responsible government. Since we clearly don’t have that now, I’m confused as to why people assume that once health care is centralised and run by the government we will be assured of benign and competent governance in the future, particularly since we clearly don’t have it now in the US. And we clearly don’t have it here now in the UK, home of the social provision of health care. The UK approach to the COVID-19 pandemic is neatly captured by the Torygraph journalist writing that “a coronavirus ‘cull’ of elderly could benefit economy”.
We certainly do need big, structural change in how we provision and deliver health care, both in the US and in the UK. And now we’re trying to rebuild as we try to survive the whirlwind. This isn’t the moment for ideological purity in our drive to rebuild our health care systems. If it works, it’s elegant.
Perhaps, as they say, we won’t let this crisis go to waste. We’ll muddle forward towards a better system in response to the horrors to come. In the meantime, we can pressure our government(s) for positive political change. I recommend starting by reading Elizabeth Warren’s updated pandemic plan and each of us making a family plan of our own.
We’re in it together, and that means we need to own it — the pandemic and our response to it.