Sunday Times - 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster

[arise_sir_charge]

Nothing about this on the BBC news today!.......Why?

Possibly because it appears to be a load of old ********.

[Devils_Advocate]

Its not about just comparing death rates with other countrys which is far to simplistic and not necessarily a good comparison.

For me its about how we manage our own situation.

For example if the govt ignored the expert advice for bad reasons but by chance they got lucky and it ended up working out well then criticism is still valid.

On the other hand if the govt act right and proper and follow advice but what seems the right decision turns out to be a disaster then youve go to accept they did the right thing but in a crisis like this you cant help but get things wrong some times and criticism wouldnt be fair

[Spijed]

If they end up in a better position than other countries, manage to avoid any issues with NHS capacity and at the same time protect the economy to some degree (which is a possibility) will you give them any credit at all?

If it's lower the government will deserve credit, likewise if it's higher they deserve criticism.

[thatdberight]

If it's lower the government will deserve credit, likewise if it's higher they deserve criticism.

No. What was said above. The government aren't God. If they make the right calls and it goes to ****, that's still a good piece of governance. If they make wrong calls and get lucky, that's still a bad piece.

[Paul Waine]

Nothing about this on the BBC news today!.......Why?

Hi Taffy, BBC R4 featured it on the news Sunday morning and again in the Broadcasting House, 9 a.m. programme. I guess they've dropped it since realising that the story is full of inaccuracies.

Starting an article, as Sunday Times did, with "On the third Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the world" is always going to be a bit of a let down if the date is 24th and you don't know that this will always be the 4th Friday....

I'm interested in how The Times deals with this in Monday's edition.

[Bin Ont Turf]

Try reading it BOT, they cover the PPE to China in detail.

I tend to scan through reading rantings from papers, especially when Brexit is mentioned many times.

We all know that the stats are skewed, even if this country that we live in is the most densely populated large country in Europe.

The Chinese must have done an incredible job of preventing the spread, 4,000 ish dead out of a population of 1.4 Billion (even though the Times says that it was spread here originally by Chinese nationals).

We need to look at Germany to find out how they are skewing the stats.

[thatdberight]

We need to look at Germany to find out how they are skewing the stats.

I'm not sure whether you're joking or not but I have no problems believing the Germans have done this much better than us.

[Bin Ont Turf]

I'm not sure whether you're joking or not but I have no problems believing the Germans have done this much better than us.

Why would you think otherwise, after all we are just a piddling little nation in the North Atlantic that has never known what it is doing.

Everywhere is better than here.

[thatdberight]

Why would you think otherwise, after all we are just a piddling little nation in the North Atlantic that has never known what it is doing.

Everywhere is better than here.

Not at all. But I think they'll have done this better because of a number of structural and cultural issues that don't particularly relate to the current government or the very recent past.

[Jakubclaret]

Grace and favour retreat - is that commonly referred to as Checkers?

Boris has ignored the flooding because he’s in a meeting about some flu virus in China!!

The NHS should have spent millions stockpiling PPE and ventilators just in case there is a flu pandemic - manufactured by the “friends” of the government of course.

Prof Sridhar - the go to academic critic!

Hindsight is lovely but what we should have done by 1st Feb is

1. Shut all borders to non uk residents. Anyone returning should be tested and placed in government run isolation camps and empty hotels for 7 days.
2. Immediate full lockdown with night time curfew. Only one person per household allowed to leave the house with pre authorised permission from local authorities stating when and where they can go and an appropriate time slot
3. The armed forces need to be deployed on the streets as a reassurance, helping with logistics and law enforcement
4. Immediate closure of all businesses.
5. Public transport to only be used with pre authorisation. All train/tube stations to be policed to restrict volume.
6. Immediate requisitioning of all manufacturing premises with output diverted to emergency equipment
7. Immediate ban on the export of any products required by UK emergency services

If we had done that we would be out of lockdown by now

Excellent post, you could have said though instead of us being out of lockdown now we wouldn’t be in 1 in the first place with them measures enacted by the 1st February, you reap what you sow in lots of ways & that’s no slight to the people powerless & engaged in the current struggle.

[thatdberight]

Excellent post, you could have said though instead of us being out of lockdown now we wouldn’t be in 1 in the first place with them measures enacted by the 1st February, you reap what you sow in lots of ways & that’s no slight to the people powerless & engaged in the current struggle.

Are you sure you're not operating under two IDs because "immediate closure of all businesses" is something so doltish I thought only you could come up with it?

Although to be fair, even in that short list it doesn't make the top two of stupid ideas.

[Jakubclaret]

When’s there a juggernaut heading in the same direction you steer away & change course, it’ll come out when’s there’s the inevitable inquiry into the whys & belated actions.

[thatdberight]

...what we should have done by 1st Feb is... Immediate full lockdown...

...instead of us being out of lockdown now we wouldn’t be in 1 in the first place with them measures...

I literally couldn't make up someone whose posts are as devoid of intelligence as yours.

[Taffy on the wing]

Hi Taffy, BBC R4 featured it on the news Sunday morning and again in the Broadcasting House, 9 a.m. programme. I guess they've dropped it since realising that the story is full of inaccuracies.

Starting an article, as Sunday Times did, with "On the third Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the world" is always going to be a bit of a let down if the date is 24th and you don't know that this will always be the 4th Friday....

I'm interested in how The Times deals with this in Monday's edition.

The Times is a Murdoch paper.........maybe he's trying to sow confusion?
He has Fox News to do that here.......half the Country think Coronavirus is a hoax.

[Spiral]

Night time curfew is my favourite one. Because corona is nocturnal.

[Damo]

Screenshot_20200420-065050_Twitter.jpg (903.92 KiB) Viewed 3479 times

"596 Dead. See page 4" jesus christ. Is that satire?

[evensteadiereddie]

A great paper.............

[Paul Waine]

The Times is a Murdoch paper.........maybe he's trying to sow confusion?
He has Fox News to do that here.......half the Country think Coronavirus is a hoax.

Taffy, are you saying you are in USA? Whereabouts? Why were you saying "nothing on BBC?" You do know, that what you see from the BBC in US is not the same as the BBC puts out in UK: BBC online presents different stories, tries to put some US ones in the forefront etc. Similarly, TV programmes (would you prefer "programs") are not identical. Can you access BBC radio while in US? I've never tried when I've been visiting US - which I used to do for several weeks every year.

Good luck with Fox News. Where do you go to for your news sources in US?

[JohnMac]

How many people would have been up in arms had we kept hold of our PPE when China desperately needed assistance?

It's what civilised Countries do, help out in times of need.

[Grumps]

How many people would have been up in arms had we kept hold of our PPE when China desperately needed assistance?

It's what civilised Countries do, help out in times of need.

They've sent more back here, than we gave them, like you say, help out where you can

[jrgbfc]

Ironic how the Brexiteers are now desperately relying on the EU and other countries to provide us with PPE. Meanwhile companies in this country are offering to help and hitting a brick wall, is this what taking back control looks like?

[DCWat]

The confirmation bias brigade are out in force on this one, I see.

[AndrewJB]

Interesting take to keep an eye on is that going off recent news storys it looks like the Barclay brothers are promoting Boris as "the only person who can save us" whereas Murdoch may want to dump him in favour of Gove.

You can see this in the way the Telegraph has run with a deluge of "Boris is the only person who
can save us" pieces whilst papers like the Times and Sunday Times seem to be attacking Johnson

If this interpretation is correct and continues to escalate then we could see some real bloody infighting and end up with our two main party's internally at war with themselves

Only one real loser in that scenario and unfortunately its good old joe public

Two (and one pair of twins) foreign multi billionaires exercising influence over our politics well beyond anything most ordinary citizens can hope to achieve.

[thatdberight]

Ironic how the Brexiteers are now desperately relying on the EU and other countries to provide us with PPE. Meanwhile companies in this country are offering to help and hitting a brick wall, is this what taking back control looks like?

I don't recall anyone proposing Brexit suggesting we were going to stop international trade, withdraw from international life or put a ring of steel around the country so that we had no interaction with it. But if it makes you feel good to make this previously unmade point, that's great.

[thatdberight]

The confirmation bias brigade are out in force on this one, I see.

All biases present and correct being confirmed on all sides.

As you were.

[DCWat]

Thatdberight

[RingoMcCartney]

Ironic how the Brexiteers are now desperately relying on the EU and other countries to provide us with PPE. Meanwhile companies in this country are offering to help and hitting a brick wall, is this what taking back control looks like?

Apart from Germany and France banning the export of their PPE, and the fact that China and Turkey arent actually in the EU. I'm loving your razor sharp analysis.

[RingoMcCartney]

Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears. Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives

On the third Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the world. Passing from person to person and borne on ships and planes, the coronavirus was already leaving a trail of bodies.

The virus had spread from China to six countries and was almost certainly in many others. Sensing the coming danger, the British government briefly went into wartime mode that day, holding a meeting of Cobra, its national crisis committee.

But it took just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus threat. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.

This was despite the publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese doctors in the medical journal, The Lancet. It assessed the lethal potential of the virus, for the first time suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people.

Unusually, Boris Johnson had been absent from Cobra. The committee — which includes ministers, intelligence chiefs and military generals — gathers at moments of great peril such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other threats to the nation and is normally chaired by the prime minister.

Johnson had found time that day, however, to join in a lunar new year dragon eyes ritual as part of Downing Street’s reception for the Chinese community, led by the country’s ambassador.

It was a big day for Johnson and there was a triumphal mood in Downing Street because the withdrawal treaty from the European Union was being signed in the late afternoon. It could have been the defining moment of his premiership — but that was before the world changed.

That afternoon his spokesman played down the looming threat from the east and reassured the nation that we were “well prepared for any new diseases”. The confident, almost nonchalant, attitude displayed that day in January would continue for more than a month.

Johnson went on to miss four further Cobra meetings on the virus. As Britain was hit by unprecedented flooding, he completed the EU withdrawal, reshuffled his cabinet and then went away to the grace-and-favour country retreat at Chevening where he spent most of the two weeks over half-term with his pregnant fiancée, Carrie Symonds.

It would not be until March 2 — another five weeks — that Johnson would attend a Cobra meeting about the coronavirus. But by then it was almost certainly too late. The virus had sneaked into our airports, our trains, our workplaces and our homes. Britain was on course for one of the worst infections of the most deadly virus to have hit the world in more than a century.

Last week, a senior adviser to Downing Street broke ranks and blamed the weeks of complacency on a failure of leadership in cabinet. In particular, the prime minister was singled out.

“There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there,” the adviser said. “And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”

Inquiry ’inevitable’ One day there will inevitably be an inquiry into the lack of preparations during those “lost” five weeks from January 24. There will be questions about when politicians understood the severity of the threat, what the scientists told them and why so little was done to equip the National Health Service for the coming crisis. It will be the politicians who will face the most intense scrutiny.

Among the key points likely to be explored will be why it took so long to recognise an urgent need for a massive boost in supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers; ventilators to treat acute respiratory symptoms; and tests to detect the infection.

Any inquiry may also ask whether the government’s failure to get to grips with the scale of the crisis in those early days had the knock-on effect of the national lockdown being introduced days or even weeks too late, causing many thousands more unnecessary deaths.

An investigation has talked to scientists, academics, doctors, emergency planners, public officials and politicians about the root of the crisis and whether the government should have known sooner and acted more swiftly to kick-start the Whitehall machine and put the NHS onto a war footing.

They told us that, contrary to the official line, Britain was in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and gone out of date after becoming a low priority in the years of austerity cuts. The training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.

This made it doubly important that the government hit the ground running in late January and early February. Scientists said the threat from the coming storm was clear. Indeed, one of the government’s key advisory committees was given a dire warning a month earlier than has previously been admitted about the prospect of having to deal with mass casualties.

It was a message repeated throughout February but the warnings appear to have fallen on deaf ears. The need, for example, to boost emergency supplies of protective masks and gowns for health workers was pressing, but little progress was made in obtaining the items from the manufacturers, mainly in China.

Instead, the government sent supplies the other way — shipping 279,000 items of its depleted stockpile of protective equipment to China during this period, following a request for help from the authorities there.

Impending danger The prime minister had been sunning himself with his girlfriend in the millionaires’ Caribbean resort of Mustique when China first alerted the World Health Organisation (WHO) on December 31 that several cases of an unusual pneumonia had been recorded in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in Hubei province.

In the days that followed China initially claimed the virus could not be transmitted from human to human, which should have been reassuring. But this did not ring true to Britain’s public health academics and epidemiologists who were texting each other, eager for more information, in early January.

Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, had predicted in a talk two years earlier that a virus might jump species from an animal in China and spread quickly to become a human pandemic. So the news from Wuhan set her on high alert.

“In early January a lot of my global health colleagues and I were kind of discussing ‘What’s going on?’” she recalled. “China still hadn’t confirmed the virus was human-to-human. A lot of us were suspecting it was because it was a respiratory pathogen and you wouldn’t see the numbers of cases that we were seeing out of China if it was not human-to-human. So that was disturbing.”

By as early as January 16 the professor was on Twitter calling for swift action to prepare for the virus. “Been asked by journalists how serious #WuhanPneumonia outbreak is,” she wrote. “My answer: take it seriously because of cross-border spread (planes means bugs travel far & fast), likely human-to-human transmission and previous outbreaks have taught overresponding is better than delaying action.”

Events were now moving fast. Four hundred miles away in London, from its campus next to the Royal Albert Hall, a team at Imperial College’s School of Public Health led by Professor Neil Ferguson produced its first modelling assessment of the likely impact of the virus. On Friday, January 17, its report noted the “worrying” news that three cases of the virus had been discovered outside China — two in Thailand and one in Japan. While acknowledging many unknowns, researchers calculated that there could already be as many as 4,000 cases. The report warned: “The magnitude of these numbers suggests substantial human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out. Heightened surveillance, prompt information-sharing and enhanced preparedness are recommended.”

By now the mystery bug had been identified as a type of coronavirus — a large family of viruses that can cause infections ranging from the common cold to severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars). There had been two reported deaths from the virus and 41 patients had been taken ill.

The following Wednesday, January 22, the government convened its first meeting of its scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) to discuss the virus. Its membership is secret but it is usually chaired by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and chief medical adviser, Professor Chris Whitty. Downing Street advisers are also present.

There were new findings that day with Chinese scientists warning that the virus had an unusually high infectivity rate of up to 3.0, which meant each person with the virus would typically infect up to three more people.

One of those present was Imperial’s Ferguson, who was already working on his own estimate — putting infectivity at 2.6 and possibly as high as 3.5 — which he sent to ministers and officials in a report on the day of the Cobra meeting on January 24. The Spanish flu had an estimated infectivity rate of between 2.0 and 3.0, so Ferguson’s finding was shocking.

“Cobra met today to discuss the situation in Wuhan, China,” said Whitty. “We have global experts monitoring the situation around the clock and have a strong track record of managing new forms of infectious disease . . . there are no confirmed cases in the UK to date.”

However, by then there had been 1,000 cases worldwide and 41 deaths, mostly in Wuhan. A Lancet report that day presented a study of 41 coronavirus patients admitted to hospital in Wuhan which found that more than half had severe breathing problems, a third required intensive care and six had died.

And there was now little doubt that the UK would be hit by the virus. A study by Southampton University has shown that 190,000 people flew into the UK from Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities between January and March. The researchers estimated that up to 1,900 of these passengers would have been infected with the coronavirus — almost guaranteeing the UK would become a centre of the subsequent pandemic.

Sure enough, five days later on Wednesday, January 29, the first coronavirus cases on British soil were found when two Chinese nationals from the same family fell ill at a hotel in York. The next day, the government raised the threat level from low to moderate.

The pandemic plan On January 31 — or Brexit day as it had become known — there was a rousing 11pm speech by the prime minister promising that the withdrawal from the European Union would be the dawn of a new era unleashing the British people who would “grow in confidence” month by month.

By this time, there was good reason for the government’s top scientific advisers to feel creeping unease about the virus. The WHO had declared the coronavirus a global emergency just the day before and scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine had confirmed to Whitty in a private meeting of the Nervtag advisory committee on respiratory illness that the virus’s infectivity could be as bad as Ferguson’s worst estimate several days earlier.

The official scientific advisers were willing to concede in public that there might be several cases of the coronavirus in the UK. But they had faith that the country’s plans for a pandemic would prove robust.

This was probably a big mistake. An adviser to Downing Street with extensive knowledge of Britain’s emergency preparations — speaking off the record — says their confidence in “the plan” was misplaced. While a possible pandemic had been listed as the No 1 threat to the nation for many years, the source says that in reality it had long since stopped being treated as such.

Several emergency planners and scientists said that the plans to protect the UK in a pandemic had once been a top priority and had been well-funded for a decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. But then austerity cuts struck. “We were the envy of the world,” the source said, “but pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years when there were more pressing needs.”

The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus which predicted the health service would collapse and highlighted a long list of shortcomings — including, presciently, a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators.

But an equally lengthy list of recommendations to address the deficiencies was never implemented. The source said preparations for a no-deal Brexit “sucked all the blood out of pandemic planning” in the following years.

In the year leading up to the coronavirus outbreak key government committee meetings on pandemic planning were repeatedly “bumped” off the diary to make way for discussions about more pressing issues such as the beds crisis in the NHS. Training for NHS staff with protective equipment and respirators was also neglected, the source alleges.

Members of the government advisory group on pandemics are said to have felt powerless. “They would joke between themselves, ‘Haha let’s hope we don’t get a pandemic,’ because there wasn’t a single area of practice that was being nurtured in order for us to meet basic requirements for pandemic, never mind do it well,” said the source.

“If you were with senior NHS managers at all during the last two years, you were aware that their biggest fear, their sweatiest nightmare, was a pandemic because they weren’t prepared for it.”

It meant that the government had much catching up to do when it was becoming clear that this “nightmare” was becoming a distinct possibility in February. But the source says there was little urgency. “Almost every plan we had was not activated in February. Almost every government department has failed to properly implement their own pandemic plans,” the source said.

One deviation from the plan, for example, was a failure to give an early warning to firms that there might be a lockdown so they could start contingency planning. “There was a duty to get them to start thinking about their cashflow and their business continuity arrangements,” the source said.

Superspreader A central part of any pandemic plan is to identify anyone who becomes ill, vigorously pursue all their recent contacts and put them into quarantine. That involves testing and the UK initially seemed to be ahead of the game. In early February Hancock proudly told the Commons the UK was one of the first countries to develop a new test for the coronavirus. “Testing worldwide is being done on equipment designed in Oxford,” he said.

So when Steve Walsh, a 53-year-old businessman from Hove, East Sussex, was identified as the source of the second UK outbreak on February 6 all his contacts were followed up with tests. Walsh’s case was a warning of the rampant infectivity of the virus as he is believed to have passed it to five people in the UK after returning from a conference in Singapore as well as six overseas.

But Public Health England failed to take advantage of our early breakthroughs with tests and lost early opportunities to step up production to the levels that would later be needed.

This was in part because the government was planning for the virus using its blueprint for fighting the flu. Once a flu pandemic has found its way into the population and there is no vaccine, then the virus is allowed to take its course until “herd immunity” is acquired. Such a plan does not require mass testing.

A senior politician told this newspaper: “I had conversations with Chris Whitty at the end of January and they were absolutely focused on herd immunity. The reason is that with flu, herd immunity is the right response if you haven’t got a vaccine.

“All of our planning was for pandemic flu. There has basically been a divide between scientists in Asia who saw this as a horrible, deadly disease on the lines of Sars, which requires immediate lockdown, and those in the West, particularly in the US and UK, who saw this as flu.”

The prime minister’s special adviser Dominic Cummings is said to have had initial enthusiasm for the herd immunity concept, which may have played a part in the government’s early approach to managing the virus. The Department of Health firmly denies that “herd immunity” was ever its aim and rejects suggestions that Whitty supported it. Cummings also denies backing the concept.

The failure to obtain large amounts of testing equipment was another big error of judgment, according to the Downing Street source. It would later be one of the big scandals of the coronavirus crisis that the considerable capacity of Britain’s private laboratories to mass-produce tests was not harnessed during those crucial weeks of February.

“We should have communicated with every commercial testing laboratory that might volunteer to become part of the government’s testing regime but that didn’t happen,” said the source.

The lack of action was confirmed by Doris-Ann Williams, chief executive of the British In Vitro Diagnostics Association, which represents 110 companies that make up most of the UK’s testing sector. Amazingly, she says her organisation did not receive a meaningful approach from the government asking for help until April 1 — the night before Hancock bowed to pressure and announced a belated and ambitious target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of this month.

There was also a failure to replenish supplies of gowns and masks for health and care workers in the early weeks of February — despite NHS England declaring the virus its first “level four critical incident” at the end of January.

It was a key part of the pandemic plan — the NHS’s Operating Framework for Managing the Response to Pandemic Influenza dated December 2017 — that the NHS would be able to draw on “just in case” stockpiles of PPE.

But many of the “just in case” stockpiles had dwindled, and equipment was out of date. As not enough money was being spent on replenishing stockpiles, this shortfall was supposed to be filled by activating “just in time” contracts which had been arranged with equipment suppliers in recent years to deal with an emergency. The first order for equipment under the “just in time” protocol was made on January 30.

However, the source said that attempts to call in these “just in time” contracts immediately ran into difficulties in February because they were mostly with Chinese manufacturers who were facing unprecedented demand from the country’s own health service and elsewhere.

This was another nail in the coffin for the pandemic plan. “It was a massive spider’s web of failing, every domino has fallen,” said the source.

The NHS could have contacted UK-based suppliers. The British Healthcare Trades Association (BHTA) was ready to help supply PPE in February — and throughout March — but it was only on April 1 that its offer of help was accepted. Dr Simon Festing, the organisation’s chief executive, said: “Orders undoubtedly went overseas instead of to the NHS because of the missed opportunities in the procurement process.”

Downing Street admitted on February 24 — just five days before NHS chiefs warned a lack of PPE left the health service facing a “nightmare” — that the UK government had supplied 1,800 pairs of goggles and 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China.

A senior department of health insider described the sense of drift witnessed during those crucial weeks in February: “We missed the boat on testing and PPE . . . I remember being called into some of the meetings about this in February and thinking, ‘Well it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’

“I had watched Wuhan but I assumed we must have not been worried because we did nothing. We just watched. A pandemic was always at the top of our national risk register — always — but when it came we just slowly watched. We could have been Germany but instead we were doomed by our incompetence, our hubris and our austerity.”

In the Far East the threat was being treated more seriously in the early weeks of February. Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was in a unique position to compare the UK’s response with Singapore, where he had advised in the past.

“Singapore realised, as soon as Wuhan reported it, that cases were going to turn up in Singapore. And so they prepared for that. I looked at the UK and I can see a different strategy and approach.

“The interesting thing for me is, I’ve worked with Singapore in 2003 and 2009 and basically they copied the UK pandemic preparedness plan. But the difference is they actually implemented it.”

Working holiday Towards the end of the second week of February, the prime minister was demob happy. After sacking five cabinet ministers and saying everyone “should be confident and calm” about Britain’s response to the virus, Johnson vacated Downing Street after the half-term recess began on February 13.

He headed to the country for a “working” holiday at Chevening with Symonds and would be out of the public eye for 12 days. His aides were thankful for the rest, as they had been working flat out since the summer as the Brexit power struggle had played out.

The Sunday newspapers that weekend would not have made comfortable reading. The Sunday Times reported on a briefing from a risk specialist which said that Public Health England would be overrun during a pandemic as it could test only 1,000 people a day.

Johnson may well have been distracted by matters in his personal life during his stay in the countryside. Aides were told to keep their briefing papers short and cut the number of memos in his red box if they wanted them to be read.

His family needed to be prepared for the announcement that Symonds, who turned 32 in March, was pregnant and that they had been secretly engaged for some time. Relations with his children had been fraught since his separation from his estranged wife Marina Wheeler and the rift deepened when she had been diagnosed with cancer last year.

The divorce also had to be finalised. Midway through the break it was announced in the High Court that the couple had reached a settlement, leaving Wheeler free to apply for divorce.

There were murmurings of frustration from some ministers and their aides at the time that Johnson was not taking more of a lead. But Johnson’s aides are understood to have felt relaxed: he was getting updates and they claim the scientists were saying everything was under control.

400,000 deaths By the time Johnson departed for the countryside, however, there was mounting unease among scientists about the exceptional nature of the threat. Sir Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease specialist who is a key government adviser, made this clear in a recent BBC interview.

“I think from the early days in February, if not in late January, it was obvious this infection was going to be very serious and it was going to affect more than just the region of Asia ,” he said. “I think it was very clear that this was going to be an unprecedented event.”

By February 21, the virus had already infected 76,000 people, had caused 2,300 deaths in China and was taking a foothold in Europe with Italy recording 51 cases and two deaths the following day. Nonetheless Nervtag, one of the key government advisory committees, decided to keep the threat level at “moderate”.

Its members may well regret that decision with hindsight and it was certainly not unanimous. John Edmunds, one of the country’s top infectious disease modellers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was participating in the meeting by video link but his technology failed him at the crucial moment.

Edmunds wanted the threat level to be increased to high but could not make his view known as the link was glitchy. He sent an email later making his view clear. “JE believes that the risk to the UK population [in the PHE risk assessment] should be high, as there is evidence of ongoing transmission in Korea, Japan and Singapore, as well as in China,” the meeting’s minutes state. But the decision had already been taken.

Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College, was in America at the time of the meeting but would also have recommended increasing the threat to high. Three days earlier he had given an address to a seminar in which he estimated that 60% of the world’s population would probably become infected if no action was taken and 400,000 people would die in the UK.

By February 26, there were 13 known cases in the UK. That day — almost four weeks before a full lockdown would be announced — ministers were warned through another advisory committee that the country was facing a catastrophic loss of life unless drastic action was taken. Having been thwarted from sounding the alarm, Edmunds and his team presented their latest “worst scenario” predictions to the scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling (SPI-M) which directly advises the country’s scientific decision-makers on Sage.

It warned that 27 million people could be infected and 220,000 intensive care beds would be needed if no action were taken to reduce infection rates. The predicted death toll was 380,000. Edmunds’s colleague Nick Davies, who led the research, says the report emphasised the urgent need for a lockdown almost four weeks before it was imposed.

The team modelled the effects of a 12-week lockdown involving school and work closures, shielding the elderly, social distancing and self-isolation. It estimated this would delay the impact of the pandemic but there still might be 280,000 deaths over the year.

Johnson returns The previous night Johnson had returned to London for the Conservatives’ big fundraising ball, the Winter Party, at which one donor pledged £60,000 for the privilege of playing a game of tennis with him.

By this time the prime minister had missed five Cobra meetings on the preparations to combat the looming pandemic, which he left to be chaired by Hancock. Johnson was an easy target for the opposition when he returned to the Commons the following day with the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, labelling him a “part-time” prime minister for his failure to lead on the virus crisis or visit the areas of the UK badly hit by floods.

By Friday, February 28, the virus had taken root in the UK with reported cases rising to 19 and the stock markets were plunging. It was finally time for Johnson to act. He summoned a TV reporter into Downing Street to say he was on top of the coronavirus crisis.

“The issue of coronavirus is something that is now the government’s top priority,” he said. “I have just had a meeting with the chief medical officer and secretary of state for health talking about the preparations that we need to make.”

It was finally announced that he would be attending a meeting of Cobra — after a weekend at Chequers with Symonds where the couple would publicly release news of the engagement and their baby.

On the Sunday, there was a meeting between Sage committee members and officials from the Department of Health and NHS which was a game changer, according to a Whitehall source. The meeting was shown fresh modelling based on figures from Italy suggesting that 8% of infected people might need hospital treatment in a worst-case scenario. The previous estimate had been 4%-5%.

“The risk to the NHS had effectively doubled in an instant. It set alarm bells ringing across government,” said the Whitehall source. “I think that meeting focused minds. You realise it’s time to pull the trigger on the starting gun.”

At the Cobra meeting the next day with Johnson in the chair a full “battle plan” was finally signed off to contain, delay and mitigate the spread of the virus. This was on March 2 — five weeks after the first Cobra meeting on the virus.

The new push would have some positive benefits such as the creation of new Nightingale hospitals, which greatly increased the number of intensive care beds. But there was a further delay that month of nine days in introducing the lockdown as Johnson and his senior advisers debated what measures were required. Later the government would be left rudderless again after Johnson himself contracted the virus.

As the number of infections grew daily, some things were impossible to retrieve. There was a worldwide shortage of PPE and the prime minister would have to personally ring manufacturers of ventilators and testing kits in a desperate effort to boost supplies.

The result was that the NHS and care home workers would be left without proper protection and insufficient numbers of tests to find out whether they had been infected. To date 50 doctors, nurses and NHS workers have died. More than 100,000 people have been confirmed as infected in Britain and 15,000 have died.

A Downing Street spokesman said: “Our response has ensured that the NHS has been given all the support it needs to ensure everyone requiring treatment has received it, as well as providing protection to businesses and reassurance to workers. The prime minister has been at the helm of the response to this, providing leadership during this hugely challenging period for the whole nation.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coro ... -hq3b9tlgh

Fake news. From what I hear!

[RingoMcCartney]

As at 17th April 2020

From yougov-

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/ar ... asing-crit

"Brits are still supportive of the Government's coronavirus response despite mounting criticism over a lack of PPE and testing, YouGov's latest figures show 

There has been a notable uptick in criticism of the Government’s handling of the Coronavirus outbreak this week. Both the press and opposition parties have been questioning the Government’s exit strategy, as well as whether they should be doing more to increase the number of tests and access to PPE equipment for staff in the NHS or care homes.

However, our latest polling shows that this has not translated into a drop in support for the Government. Two thirds (66%) still say the government is doing well at handling the outbreak, compared to just under three in ten (28%) who think they are handling it badly.

This is down slightly on the peak support of 72%, just after the lockdown began.

The small drop off we have seen has come almost entirely from Labour voters, signalling that this is potentially becoming more of a partisan issue. In our latest poll, 42% of Labour voters say the government is doing well, down 14% on three weeks ago, while 54% say they are doing badly, up 18% on three weeks ago."

Could be the increasingly well used line by labour politicians, is getting through?

"I dont want to turn this crisis a party political issue and attempt to make political capital out of it BUT..............".

[jrgbfc]

Apart from Germany and France banning the export of their PPE, and the fact that China and Turkey arent actually in the EU. I'm loving your razor sharp analysis.

That's why I said "other" countries. One of the biggest lies spread during the campaign was that those "nasty" Turks were going to join the EU and we'd be swamped with more immigrants.

[diamondpocket]

I wonder if the 350 million is now being invested into the NHS?

[RingoMcCartney]

That's why I said "other" countries. One of the biggest lies spread during the campaign was that those "nasty" Turks were going to join the EU and we'd be swamped with more immigrants.

Not sure, how, what was or wasnt said in the run up to the 2016 eu referendum, is relevant to be honest.

Taking of the EU though, the Corona bond debacle isn't a good look. The "we're all in it together," the "a strong United europe is the only option to face modern day challenges" the "unity is strength" the "in a global world only a United Europe of equals is the answer" all appear to have been ditched for " everyman for himself " and "I'm alright Franz!"

[dsr]

Has the Tory media ever been disunited regarding the leader of whichever Tory government was in power? I’m too young to remember the Tories pre-Blair.

But not too young to remember them under May, presumably?

[jrgbfc]

Not sure, how, what was or wasnt said in the run up to the 2016 eu referendum, is relevant to be honest.

Taking of the EU though, the Corona bond debacle isn't a good look. The "we're all in it together," the "a strong United europe is the only option to face modern day challenges" the "unity is strength" the "in a global world only a United Europe of equals is the answer" all appear to have been ditched for " everyman for himself " and "I'm alright Franz!"

I agree that the EU is far from perfect, and this crisis could be another nail in the coffin. Countries will realise that when it really comes down to it its every man for himself. Anyway I'll leave it at that before the thread goes off on another Brexit tangent!

[tiger76]

That's why I said "other" countries. One of the biggest lies spread during the campaign was that those "nasty" Turks were going to join the EU and we'd be swamped with more immigrants.

No-one seriously believed Turkey were about to gain EU membership anytime soon,they applied for accession in 1987,and their still no nearer meeting the necessary criteria for EU membership,if your referring to the Farage poster that was one of the worst dog-whistle political stunts I've witnessed,and it was borderline racist as well as misleading.

Turkey is negotiating its accession to the European Union (EU) as a member state, following its application to accede to the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the EU, on 14 April 1987.After the ten founding members,Turkey was one of the first countries to become a member of the Council of Europe in 1949. The country was also an associate member of the Western European Union from 1992 to its end in 2011. Turkey signed a Customs Union agreement with the EU in 1995 and was officially recognised as a candidate for full membership on 12 December 1999, at the Helsinki summit of the European Council.

Negotiations for full membership were started on 3 October 2005. Progress was slow, and out of the 35 Chapters necessary to complete the accession process only 16 had been opened and one had been closed by May 2016. The early 2016 refugee deal between Turkey and the European Union was intended to accelerate negotiations after previous stagnation and allow visa-free travel through Europe for Turks.

Since 2016 accession negotiations have stalled. The EU has accused and criticized Turkey for human rights violations and deficits in rule of law. In 2017, EU officials expressed that planned Turkish policies violate the Copenhagen criteria of eligibility for an EU membership. On 26 June 2018, the EU's General Affairs Council stated that "Turkey has been moving further away from the European Union. Turkey’s accession negotiations have therefore effectively come to a standstill and no further chapters can be considered for opening or closing and no further work towards the modernisation of the EU-Turkey Customs Union is foreseen."

If Turkey is ever to be considered for EU membership in the future,it'll certainly not be on President Erdogan's watch,i think that's a safe bet.

[Burnley Ace]

Night time curfew is my favourite one. Because corona is nocturnal.

Stops people going out unnecessarily at night and therefore reduces opportunities for it to spread. Much easier for someone to come up with a spurious excuse during the day. Easy to enforce and sends out a strong message about the importance of staying in isolation! Fairly straight forward concept, not sure why you don’t understand it?

[Burnley Ace]

How many people would have been up in arms had we kept hold of our PPE when China desperately needed assistance?

It's what civilised Countries do, help out in times of need.

We also needed it. We are now in a position we’re we don’t have enough partly because we sent some to China. China has the worlds biggest manufacturing industry and more than enough capacity and control to manufacture their own

[Burnley Ace]

They've sent more back here, than we gave them, like you say, help out where you can

Did they send or have we paid? They have already tried to fob us off with faulty testing equipment.

[tiger76]

Worth noting other European countries are having their own difficulties,Sweden for one,the herd immunity approach might pay dividends in the long-term,but it'll cause short-term pain and suffering.

Anger in Sweden as elderly pay price for coronavirus strategy
Staff with no masks or sanitiser fear for residents as hundreds die in care homes

It was just a few days after the ban on visits to his mother’s nursing home in the Swedish city of Uppsala, on 3 April, that Magnus Bondesson started to get worried.

“They [the home] opened up for Skype calls and that’s when I saw two employees. I didn’t see any masks and they didn’t have gloves on,” says Bondesson, a start-up founder and app developer.

“When I called again a few days later I questioned the person helping out, asking why they didn’t use face masks, and he said they were just following the guidelines.”

That same week there were numerous reports in Sweden’s national news media about just how badly the country’s nursing homes were starting to be hit by the coronavirus, with hundreds of cases confirmed at homes in Stockholm, the worst affected region, and infections in homes across the country.

Since then pressure has mounted on the government to explain how, despite a stated aim of protecting the elderly from the risks of Covid-19, a third of fatalities have been people living in care homes.

Last week, as figures released by the Public Health Agency of Sweden indicated that 1,333 people had now died of coronavirus, the country’s normally unflappable state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell admitted that the situation in care homes was worrying.

“This is our big problem area,” said Tegnell, the brains behind the government’s relatively light-touch strategy, which has seen it ask, rather than order, people to avoid non-essential travel, work from home and stay indoors if they are over 70 or are feeling ill.

The same day prime minister Stefan Löfven said that the country faced a “serious situation” in its old people’s homes, announced efforts to step up protections, and ordered the country’s health inspectorate to investigate.

Lena Einhorn, a virologist who has been one of the leading domestic critics of Sweden’s coronavirus policy, told the Observer that the government and the health agency were still resisting the most obvious explanations.

“They have to admit that it’s a huge failure, since they have said the whole time that their main aim has been to protect the elderly,” she said. “But what is really strange is that they still do not acknowledge the likely route. They say it’s very unfortunate, that they are investigating, and that it’s a matter of the training personnel, but they will not acknowledge that presymptomatic or asymptomatic spread is a factor.”

The agency’s advice to those managing and working at nursing homes, like its policy towards coronavirus in general, has been based on its judgment that the “spread from those without symptoms is responsible for a very limited share” of those who get infected.

Its advice to the care workers and nurses looking after older people such as Bondesson’s 69-year-old mother is that they should not wear protective masks or use other protective equipment unless they are dealing with a resident in the home they have reason to suspect is infected.

Otherwise the central protective measure in place is that staff should stay home if they detect any symptoms in themselves.

“Where I’m working we don’t have face masks at all, and we are working with the most vulnerable people of all,” said one care home worker, who wanted to remain anonymous. “We don’t have hand sanitiser, just soap. That’s it. Everybody’s concerned about it. We are all worried.”

“The worst thing is that it is us, the staff, who are taking the infection in to the elderly,” complained one nurse to Swedish public broadcaster SVT. “It’s unbelievable that more of them haven’t been infected. It’s a scandal.”

Einhorn was one of 22 researchers who on Tuesday called for Sweden’s politicians to break with the country’s tradition of entrusting policy to its expert agencies, and to seize control of Sweden’s coronavirus strategy from the agency.

She argues that the reason why Sweden has a much higher number of cases in care homes than in Norway and Finland is not because of the homes themselves, but because of Sweden’s decision to keep schools and kindergartens open, and not to shut restaurants or bars.

“It’s not like it goes from one old age home to another. It comes in separately to all of these old age homes, so there’s no way it can be all be attributed to the personnel going in and working when they are sick. There’s a basic system fault in their recommendations. There’s no other explanation for it.”

Tegnell’s colleague AnnaSara Carnahan on Friday told Sveriges Radio that the number of deaths reported from old people’s homes was “probably an underestimate”, as regional health infectious diseases units were reporting that many elderly who died were not being tested.

Bondesson’s mother, who has dementia, is worried, he says. “She is aware of most things that you talk about, it’s just that she might have bad short-term memory, on and off,” he said. “She had also been questioning the lack of face masks. She thinks it’s really sad to have to be there constantly for weeks and not to know when it’s going to end.”

So lots of similarities with what's happening in the UK,lack of PPE,care sector being forgotten,and a softly,softly approach to any restrictions on daily life,relying on compliance rather than enforcement,and the most bizarre keeping many public spaces open,it appears it's not only the UK government facing questions about how this crisis is being managed.

[Spijed]

Anger in Sweden as elderly pay price for coronavirus strategy
Staff with no masks or sanitiser fear for residents as hundreds die in care homes

That's why the figure of less that 300 dying in UK care homes isn't true and is a downright lie.

[thatdberight]

That's why the figure of less that 300 dying in UK care homes isn't true and is a downright lie.

So I ask myself does this person already have a viewpoint that means he's likely to call it a lie...

[dsr]

To be fair, in this country at least, a third of all fatalities from all causes are people who live in care homes. So a third of corona victims living in care homes is not, in itself, a concern. Not to say there isn't a concern, but that isn't it.

[dsr]

That's why the figure of less that 300 dying in UK care homes isn't true and is a downright lie.

Has anyone actually measured total number of deaths in care homes now compared with the pre-corona average? That would be a partial guide. Accepting of course that the number is bound to be up by the numbers would normally have been sent to hospital to die but now are not being, and the number who have died because of the effects of lockdown.

[arise_sir_charge]

That's why the figure of less that 300 dying in UK care homes isn't true and is a downright lie.

Spijed, do your purposely ignore what the government say?

Nobody is saying that the care home number is accurate and they have explained multiple times what affects the accuracy of the number and why. Similarly with the NHS workers number. There is a reason why what the press say and the government say may be different but ultimately there will be a number that is correct.

It might surprise you but it's a little more complicated than a bloke sat in a room with a tally chart.

[Spijed]

Spijed, do your purposely ignore what the government say?

No, but neither should you believe everything they say is truthful either.

[tiger76]

That's why the figure of less that 300 dying in UK care homes isn't true and is a downright lie.

I thought it was common knowledge the figures in the care sector were being hugely under counted,whether it's a downright lie is a matter of opinion,however if many residents are dying and not being classed as covid-19 victims by doctors,then the official numbers will be far lower than the total should be.

The NCF has relied on its own staff to say whether they suspect a person has died of coronavirus as well as including the confirmed cases, whereas the official figures rely on cases where doctors have recorded the virus on death certificates.

Since we have not had widespread testing in care homes so far it is very difficult to really judge the true impact. The government is now promising more testing so it will only be in the coming weeks and months that we will really know.

The latest ONS numbers should be updated tomorrow,so they could well show a sharp incline,but there's still the two-week lag to consider,so it'll be a few months before the accurate figures are collated,but it's clear that they'll be in the thousands at the minimum.

Virus-related deaths in care homes - and elsewhere in the community, such as in hospices or in people's own houses - are measured separately and figures covering England and Wales are announced on a weekly basis by the Office for National Statistics every Tuesday.

Because these are based on what doctors write on death certificates - sometimes only issued in the days after the death - there is a two-week lag on collecting this data from the thousands of care homes involved. For that reason, the figures issued last Tuesday only went up to 3 April.

[Bordeauxclaret]

Richard Horton, who’s tweet is quoted in the government’s response, accuses them rewriting history.

https://twitter.com/richardhorton1/stat ... 84933?s=21

[arise_sir_charge]

No, but neither should you believe everything they say is truthful either.

I don't by any means, but when they acknowledge and explain a reason for something, I think it's fairer to take that on board than to label something as a "downright lie".

[arise_sir_charge]

Richard Horton, who’s tweet is quoted in the government’s response, accuses them rewriting history.

https://twitter.com/richardhorton1/stat ... 84933?s=21

To be fair he can accuse them of whatever he wishes but his comments are there in black and white for all to see.

In any event, I think that all this does is show the very fluid nature of this whole thing and demonstrates that nobody had all the answers back then and nobody has all the answers now.

This is why the blame game and politicising is all a bit distasteful amidst an ongoing and forever developing crisis.

[quoonbeatz]

Richard Horton, who’s tweet is quoted in the government’s response, accuses them rewriting history.

https://twitter.com/richardhorton1/stat ... 84933?s=21

He's got them bang to rights I'm afraid. They said his tweet was on the 23rd when it was on the 24th.