Jacko wrote:
since European socialists stopped making people into soap and lampshades
What are you talking about?
Jacko wrote:
People may be inclined to interpret what is reasonable in the context of a government and public health command structure which has:
(a) deliberately seeded Covid-positive patients into old-peoples’ care homes;
That’s serious conspiracy theory stuff. I understand the criticism in terms of competence on decision making, PPE stocks, etc, but you are suggesting a deliberate policy designed to kill people, which I think is nonsense.
@Airborne_Again I assume he is talking about National Socialists (eg Nazis). I suppose some of the things they did like building autobahns and the VW Beetle might be considered socialist, depending on your definition of the word.
It is of course conspiracy theory rubbish to suggest it was deliberate. But that does not mean it was not allowed to happen without anyone really taking steps to prevent it. What is far more likely is that while we were watching what was happening in Italy and planning to make sure our hospitals didn’t get overwhelmed like theirs, no-one thought of what might happen in care homes.
If I had a loved one in a care home right now then I would not be entrusting them to the system. I would go there myself and bring them back to my home. I don’t care what the rules are, the authorities would have to physically restrain me.
Jacko wrote:
People may be inclined to interpret what is reasonable in the context of a government and public health command structure which has:
(a) deliberately seeded Covid-positive patients into old-peoples’ care homes;
Neil wrote:
That’s serious conspiracy theory stuff. I understand the criticism in terms of competence on decision making, PPE stocks, etc, but you are suggesting a deliberate policy designed to kill people, which I think is nonsense.
Do you deny that there was a formal instruction to discharge infected old people from hospitals into nursing homes?
Or do you think that every one of the administrators, doctors and nursing staff who issued, promulgated and complied with that instruction was too stupid to understand the consequence?
We can discuss whether it was right to kill a few thousand old folks and their carers to free NHS beds for more worthy cases, but it’s surely unfair to infer that the entire British healthcare community are congenital idiots.
Anyway, we seem to have strayed quite a way from the point in Harriet Harman’s parliamentary briefing paper that a “reasonable excuse” for leaving home is what is reasonable for the individual. Viewed from here, with a local population density of 0.25 per sq km, it is hard to imagine how leaving my home by foot, car or aeroplane could possibly make matters worse than our “fantastic” healthcare service has already done.
The care home issue is – as always – more complicated.
Apparently 84% of UK care homes are privately owned. These are expected to buy their own kit. They have plenty of money coming in. And it tends to be a good earner for the owners.
The other 16% are local govt owned. There the responsibility is less clear. In “normal times” it is the local govt of course.
One could argue that the vulnerability should have been seen sooner. The problem is that hindsight is always 20/20 and this thing moved fast. Way too fast for the well-lunched (in decades past, well-bribed) NHS procurement machinery. I don’t know about other countries but the UK care homes banned visitors pretty fast, and everybody thought this will close the back door. What nobody in power realised is that the care home employees are in the most infected sector themselves (least paid, poorest health, largest households, least educated / lowest appreciation of procedures, multiple jobs, basically living their lives right on the edge, etc) and they would bring it in.
The govt did move a load of old people from hospitals into care homes, in the early panic to free up hospital beds, to avoid the situation which we had all day on TV: Italian doctors crying on TV saying how everyone over 65 was being left to die in the corridors and please don’t let your own country go the same way, with coffins stacked up just outside the ICU wards, and stories of > 90% mortality among the ventilated. This transfer was obviously not done to seed the virus into care homes, but it created an implied responsibility to provide the care homes with extra support (not just pay the room rate, which the govt obviously did do). But as I say above few saw the back door was still wide open for the virus.
Nobody is suggesting that known-infected people were moved from hospitals into care homes. Well, few people were being tested back then because somebody else in Europe bought all the test kits 
By the time the care homes realised they need PPE, you could not buy it except on Ebay etc and at crazy prices. A £0.05 mask for £5.00 gets too expensive.
Every country made the same mistake…
Even now the govt is telling people that wearing masks in public is not useful, but few are saying the real reason for this obviously wrong advice: they don’t want NHS supplies to be diverted (read: stolen from hospitals) to Ebay. This can’t be spoken about because the NHS is a lot of totally untouchable heroes in the media (which the front line staff really are; they should be wearing bio warfare suits).
The UK NHS (and obviously every other country’s “NHS” too) loses over £1BN/year to staff theft, which works out to about £1000 per employee and is a business that would impress Pablo Escobar in its scale and efficiency And it doesn’t take a PhD in criminology to organise this; many years ago I had a job at a high-end hifi loudspeaker manufacturer and every day, after 5pm when the management had gone home, a van would reverse into the loading bay and a load of speakers were quickly loaded up… Some years ago there was a load of oxygen concentrators for sale on Ebay, from Italy, and it later became apparent these were stolen from a military hospital there. Thread.
gallois wrote:
I assume he is talking about National Socialists (eg Nazis). I suppose some of the things they did like building autobahns and the VW Beetle might be considered socialist, depending on your definition of the word.
Of course I understood that, too. The nazis were no more socialists than the German Democratic Republic was democratic.
That sentence about soap and lampshades is guilt by association of the lowest kind.
Peter wrote:
The care home issue is – as always – more complicated.
What Peter describes is very close to what happened in Sweden. It appears it did not happen in the other Nordic countries — probably Swedish elderly care is organised more like it is in the UK. This is a structural problem that authorities could not reasonably fix in the very short time available.
Apparently 84% of UK care homes are privately owned. These are expected to buy their own kit. They have plenty of money coming in. And it tends to be a good earner for the owners.
Exactly, but that money is (at least in the Swedish case) siphoned off to the owners or for expanding the company. (That has been a major source of debate in Sweden for a long time.)
This is a structural problem that authorities could not reasonably fix in the very short time available.
It is not fixable. Well, if the staff wore really high spec gear… how will that work, in what is supposed to be a place for old people to spend their (on average) last 2.5 years?
that money is (at least in the Swedish case) siphoned off to the owners or for expanding the company.
Private care homes exist only to make money for the owners. Nobody would set one up otherwise!
Nobody will open a shop selling shoes unless they are going to “siphon off” the money
You could nationalise the care home sector, perhaps. You would need to pay compensation – many billions. But that won’t fix anything because what happened is nothing to do with who makes the money. The cockup happened basically because everything was moving too fast for the system, driven along by the media frenzy.
This argument that because no one person / country / government is perfect then we’re all equally bad is just nonsense. It’s very easy to observe that capitalism seems to have brought the biggest rise in living standards across the globe, whereas soclialists take the prize for murdering the most of their population or starving them to death.
It’s unfortunate that China has managed to export some of it’s home grown disease and covered it up. The PPE purchasing they did globally beforehand does seem to indicate they knew something serious was up before they admitted to the rest of the world.
The private care home thing is a tricky one, there must be some good ones, but many are terrible. I think it’s quite easy for some owners to cut corners big time which allows for them to make lots of money, but means when something happens they’re left (if they’re still about) totally unprepared
