172driver wrote:
the relative ease with which SE Asia more or less shrugged off the virus.
Studies of the genetic makeup of the virus has shown that there are two major strains — one “asian” and one “european”. There might well be differences between the two in how easily they spread and how deadly they are. The US mostly have the european strain although there is some spread of the asian strain along the west coast.
Peter wrote:
As if the head of the govt is responsible for much of what happens.
In fact yes. These are times when leadership is needed and Boris ridiculed the whole thing until he got it himself. Then he closed the door after the horse had emigrated to somewhere less exciting.
The numbers you post do make it clear that the UK fared very bad in comparison to most European states, only Italy and Spain came close and both of these were ample ahead of the UK so it should have been clear at that point at what price herd immunity would come. The same, in a worse way, goes for the US and Trump.
In the end, most politicians world wide did not get their act together in time to stop this. And it is NOT that they did not know: The subject was widely discussed at the WEF in January. Had they all stopped flights from China then and rigorosly locked down any outbreak areas, we would not have anywhere close to this kind of disaster that Covid became.
If we can not look at the head of government for leadership in this time then to whom? They got the top job and therefore the responsibility. There were preciously few who did their jobs well and it shows both with figures and how fast they had their countries to a low level of infection.
As for not posting uprisings: I am not aware of any here, just some folks who did not adhere until they got fined. Yes there is a vocal fraction who claims all sort of conspiracy theories and other garbage but they can claim “it wasn’t so bad” primarily BECAUSE the measures were taken, albeit late. Otherwise we’d be at the same place than Italy was or the UK is now. As for those who had ideas like “oh, great, this will kill off half the population so we can reach our climate goals faster”….. I can only hope that some got the same lesson your PM did.
I think there are multiple reasons why the UK has done so badly, when compared to others.
One of them is the obesity epidemic. Most European countries have a “poor, high density living underclass” – these are basically people doing the jobs which the better-off don’t want to do. Some have a much bigger underclass than the UK has. Some have an underclass which has been comprehensively swept under the carpet, to the point where even the police rarely go there and when something really big flares up the rest of the country wonders where the hell it came from. But the UK’s underclass may be unusual in having a high level of poor health and especially – due to not eating home cooking like most poor people do, and eating crap ready-to-eat foods – obesity. Much of the NHS workload goes on keeping these people alive. And we know that apart from being old/frail, obesity is the biggest single risk factor with this virus. Throw in the poor education and telling people to keep 2m apart is largely wasted; most don’t know what a metre looks like.
There are other reasons I am sure. The seeding of the UK by the airline-flying ski community was perhaps the most effective in Europe, when combined with the above high density populations. The other countries which got so effectively seeded by flight+bus skiers have a much lower population density and most of them are quite rich (read: well educated) all the way down. Another one is that the UK has a large BAME (basically, dark skin) community; even after correcting for known health conditions (which are an above-average factor in the BAME community, with unusual patterns of cardio conditions and obesity) there is a 2x factor which is as yet unaccounted for. Reports from ICU persistently indicate wards full of people from these communities.
In normal “bad winter flu” times, they would be full of old people but this time round the govt was so panicked by the videos posted by tearful Italian doctors, of people over 65 left to die in hospital corridors, that they went for maximum hospital space by abandoning the usual practice of immediately transferring any care home resident with a temperature to hospital; actually they did the opposite which was to move them back to the care homes, where they got effectively infected by care home staff who are firmly in the above mentioned “underclass”. The figures are not being released by the govt but it is now believed that at least half of the deaths are in care homes.
Due to the massive cost of this exercise, I am sure lessons will be learnt and implemented rapidly when the next one comes.
Everybody in Europe screwed up badly. Some got more lucky than others. Some were fortunate in having a domestic test kit / reagent production, where orders got fulfilled nationally regardless of contractual obligations to foreign customers.
But nobody in politics is able to admit they screwed up, and most of the above cannot be discussed openly because it is non-PC.
Peter wrote:
There are pretty big uprisings in some places around Europe against the lockdowns.
Can you point to news articles etc. about this? I’ve only read about small and isolated incidents in a few places.
Well, as I recall predicting at the beginning of the lockdown here, after a month or so there would be an “incident” and it would kick off in certain predictable areas…
Sure enough the last week of April there was a kick-off that lasted a week, not widely reported (who says the media isnt influenced by the state…) which was triggered when police opened their car door and knocked a guy off a scooter.
A week of riots
I also agree that Boris is not to blame for everything. Although of course he/they are clearly to blame for some things.
Nobody on Social Media seems to point to the NHS doctors and managers which (a) transferred numerous infected patients into the Care Home system which was incredibly sad and (b) in spite of a planning exercise well before Boris took power, had woeful stocks of PPE etc.
But I forgot, we’re only allowed to Clap the NHS and we can’t be critical in any way as it is the new religion in the UK.
The quality of debate on this forum is better than you see in any Newspaper so congratulations to the EuroGA forum again.
I have to say Im glad that Im not the only person that has been increasingly annoyed to hear various people, politicians and the media (including those that should know better) complaining that “the govmint” should provide PPE to NHS staff, Care Home workers, supermarket staff, teachers or whoever. That is the job of their employers…
In normal times I would agree with you. But how is Mrs Smith who manages the care home down the road going to negotiate the purchase of many thousands of pounds worth of face masks in China? Care homes, in particular, are a pretty cutthroat business where if they make an attempt to look after the residents, they don’t make much money. If they were suddenly faced with such bills, many would go out of business and then what would happen to the residents? And if they don’t provide PPE and the minimum-wage carers walk, then what would happen to the residents? In many parts of the world – including first world nations – there have been stories of care home residents who were simply left to die then rot, in the literal rather than metaphorical sense.
Ultimately NHS workers and teachers are employed by the state, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to expect the state to have a role in managing the provision of emergency equipment such as PPE.
The issue of patients being discharged from hospitals to care homes is a tricky one that was obvious from the start to anyone who was thinking about the problem. The churn of patients between care homes to hospitals and back again is such that there was a very real need for hospitals to discharge nursing home residents back otherwise they would fill up within a few days. Likewise I can appreciate the fear of care home staff of accepting patients back who might bring COVID back to the home. Unfortunately, particularly in the early days, there were complexities and anomalies that made it very hard to deal with the problem effectively.
kwlf wrote:
Care homes, in particular, are a pretty cutthroat business where if they make an attempt to look after the residents, they don’t make much money. If they were suddenly faced with such bills, many would go out of business and then what would happen to the residents? And if they don’t provide PPE and the minimum-wage carers walk, then what would happen to the residents?
Indeed. That is a strong argument against privatised care homes — a debate which has been raging to and from in Sweden for some 20 years and which will surely erupt in full force again once things have begun to settle.
The current issue for care homes is the cost of PPE.
Yesterday I was looking for some electronic bits on the famous RS Components website and of course they are flogging masks and hand sanitiser too. Masks at £5 each, and a sanitiser bottle at £10. This is outrageous. The masks came from China for about 10p and I bet they still are in that region now. Maybe 20p. There are loads of people getting very rich on PPE right now.
I got a thick wad of NHS-looking masks sent free of charge by a chinese PCB supplier but anyone wearing them on the street is going to get beaten up for robbing the heroic NHS 
£5 is OK if you use the same mask all day, but that isn’t what one is supposed to do.
Also I bet the staff, who are basically non medical (and mostly totally uneducated) people, have no idea about procedures to avoid cross-contamination, e.g. using your phone with gloves and then using it without gloves.
