Your views on how the Tories have handled Coronavirus.

[Chippy_Tea]

Not a fan of Piers Morgan but he does his job here.

I am not a fan but these are the sort of people that should be interviewing (grilling) politicians and not letting them off the hook as others do.

 

[An Ankoù]

I am not a fan but these are the sort of people that should be interviewing (grilling) politicians and not letting them off the hook as others do.

The worst is Andrew Marr. He's really lost his edge, if he ever had one!

 

[Chippy_Tea]

The worst is Andrew Marr. He's really lost his edge, if he ever had one!

He was in my thoughts as i typed my reply they should replace him with Andrew Neil

 

[Futureboy77]

Anything but a fan of Piers Morgan, but at least he is asking the rights questions. This whole situation has shown how poor the standard of journalism has fallen. BBC in particular.

 

[trueblue]

Just found a third part from Piers Morgan his reaction to her answers. Seems to me he is fuming with her

 

[Rodcx500z]

Mind boggling, she was ripped to pieces i think thrown under the bus comes to mind

 

[Futureboy77]

Excercise Cygnus is well publicised. It only dealt with the NHS response (which was sorely lacking for a variety of reasons, underfunding being one). They try to make an economic point at the start of the interview, which was never a point of the excercise so comparing apples and pears.
I've been involved in pandemic planning as part of my job. The government response has been nothing short of shocking.

 

[Kuabi]

As a buyer, if I mess up in my job I don't blame the government. We have struggled buying PPE since February, it's a global thing and all anyone can do is listen to the advice given from experts and not the armchair ones. To many on the blame game trail.

 

[pms67]

Congratulations Boris on your baby
Been some month for him

 

[Futureboy77]

The government have ignored WHO advice, which has undoubtedly resulted in more cases. That's not just my view as an armchair expert, it's a view also shared in the British Medical Journal.
Re: PPE, I was able to buy a large stock of FFP2 & FFP3 respirators quite easily in the third week of March (for non C19 related reasons).

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Congratulations Boris on your baby
Been some month for him

He can go on paternity leave and have another month off.

 

[ClownPrince]

He can go on paternity leave and have another month off.

Probably a blessing in disguise.

 

[Linalmeemow]

As a buyer, if I mess up in my job I don't blame the government. We have struggled buying PPE since February, it's a global thing and all anyone can do is listen to the advice given from experts and not the armchair ones. To many on the blame game trail.

But they ARE to blame here. I posted this earlier a week or two ago:

"There should have been proper risk assessment and control measures in place before putting NHS staff in harm's way. Exercise Cygnus (or whatever it was called) appears to have identified that there was a significant lack of PPE in place for medical staff in the case of a pandemic disease, so this lack of suitable control measures was foreseen but not acted upon. Even the Daily Telegraph is highlighting that the government has tried to bury the results of this exercise."

Exercise Cygnus took place four years ago, complaining of not being able to get PPE in February doesn't cut it. Any other employer failing to mitigate risks they've identified and assessed would be for the high jump, the same should apply to this government.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

"There should have been proper risk assessment and control measures in place before putting NHS staff in harm's way.

This thread is going round in circles yes they should have stockpiled many millions of pounds worth of PPE after the results of Exercise Cygnus but they didn't and i wonder what would have been said by all the other parties and their supporters if we had found out they had done this when the NHS needed money.

The bottom line is they didn't stockpile PPE as many other countries didn't and then when there was a world shortage they struggled to get it as did all other countries i think bearing that in mind they haven't done a bad job of handling the pandemic.

(i am not a Conservative voter before someone rips me a new one)

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Chippy
It's going around in circles because the government won't admit their errors and therefore information is coming to light from investigation. If they said we f**ked up and this is what we're going to do to fix it then this would stop.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Gove says scientific advisers determined what was held in PPE pandemic stockpile
In the House of Commons, in response to a question from the SNP’s Pete Wishart, the Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove suggested that the government’s scientific advisers bore some responsibility for the shortage of PPE (personal protective equipment).
Asked by Wishart to acknowledge that the government had not stockpiled enough in advance, Gove said:

The stockpile that we had before this pandemic was explicitly designed in accordance with the advice from the scientific advisers the government has - Nervtag (the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group) - and of course it was specifically for a flu pandemic.
The nature of coronavirus is different from a flu pandemic as we all know and we, like every government across the world, have had to respond to this new virus by assuring not just with personal protective equipment, but in every respect, that we are in a position to retool, refit and to upgrade our response.

This exchange can be viewed as an early dry run for the debate that is going to be central to what is now seen as the inevitable public inquiry that will take place into how the government handled the pandemic.



Gove admits he only read key Exercise Cygnus pandemic planning report last week
Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, has admitted that it was only last week that he read a confidential government report on the lessons learnt from a three-day exercise in 2016 modelling what would happen in a pandemic.
Giving evidence to the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee, Gove said that he read the report from Exercise Cygnus last week - although he said he had read recommendations prompted by the report earlier.
His admission is surprising because it has been claimed that Exercise Cygnus gave a prescient insight into the problems the UK is facing now with coronavirus - challenges for which the government has not seemed well prepared. Gove is one of the ministers who attends the daily C-19 meeting in Downing Street, which is referred to by insiders as the coronavirus “war cabinet”, and he chairs a coronavirus implementation committee in charge of “preparedness” across much of the public sector and critical national infrastructure, excluding the NHS.
In an exclusive report on Exercise Cygnus published at the end of March, the Sunday Telegraph said:

The NHS failed a major cross-government test of its ability to handle a severe pandemic but the “terrifying” results were kept secret from the public.
Ministers were informed three years ago that Britain would be quickly overwhelmed by a severe outbreak amid a shortage of critical care beds, morgue capacity and personal protective equipment (PPE), an investigation has discovered ...
Despite the failings exposed by Cygnus, the government never changed its strategic roadmap for a future pandemic, with the last update carried out in 2014.

Summarising the conclusions from the exercise in the Sunday Telegraph, Paul Nuki and Bill Gardner said:

But it was not the pandemic itself that was causing those gathered in Whitehall to grimace but the nation’s woeful preparation. The peak of the epidemic had not yet arrived but local resilience forums, hospitals and mortuaries across the country were already being overwhelmed.
There was not enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for the nation’s doctors and nurses. The NHS was about to “fall over” due to a shortage of ventilators and critical care beds. Morgues were set to overflow, and it had become terrifyingly evident that the government’s emergency messaging was not getting traction with the public.

Gove told the committee he had read the report. But, when pressed by the committee’s chairman William Wragg as to when he had read it, he said last week.
When Wragg expressed surprise about this, Gove said: “Some of the product that flowed from that report I had read beforehand.” Asked what he was referring to, Gove said he was referring to recommendations relating to the need for emergency legislation, to the risk of the NHS being overwhelmed and to the need to de-prioritise non-urgent operations.
Gove said the report had led to the development of an influenza pandemic stockpile. But Exercise Cygnus specifically covered a flu pandemic, and Gove said the fact that coronavirus was a different sort of virus meant that there was a need for “a recalibration of our approach towards PPE [personal protective equipment]”. Echoing what he told the Commons yesterday, Gove said that Nervtag (the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group) was responsible for advising on this.
Asked if he would be willing to publish the Exercise Cygnus report, Gove claimed that he had a “general disposition to share as much as possible” but that he would have to consult with colleagues on this, and that it might not be possible to publish it, to protect the interests of the civil servants who wrote it. He said:

I would have to ask the propriety and ethics team here in the Cabinet Office, because sometimes I’m anxious to share things, but the point is made to me that this is advice that has been offered in confidence, by civil servants, and we have to respect their duty of candour and the safe space in which advice is offered.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

UK must learn from German response to Covid-19, says Whitty
Government’s chief medical officer says Germany got ahead in terms of coronavirus testing
The UK government’s chief medical officer has conceded that Germany “got ahead” in testing people for Covid-19 and said the UK needed to learn from that.
Ministers have been challenged repeatedly during the pandemic over their failure to increase testing quickly enough, prompting the health secretary, Matt Hancock, to promise to deliver 100,000 tests a day by the end of April.
Asked about the differences with Germany, where the number of deaths appears to be increasing less rapidly than in the UK, Prof Chris Whitty told the daily government press briefing on Tuesday: “We all know that Germany got ahead in terms of its ability to do testing for the virus, and there’s a lot to learn from that.” Germany is already able to test 500,000 patients a week and is under pressure to increase this further.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-from-german-response-to-covid-19-says-whitty

 

[Rodcx500z]

It's a bit like buying a car in case you pass your test, and are we just taking Germanys word they are doing this many tests, i have not seen any evidence of this on the news and i am sure our press would soon show us

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Rod
Don't judge the German government by our government's standards.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

It's a bit like buying a car in case you pass your test,

Can you imagine the public outcry if the Conservatives had come out and said we have to spend billions of pounds on PPE because we have been told a flu pandemic is likely so there isnt enough money in the pot to increase sending on the NHS or worse they would have to spend less.