Covid - Parliament's Inquiry Findings

Two Select Committees (the Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees) have combined to produce really the first overall review of the governments handling of the pandemic in a 147 page report - Entitled Lessons Learn to Date.

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7496/documents/78687/default/

To save anyone from reading it a very good precis of the major points are covered in this BBC report thread of today -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-58880971

Fwiw it seems to be generally confirming what I've been saying throughout, namely the country wasn't prepared for such a pandemic (no country was), the government DID follow the experts recommendations and the priority was to save the NHS (which led to the decanting of elderly back to their care homes to create bed space).

Mistakes were made which led to deaths but somethings were also done brilliantly in particular the vaccine development and roll out led by Kate Bingham.

The view of the experts at the start seemed to have been that Covid could not be kept out, so there was no point to shutting the stable door any more, instead it needed to be managed within the community - thus by default the thinking became herd immunity.

The report is challenging that view of the experts (and notes - I can't recall the exact number without looking through the report again - that all but one of the scientists who attended the sage meetings - there was something like 850 of them - were British) and suggest that this led to 'group think' and suggests we should have had more international views on what was needed particularly from the south Asian country's who had experience of SARS and went into lockdown  and closed their borders immediately - to have based better decisions on.

Fwiw imo I think the report is fair as far as it goes but doesn't take into account political and practical factors that put into context why decisions were or were not taken at the right times.

For instance the report says we should have locked down sooner and it also says that we did ban travel from country's worst effected by Covid but also that over 60% of our Covid infections in the first wave came from just just France and Spain - so what action should the government have done at that time - close the boarders and leave hundred of thousands, maybe millions of UK nationals stranded abroad worldwide???

Imagine the outcry if they did that.

Also at the time there wasn't the ability to test everyone for Covid so the resources we had were mainly used to test people going into hospital.  The report believes more should have been done to test those returning to care homes - fair comment so far - but it still leaves the fact that care home staff - particularly agency workers - were untested and some infected and spreading the virus unknowingly themselves.

Point being everyone could have left hospital Covid free only to be cared for by people with Covid.

What do you do, keep the elderly in hospital - but you need the beds - look what happened in places like India when the hospitals were overwhelmed with Covid patients.

Which is the best of the two evils the government were faced with?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but you've got to judge on what was known at the time and what resources there were to hand.

Only caught it on the news before work so far, but pretty damning for the government and their advisors - particularly as this is the commons inquiry and not an independent. 

Also (and i haven't read it yet so may be wrong on this) the report only looks at one of the late lockdowns, and not the entirety of 2020 and into 2021, arguably the rush to reopen in summer, tragic consequences of 'eat out to help out' and late Christmas lockdown are even worse mistakes given what the government knew at the time.

Barclay was rolled out on Sky News this morning, Kay Burley kept asking if he would like to apologise for the needless deaths the report cites but no such contrition forthcoming. Not that anyone would expect different.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:Only caught it on the news before work so far, but pretty damning for the government and their advisors - particularly as this is the commons inquiry and not an independent. 

Also (and i haven't read it yet so may be wrong on this) the report only looks at one of the late lockdowns, and not the entirety of 2020 and into 2021, arguably the rush to reopen in summer, tragic consequences of 'eat out to help out' and late Christmas lockdown are even worse mistakes given what the government knew at the time.

Barclay was rolled out on Sky News this morning, Kay Burley kept asking if he would like to apologise for the needless deaths the report cites but no such contrition forthcoming. Not that anyone would expect different.

Well to be fair to Barclay, neither would I apologise or blindly accept responsibility for anything resulting from a report I've not yet read!

I didn't see the interview or what was said but I'd be surprised if he didn't express his regret over the people who have died from Covid - and fwiw Johnson has repeatedly said he accepts all responsibility for the governments actions.

The report is entitled 'Lesson's Learned to Date', so I guess issues such as you've mentioned are still being assessed and evaluated, or alternatively that there has been nothing to learn from them?

We all knew mistakes have been made and I think this comment from one of the Chairs of the report should always be kept in mind -

Asked who was accountable for mistakes made, Greg Clark, the chair of the Science and Technology Committee, said that in any democracy, politicians were accountable, but stressed that everyone - from the prime minister down - was trying to do the best they could.

"We did get some things right and we got some things wrong, and it seems essential we don't just let that pass without trying to squeeze out the lessons and confront some difficult truths," he told BBC Breakfast.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58876089

Nobody deliberately went out of their way to make bad decisions.

I'm not sure why you don't consider the inquiry to independent - it was carried at by elected representatives of all parties who all unanimously endorsed the report, having had access to all the information they sought and interviewed all the key people involved.

Are you suggesting all the political party's (including Labour) colluded in some sort of mass cover up?

Again though I stress that there is another dimension to all this that needs to be taken in the context of when decisions were made in terms of what the alternative choices there where at the time and the ramifications flowing from them, such as do we close our boarders and not let anyone in - including British citizens on holiday abroad at the time?

The report states that 60% of the spread of the virus came just from two country's - Spain and France - I imagine a very large part of that was from people returning from their hols!  Would the public/Labour Party be cool in banning their return for months until we had enough resources to test returnees for Covid?

I very much doubt it.

I'm pleased the report finds that the government was led by the experts - hopefully it will put to bed the numerous looney claims on here at the time that they were not.

The government did what any other government would have done - their best.

Nobody would have got it perfect.

People would still have died.

We learn from it and move on - what else can we do?

I’m distinguishing between this and the independent inquiry next year.

Nobody serious has ever argued the government intentionally caused deaths - that was you spinning to discredit other views.

The argument most on here put forward was that the decisions were wrong and the government incompetent, and that was a contributing factor (note this does not mean it was the only factor) to our huge death toll. Only you argued that, but this report supports it.

Will you admit you were wrong? Will you bollocks 

T.R.O.Y. wrote:I’m distinguishing between this and the independent inquiry next year.

Nobody serious has ever argued the government intentionally caused deaths - that was you spinning to discredit other views.

The argument most on here put forward was that the decisions were wrong and the government incompetent, and that was a contributing factor (note this does not mean it was the only factor) to our huge death toll. Only you argued that, but this report supports it.

Will you admit you were wrong? Will you bollocks 

Well the report clearly states the government followed scientific advise.

The single biggest issue is did we lockdown too late for the first wave.

Clearly now the answer to that was yes.

But what was the scientific advise at the time...

Prof Devi Sridhar, an expert in public health from Edinburgh University, is one of those who has been critical of the approach the UK has taken from the start.

She says the UK, like much of Europe, was "complacent" about the threat of infectious disease - choosing to treat the new coronavirus "like flu" and allowing it to spread, while talking about the desire to achieve herd immunity.

This all changed in late March, when a full lockdown eventually came. But there was a crucial delay of a week which is estimated to have cost more than 20,000 lives, according to government modeller Prof Neil Ferguson, because of how quickly infection rates were doubling at that point.

This, of course, is said with the benefit of hindsight. Government modellers themselves acknowledge the data was "really quite poor" making it difficult to make a decision that would have significant repercussions. It is a point acknowledged by Prof Chris Whitty, the UK's chief medical adviser. Speaking in the summer he said there had been "very limited information" in early March.

By then, the virus was ripping through care homes. Around 30% of deaths in the first wave happened in care homes; 40% if you include care home residents who died in hospital.

Those at the heart of government acknowledge mistakes were made. UK chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said recently: "The lesson is go earlier than you think you want to, go harder than you think you want to, and go a bit broader than you think you want to in terms of applying the restrictions."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55757790

This from an article back in January of this year.

As I said back at the start of all this the government worked on the information that was being provided from China - we know now that it was deliberately misleading and false.  It was only when they learned what was actually happening in Italy that they did that massive u-turn and locked down.

Those are simply the facts.

The experts said on their modelling there was no need for an immediate lockdown, the government followed that advise.

The information they had been given to do the modelling from was deliberately false.

We've known for sometime now that this caused lives - 20,000 according to Ferguson.

Was it a mistake that the government followed the scientific advise?

Was it a mistake that the scientists believed the information they modeled were true?

Yes they were mistakes but honestly taken believing them to be correct.

The scientist's also said people would not tolerate too much of a lockdown and again the government took their advise and delayed lockdown until they thought it to be the right time to last through the oncoming wave.

The report claims that was misjudged - well I don't know if that was true nationally but it certainly wasn't around where I live, nor in Bolton where my brother lives, where most gave up lockdown weeks before it actually ended!

I don't need to spin anything to discredit the hysterical bollocks many on here were screaming at the time.

Read it back for yourself if you like and squirm at all the hatred and bullshit that was being spewed - and mainly because those who spewed it simply hated the Tory's well before we had even heard of the word coronavirus!!!

Christ, your mate Maugham was even taking legal action against Kate Bingham until he realised what an amazing job she did with getting and delivering all the vaccines - and very, very quietly dropped her name from it!!!

More about Tory hatred than acceptance that errors and mistakes would inevitably occur with everything that needed to be done with limited resources to start with and a pandemic raging across the world.

Nothing was done deliberately to make things worse but you'd never know that at the time from the Tory haters on here - and social media generally.

Go on Sluffy, you can do it!!

T.R.O.Y. wrote:I’m distinguishing between this and the independent inquiry next year.

Nobody serious has ever argued the government intentionally caused deaths - that was you spinning to discredit other views.

The argument most on here put forward was that the decisions were wrong and the government incompetent, and that was a contributing factor (note this does not mean it was the only factor) to our huge death toll. Only you argued that, but this report supports it.

Will you admit you were wrong? Will you bollocks 

I don't think the preemptive spin fools anyone.
Yes it was difficult and yes the government was unprepared but equally they ignored the numerous warnings and then prevaricated so it's poor government rather than bad luck - and I've no doubt the independent inquiry will be less inclined to pull their punches given that theoretically they have no vested interest.

boltonbonce wrote:Go on Sluffy, you can do it!!

wanderlust wrote:

T.R.O.Y. wrote:I’m distinguishing between this and the independent inquiry next year.

Nobody serious has ever argued the government intentionally caused deaths - that was you spinning to discredit other views.

The argument most on here put forward was that the decisions were wrong and the government incompetent, and that was a contributing factor (note this does not mean it was the only factor) to our huge death toll. Only you argued that, but this report supports it.

Will you admit you were wrong? Will you bollocks 

I don't think the preemptive spin fools anyone.
Yes it was difficult and yes the government was unprepared but equally they ignored the numerous warnings and then prevaricated so it's poor government rather than bad luck - and I've no doubt the independent inquiry will be less inclined to pull their punches given that theoretically they have no vested interest.

What preventive spin?

You mean the two cross party committees with access to all information and who interviewed all the key people including Boris, Cummings, Hancock, Whitty and Valance and who all unanimously backed the report?

What vested interest have all the non Conservative members on both these committees not to lay out all they've found out???

And what where all these numerous warnings the government ignored - non where mentioned in the report - indeed it states they simply followed SAGE's advice!!!

The UK's failure to do more to stop Covid spreading early in the pandemic was one of the country's worst public health failures, a report by MPs says.

The government approach - backed by its scientists - was to try to manage the situation and in effect achieve herd immunity by infection, it said.

This led to a delay in introducing the first lockdown, costing thousands of lives, the MPs found.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58876089

Don't let the facts stand in the way of your hatred though...

No. I mean your biased interpretation which only references the bits that suit your perspective and omits a whole swathe of other relevant facts - as usual.

wanderlust wrote:No. I mean your biased interpretation which only references the bits that suit your perspective and omits a whole swathe of other relevant facts - as usual.

I'm stating the facts ffs!!!

TWO cross party commissions have examined and interviewed all there is, and submitted a unanimous report stating that the government followed the scientific advise.

The report concludes that that advise was 'flawed' primarily because of 'groupthink' and that SAGE should have included views from international scientists and not exclusively all from UK scientists (bar just one person).

Read the report if you don't believe me - it's all there and has nothing to do with 'my' so called 'biased interpretation' and 'perspective'!!!

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7496/documents/78687/default/

You do make me laugh you loony!!!


Loony

Informal
noun
A mad or silly person.

If you'd had a relative or loved one die due to shambolic handling of the crisis, you would not try to excuse the government or downplay the findings of the MPs' inquiry.

The full inquiry demanded by grieving, bereaved families should not be delayed in the same way that the response to the Covid outbreak was initially delayed. 

Show compassion, accept responsibility and apologise profusely and sincerely. 

There was lots of advance warning from the likes of the Cygnus Report, and clear evidence from what was happening in e.g. China and Italy for our authorities to act promptly to save lives. 

They failed to do so, as all our TV news outlets and daily newspapers confirm (except for the grotesque Express and the Telegraph that employs Johnson).

Posted at 9:42
What did we learn from the MPs' Covid report?

The report included strong criticism of the government's handling of the pandemic in its early stages, but also highlighted successes such as the vaccination programme.

The findings included:

- "Group-think" among scientists and ministers led to failings, including a delay in introducing the first national lockdown
- Pandemic planning had focused on flu rather than coronaviruses, meaning testing and contact tracing capacity was poor
- The government's test-and-trace system was initially "slow, uncertain and chaotic"
- Thousands of vulnerable hospital patients were discharged to care homes without being tested for Covid, allowing the virus to spread among residents and staff.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-58886986

A more detailed look at what went wrong here -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58890472

Sluffy wrote:



I'm stating the facts ffs!!!

TWO cross party commissions have examined and interviewed all there is, and submitted a unanimous report stating that the government followed the scientific advise.

The report concludes that that advise was 'flawed' primarily because of 'groupthink' and that SAGE should have included views from international scientists and not exclusively all from UK scientists (bar just one person).

Read the report if you don't believe me - it's all there and has nothing to do with 'my' so called 'biased interpretation' and 'perspective'!!!

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7496/documents/78687/default/

You do make me laugh you loony!!!


Loony

Informal
noun
A mad or silly person.

Didn't you promise us a break? I'm sure you said you were going to give us some peace and quiet for a couple of months yet within days of the outpouring of sympathy and well-wishing for your undefined "personal issues" you're back spouting shite again.

wanderlust wrote:Didn't you promise us a break? I'm sure you said you were going to give us some peace and quiet for a couple of months yet within days of the outpouring of sympathy and well-wishing for your undefined "personal issues" you're back spouting shite again.

I promised nothing actually.

What I said was that it would seem reasonable of me to laugh at you away from the site.

As you took it upon yourself to post your personal view of me...

...biased interpretations

...reference the bits that only suit my perspective...

...omits a whole swathe of other relevant facts...

and all of them as you put -

...as usual...

then I find it reasonable to post once again to laugh at you.

And my reasons being away from the site are personal to me and my family and will remain so.

As for your particular 'well wishes' you hoped that I may be going into hospital for a sense of humour transplant...!

I treated that with the insensitivity, insincerity and contempt it deserved.

You really are not a class act.

The good news for you however is that I've received the confirmation I was waiting for and will be absent from tomorrow for around the next six week or so.

I will leave it for others to laugh at you instead!

I think after spending the last 18 months attacking anyone who suggested the government held fault in this, you could at least show some contrition now to say you got it wrong. Effectively this report backs everything that was said by most on here at the time. 

Whatever your break is for, hope it goes well and you’re back soon.

Utah beckons.

Can't put Sluffy on "Ignore" so I just decline to read what he writes. Unfortunately, his words get quoted in responses from bright, worthwhile posters, so I become aware of his blind, aggressive attacks and faulty interpretations of the news and of others' views.

 He clearly loves going to enormous trouble to find fault. By his own admission, it fills his time and gives him a laugh at others' expense. Each to his own. Not for me, though.

 I wouldn't wish him any harm, however. We all share the Wanderers' helter-skelter rides together.
 Sluffy evidently has issues to deal with, as most people have in these times. I have a schizophrenic nephew and my grandson broke his ankle skateboarding yesterday!

Forgive me my ongoing commitment to pointing out the government's faults, even though I know it has no influence here on such a site as this. It upsets me so much to see the country and its citizens being brought down unnecessarily. My heart bleeds for those who died in care homes....and their relatives.

 More cheerily, am just off to play golf now on this glorious day here. Have a great day, everyone....

I read today that the UK has more new covid infections than the entire EU.

Britain wins again!

Javid to give a press conference later today as Covid cases continue to rise.
Don't be surprised if new restrictions are mentioned.

The seven day infections average as of yesterday for the UK is 45,107


Meanwhile in Europe over the same week:

Germany          8395
France            3927
Spain                562
Portugal             550
Greece             1748
Austria             1665
Italy                2427
Netherlands      3389
Sweden             813
Slovenia             846
Slovakia           1596
Belgium            3203
Poland             2806
Norway              242
North Macedonia 205
Luxembourg         66
Ireland             1761
Denmark              28


...a combined total nowhere near ours so regardless of what people say or what the report finds, there is obviously something very, very wrong.