????????????Originally Posted by Bam
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Obviously, sorry.
I don't doubt the pre-crisis governments were lining up to fry nurses' livers in garlic butter if it saved a few quid, but in terms of crisis governance now I haven't seen any evidence they've done much wrong in the PPE department. I am happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.
It's pretty staggering that far-fetched stockpiling decisions made three years ago should have been subject to any sort of 'economic assessment'. There should be manslaughter charges when this is all over.
The delivery of kit has been pretty patchy. My place has plenty, I know others are really struggling.
Yeah I'm sure trying to panic-produce it now is cheaper (something like this was absolutely inevitable to happen at some point so the argument you might be stockpiling stuff that was never used is a non-starter).
I mean my tongue is firmly up the government's arse where this is concerned to date, and would obviously be singing from the same hymn sheet - the two hymns being 'Unprecedented' and 'Unforeseeable' - but I just rewatched Contagion the other day and you gotta say, every government who was caught surprised by this needs their Cineworld Unlimited membership revoked sharpish. South Korea and co didn't just magic up the technology and resources to defeat this, they prepared like everyone else should have been doing.
Also, day 33(?) Thought of the Day: If this shit happened in winter, the mental strain would have been even worse. Even though the pain of walking past some nice beer gardens is pretty traumatic in this weather, nature and exercise are literally the only things keeping me going.
Don't like being called out on what? If you can be arsed to engage with me rather than sniping like a weasel we can have a discussion.
The current highlight of my day is sunsets behind the park that my flat overlooks, though they've been slightly ruined now as the leaves are back on the trees so the silhouettes aren't quite as crisp against the orange light.
It's come to this.
It probably is cheaper than throwing x hundred million quids worth of clobber away every year when the inevitable doesn't happen. Especially in that particular planning case, where they seem to have based their assumptions on more common, less persistent versions of the stuff (something which the THEY HAD AN EXERCISE cranks seem to miss).
It's not cheaper when your country slides into massive economic depression when it does come
Yes, shutting society down is all about conserving glove supplies. Good point.
I said to my friend the other day, imagine this struck mid-November. Suicide rates would be sky-high.
I reckon it would go the other way as we'd have the summer as glorious beacon of promise to look forward to. As it is now we'll be released back into the abject misery that is late October.
Weather's been absolutely blinding since lockdown though, having rained solidly for about 5 months in the run up to it. It's been a godsend.
I'm with Jim. I'd much rather good weather when we got out.
You’re getting out in a July at worst. Chill out.
You'll be out for summer.
By which point it will be apparent that this 2 week spell of good weather was actually the summer, unfortunately.
I didn't say we weren't.
Couple of tasty daily counts in a row from our Chinese brothers. I don't know if it's just a result of shipping in a load of Covidites or whether it could be the start of a second wave but it's enough to give me a semi.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-52261055
People really are thick.
Surely it's the job of the government to chuck a load of equipment at the NHS*. Assessing where it needs to be sent and arranging for it to be done has to be the job of someone internal, surely?
*even that's pushing it. Order your own shit.
Last edited by Spikey M; 13-04-2020 at 06:07 AM.
Things like the visors (which are the thing they refused to stockpile) wouldn't need throwing away every year.
The only reason it might be cheaper is because people have started 3D printing stuff and donating it. Another Cummings masterclass I presume. You and Jimmy really are boring fangirls when it comes to the Tory's.
In a world of finite resources doesn't stockpiling something on the never never mean you don't have something else (like a £30 loaf of gluten free bread) you might need at any given time? As an ill-informed and relatively uninterested onlooker NHS procurement seems to be complete clusterfuck [by which I mean all over the shop, ie some good some bad rather than it being universally rubbish], but then that's probably true of all governments and/or large organisations. What would the costs associated with acquiring and storing sufficient levels of things like masks/visors be (which I assume have little use in more normal times) at the levels now needed? How many years can you reasonably keep that up before a penny pinching government, or activist group who wants a particular drug funded starts asking awkward questions? I doubt you could actually maintain the levels of necessary contingency planning for more than a couple of years, so you'd need to time it right to coincide with need, which is impossible.
On the flipside, maybe it'd be a good idea to have contingency plans for rapid acquisition of such things that could be put in place, and perhaps should have been earlier in the year (I assume such plans must exist to some extent).
Last edited by niko_cee; 13-04-2020 at 08:59 AM.
What? Shutting down is to protect hospital workers from getting overwhelmed, so when staff numbers are down 30% on what they would be if they had ample supplies because everyone’s sick...
I guess you don't need the PPE once all of the staff have had it, whilst they are off sick, or are dead.
It's not Tory fanboyism, I don't really care who the government is and I'm sure they've made mistakes. For my part at least it's a reflex against politicised blame culture. Most bad things aren't the government's fault, regardless of which party is in.
The government asking for advice from experts on what to do then ignoring said advice and now there's the exact problem which was foreseen as a direct result of the government ignoring that advice is not the government's fault.
Ok.
Matt Hancock doubling down on saying staff are "over-using" PPE is a disgrace. Saying people should only use stuff in line with guidelines; guidelines which conveniently changed as soon as it became clear there was a lack of PPE (we were initially told full PPE for all covid positive patients, which suddenly changed to full PPE only for aerosol generating procedures even with confirmed cases when respirator masks were in short supply).
I wonder if he'd be happy for his own family to be up close to a confirmed case with only a surgical mask, gloves and an apron barely more substantial than cling film.
Coming from the man who blames Tony Blair for everything going to shit.
If they had full staffing levels they could be processing people at such a rate that we could all just be back at work and in the pub? Presumably not, given that 1) the health service is still nowhere near being swamped; and 2) they seem to be working around the equipment issue.
"Working around" = wearing less than ideal amounts or quality of PPE and accepting the risks.
Almost every country shat the bed on this but that's no excuse. There must've been a daft misconception amongst the experts that thought this would burn itself out in China.
Last edited by Shindig; 13-04-2020 at 10:46 AM.
Yeah, working around. Accepting something at risk. The same reason we don't have eight ballistic missile submarines, or why my workplace hasn't bothered to upgrade past Windows 7
They weren't 'ignoring' the advice. Short of having no budget ceiling for this stuff something was always going to be lacking, and it was decided that masks were less cost effective than other things ('evidence around the incremental benefits of wearing eye protection'). If your criticism is that literally every official request was never met then fair enough; but you will be arguing for doubling every government budget to meet similar proposals across the board (twelve destroyers please). Unless you want to make the case that this stuff should always have been prioritised, but building on what niko put, I don't recall any great movement to increase spending on pandemic supplies until this month over every other area of health provision (previous stockpile news items have tended to focus on flu vaccines, and when the government bought a load of those for the swine flu pandemic that never arrived the Guardian hammered them for believing fear-mongering pharmaceutical companies). If you had been asked three months ago whether to fund some twat's treatment of buy another shelf of masks, what would you have said?
The answer to your final question is always 'both'.
It's why doctors never take aim at the time-wasting twats who clog up the system in normal times.
Ah, you might think it's a waste of time, but Mrs Miggins might not have talked to anyone for a week, so . . .
We don't want to tell people not to go to their GP etc.
That's evidently not remotely the same and you know it isn't. This is more akin to asking soldiers to go into an active combat zone with a BB gun and a saucepan on their head because we didn't buy any guns or helmets.
This is not a case of not meeting every proposal. This scenario was literally inevitable. Stockpiling some cheap, long-lasting plastic visors to be prepared is not the same as spending a few hundred billion on battleships.
It's not like you have to stockpile an endless supply either, just enough that you don't run out in the time it takes to sort out production and supply. Note I'm not complaining about us not stockpiling thousands of ventilators, because that's clearly not feasible.
Last edited by randomlegend; 13-04-2020 at 11:33 AM.
Go on RL. Proud of you, sister x
Lewis and Jimmy are chatting bollocks and they know it.
I was praising Johnson and Sunak yesterday for their reaction, a few missteps aside, which can be just about forgiven in difficult and highly pressurised circumstances. As far as prevention goes, it's not good enough and those decisions have resulted in an unquantifiable amount of people dying. The reason Tories are on the defensive and talking about battleships (lol), is because if the NARRATIVE were to turn and they were deemed responsible, that'd be it at the next general election and probably for at least a decade. See: Trump, Donald.
I'd bet GP appointments like that save money by avoiding unnecessary hospital attendances (which in vulnerable elderly people turn into month long stays with pneumonias they got because they came to hospital and then into residential care because they dropped their baseline dramatically from the period of illness and can no longer cope at home etc. Etc. Etc.)
It’s amazing how people hate blame culture the moment people they like are to blame.
https://www.theguardian.com/artandde...onavirus#img-1
Some interesting points touched on. The possible death of the open-office, the scourge of tourism and density and the likely fact nothing will come ofany of it.
My point is very specifically about the crisis governance being fine and not the issue. I don't pretend to know about long term preparedness for pandemics.
People are too lazy to read with any precision before making glib comments.
TBF you are making a different point, but it's still a case of highlighting what they're doing relatively well (crisis management) and ignoring what they've done badly (being prepared). It's not pretending, there's an article on this page of the thread and it's consistent with how austerity driven Tory governments conduct policy. If evidence comes out that they were acting with this possibility in mind before the outbreak then I'm happy to reconsider.
Having said that, there were different people at the wheel and you can't hold Johnson himself responsible, so he gets a fresh slate, and he's doing quite well (nearly dying probably helps). I don't like dipping into party politics myself at the minute, as don't agree with governments being held accountable for international problems, and neither does Gordon Brown, but it's difficult to ignore the PPE situation. We should've been in a better position. Prevention over reaction and all that.
It is the same, although a better comparison would be like asking soldiers to get blown to pieces in Land Rover Defenders all over Iraq for however many years because they needed the money to double health spending. It is all worked out on bullshit assumptions and dubious costings, whether it's nuclear deterrence or bin collections, and someone somewhere has decided that masks weren't worth springing for because it would have 'increase[d] the cost of the PPE component of the pandemic stockpile four-to six-fold, with a very low likelihood of cost-benefit based on standard thresholds'. And it won't have been some politician making that decision unilaterally. It would have been batted back to the experts and they would have given up masks to keep the rest of the stuff that they assumed would have been better value because even your life as a doctor has a number on it, and it probably doesn't exceed the cost of a million masks.
It says in that article that Jeremy Hunt was securing general spending increases in the background of these assessments, so it doesn't appear to have been for a general lack of money. They just wanted to spend it elsewhere, and who, for all that this was literally inevitable, was advocating stockpiling at the time?
The financial crisis is probably an apt comparison in some ways. Brown's Labour government did a decent job of fending off the worst of an international crisis that they did not create, but they were poorly prepared in the long run after years of assuming it would never happen.
You're on the thicker side, aren't you? In what world would having a good number fewer active doctors/nurses not prolong and worsen this crisis? Jesus Christ
That's what we want to see, less word count more insults.
Oi, Giggles, your dad shaves his legs, you cunt.
I know, right? There's nothing worse than reading these long ass fuckin diatribes looking for gold and leaving empty handed.
Still not going to forgive Brown for selling off our entire gold reserves just to save Goldman Sachs from collapsing.
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