I am not apologising for anything! I wasn't responsible for the decisions. Nor I am competent to do so. I am just explaining what I regard as fact. Whilst we know the cost of what we did, we don't know the cost of what we didn't do. That is surely obvious. Therefore to assume it would be less doesn't make sense. Nor does trying to place a value on any additional, or lower, lives lost.

My argument is about what we should be doing now, not what we could have done then, which is just a theoretical exercise anyway.

In my view, we are now doing the right thing by taking a calm, studied look at everything that happened and learning the lessons.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

Tbh wissie im on your side here. Some alternative analogies could be if we didn’t do Dday how many more deaths would there have been. Why didn’t we do it earlier is an alternative analogy. How many wouldn’t have died.
When covid hit the whole world was basically in shock. No one knew how dangerous it was or how long it would last. There wasn’t a cure in sight and as it appeared through science; being apart was the only proven way of preventing it spreading. 2 meters was an accepted minimum distance but sadly farther was proved to be more effective. This included not actually being around each other; which has , was and is still traumatising people. I’m pretty sure that hmg took the steps they took on what at the time was scientific advice. Suddenly though within a year a potential help was found in the vaccine. This I believe was and continues to be in some way our only way out of our distancing and more. The money spent is a talking point alongside where it was spent but hindsight is fantastic and I know that money and finance is cyclical in both our personal lives and the bigger world. If covid was left to spread and many millions of us were dead or very sick still I’m sure the question of why we didn’t do what we did to save life would be the present one. Tbh I do sit and think about how f***ed up the whole world was back then and it does freak me out. The only and I mean the only consolation in a maybe sick kind of way is that in years to come I can say I was there and I truly pray that our new generations don’t have to be there. Many people Died from covid, a lack of other care for illness and accident and of course many suicides including a fan of palace I knew.
The arguments do need to wane as it’s happened and s*** does !!!!

I wish

Red and Blue Army!

Hindsight!!!

I'm going to bite my lip.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

What I will admit is I’m not overly learned like many on here but if you read my reply to Stirling we had the lesson and didn’t learn from it. My agreement is purely in the fact that it was an unknown at the time and doing nothing wasn’t an option. We could have done it differently and again an unknown outcome. I don’t look at any videos on anti this or pro that like yourself and others have been having tennis with. Contracts here and parties there. I don’t really care that’s way above my head to argue about. I don’t honestly know how bad long covid is but it is becoming obvious it is a thing. What I do know is that this bug has screwed up a lot of people and and the whole world had absolutely no idea the best way to deal with it. We are proven to be stupid lumps of meat on a tiny blue dot in the universe who has and always will be at the mercy of nature. I do think it was a made bug but within that were natural viruses. You cannot make them, you can only join them up to create a bad one. I have had 3 hits of vaccine and are not having anymore; not because I have no faith but by dint of that and having mild covid my protection should be now be natural. All in all it was a s*** show that I never want to go through again!

I read it.

The exercise we ran was called Cygnus and took place in 2016. Jeremy Hunt was Health Secretary at the time and was speaking to the Enquiry about it yesterday. He was pretty scathing that it was a failure of "group think" in that it concentrated on a flu like pandemic and not on a Covid type. We did not pay nearly enough attention to the experience of Korea during the Mers epidemic and the lessons they learned. Which were to take more aggressive action earlier to contain the spread of infection. We thought we knew better, along with all Western nations, and we didn't and as a result we were unprepared and too slow to introduce measures, including isolations and lockdowns.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.