You are wrong silver, they had a better handle on all things NHS, and with advisers, wouldn"t have made half the cock ups these CONS have, i don"t mind Boris as a person, but his boys have made mistake after mistake, starting with him not going to first 5 meetings on the virus, the rest followed that i mentioned in earlier post, you might not like Jeremy, but he wouldn"t have dropped the ball like this lot have!

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You must be joking. By now they would be close (but not that close) to forming a committee on how to form a committee that has sufficient diverse representation to form a committee that is effectively representative to ensure that every diverse consideration is properly considered and factored into an effective action plan that takes account on a paramount interest basis of the primary needs of wimmin ethnic minorities and the particular requirements of the LGBTQ community...

I was thinking this morning (a dangerous pastime, I know) how everyone is berating everyone else for their unpreparedness for this pandemic, but in reality no one actually knows how to prepare for something like this: there is no model, and the last true pandemic was over 100 years ago, in an age when we didn't even have penicillin and a ventilator needed a whole room to itself.

I know there was SARS and Asian Bird Flu and a couple of others, but they never really amounted to anything (or not in the UK anyway), so although there was certainly models of the hows, whens and whys - you can only plan to a certain level, after which you can only go with the actuality of events as they unfold and spread.Which is exactly what has happened here with distribution of PPE, shortages of supplies, availability of beds and equipment.

To me, they got the greater part of the planning right and are doing pretty well with coping with the 'unplannable' as things move along.

Gets tin hat and retires.......

In 2008 we committed 0.7% of GDP to PHE pursuing global health assistance and strategies for precisely this reason. We played a big role in managing the Ebola outbreak in 2014.

As with most events when it comes to humans - we quickly forget what happened in the near past and focus on the now. Do we really need that? We don’t need to fund that. I don’t remember that. It wasn’t that bad was it?

It’s not a political issue. It’s a human trait. It’s how we’re wired - history will always repeat itself until we have a system that can predict for us.

Cycle forward 12 years and adequate funding to prepare for this kind of scenario got binned a long time ago. We were simulating for pandemic response in 2012 (I think we know why in that specific scenario) And now here we are.

We’ve not done badly but let’s not kid ourselves and think we’ve done ‘well’.

To say no one knows how they’d prepare for it on the face of it is true - But also insanely obvious

What you’re not thinking about or even aware of is what was being done to help reduce the unknowns in this exact situation was killed off some time ago - and this is the result. We had a strategy and we got complacent, had to cut budgets (allegedly) and went for the thing they felt had the least chance of reoccurrence based on memory.

Foot and mouth, BSE. Happened ages ago innit

SARS, Ebola - not our problem. We’re an island, we’ll be fine

Classic normalcy bias. Take the first easy answer and move on. The majority of humanity is a joke.