Cronus wrote:
South Korea manufacture the tests. They have 5 factories dedicated to it, just as some UK companies are switching to the same task. Yes of course in your brain there should have been millions of tests immediately available despite every nation on the planet frantically trying to buy them, but you appear to be living in cloud cuckoo land.
So you think all airports should have been closed immediately? Yes, you could seal off the country, but how long for? There will be no vaccine until perhaps 2021. And it was probably already here given the tens of thousands Chinese students who travelled home and back over the Christmas break, similarly all those who travelled to Northern Italy early in the year. With a high R0 it was already spreading.
We could have locked down immediately - but again, how long for? A year? To what purpose? No-one leaves their house for what, 6 months? All the while the virus is spreading globally and is not going to go away. Then we open up again with no vaccine? Have a think about that.
Ask yourself - how long can South Korea and others stay locked down? What happens when their population - that has not been widely exposed - starts moving again? Another outbreak, back to square one.
No, you cannot escape this. The only strategy is a managed spread, allowing a significant percentage of the population to be infected in order to build widespread immunity, which is what we are doing. "Flattening the curve". It's not nice and people will die but if it comes back in cannot spread anywhere near as quickly or widely and the NHS will not be as overwhelmed as it is about to be. I'm not actually sure why I'm bothering to try and explain this again, you're either incapable of understanding or are too biased.
And I'm sure you think we should have 20,000 ventilators and associated equipment, as well as masks, gloves, etc just sitting in storage? Bearing in mind many of these items degrade over time and become useless. The fact is, every nation is ill-equipped for this and yes, doctors all over the world will have to prioritise those who will die anyway, over those with more chance of survival. Those are the stark realities of a novel pandemic, not the comfortable entitled world we've all been living in so far.
BTW it's already reached my family. My sister's husband was horrifically ill for over a week. Fortunately her family are symptom-free so far. My family and I are in day 12 of isolation for various reasons. I actually suspect (and hope) we've had it although very mild, but it's a chance I cannot take. But if we haven't had it and in about 6-8 weeks things start moving again and we all go back to work, we'll be much safer with a largely immune population around us. Do you get it yet?
That's pretty well put.
The only part of the Governments strategy that seemed wrong at the time and more so with the benefit of hindsight, was allowing people to travel freely overseas to anywhere they chose.
Absolutely crazy in the circumstances.
Maybe this was in the vain hope of protecting the Airlines but, if so, it clearly didn't work.
Politically speaking, the only other area where we have been "caught short", is with the lack of nurses etc within the NHS, which is largely down to government policy over the last 10 years.
Also, the audacity for Johnson to extol the virtues of the NHS and the staff working within it, after his government froze the wages and cut the bursaries (which is why there is such a shortage), is borderline sick - the two faced b'stard.
