On @MattHancock bad half-hour.... 1/ The UK govt is set to extend the lockdown by 3x weeks. Good, because it’s working. But what is the strategy beyond lockdown? That’s a legitimate question and it can be answered without confusing today's public health message…
2/ The reason it’s legitimate to ask for, and to scrutinise, the next phase of the public health strategy is that the people in charge have already screwed it up once, and seem adrift now… (eg PPE, missing targets on testing then denying they ever set them)...
3/ The plan suggested by @profhelenward is pretty clear: find, isolate and trace cases using apps and local health teams; track the epidemic; provide PPE, testing etc in hospitals and care homes...
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
4/ The only plan the govt ever published was on 3 March and it was the wrong plan, and key parts of it were not followed. Now the Tory right, mirroring Trump, are calling for an indiscriminate retreat from lockdown on economic grounds. That’s why we need a clear strategy...
5/ We need an end to the 5pm charade of insider journalists asking useless questions and ministers palming us off with platitudes... when Parliament comes back, the daily briefing and questioning should be done in the (virtual) house only...
6/ The ineffectiveness of the British state is a realtime issue: the ventilator fiasco, the PPE fiasco, the care home shambles are all traceable to the marketisation of behaviour and relationships, the absence of interrogation, command and control newstatesman.com/politics/econo…
