It's nearly six weeks since the first COBRA meeting and still there's a crisis of PPE and testing. Why? Let me tell you a story from Hurricane Katrina... 1/ From Monday-Thursday the evacuation was demand led: how many refugees can Florida take? Guess what...
2/ With a demand led evacuation nobody got evacuated. Then the @USMC arrived and by the weekend they started choppering people straight from motorway intersections to other states who *had not asked for any refugees*....
3/ The Superdrome was cleared, the motorway intersections, where I saw elderly and frail people with drips sitting in the bright sun, dehydrating, were cleared...
4/ It happened because someone in the Marine Corps just said ****-it we are going to take people off these sites whether the receiving states want them or not...
5/ It took leadership - Bush was as useless as @MattHancock has been - but someone made, effectively, and economic command decision. That's why the UK military were able to lead the building of the Nightingale hospitals efficiently...
6/ The lesson is we need a *temporary* command economy in the medical supplies sector; the's no need to make this ideological - just read Arthur Herman's Freedom's Forge - a right wing account of FDR's war mobilisation....
7/ There should be something like a "Ministry of Medical Supplies" - like Beaverbrook's air production ministry in 1940... Beaverbrook suspended the boards of every aircraft company, set them quotas, replaced crap managers with good ones...
8/ We are going to need a LOT of PPE forever; we are going to need excess ventilator capacity and millions of testing kits. The private sector can rise to this but the state has to direct investment, production and answer for outcomes.
