Talking about “the best of times” in Covid..the speed with which scientists have been able to move on vaccines, treatment trials and tests when backed well.
The worst of times : “The virus creates a disease that is godawful”
The beat of times. It truly is an extraordinary thing to produce likely effective vaccines at such speed, let alone the huge numbers in the pipeline...AND get them under production.
Human beings at their best working efficiently, carefully and hugely productively
“Best” dammit.
“The worst of times”
Everybody who has had the virus is likely to have a pre-existing condition. Awful in insurance based healthcare, but also for such things as life cover and holiday insurance.
AND Not just the dead.
There are people who will never return to who they were
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Boris Johnson appoints people who he knows has form for bullying and overbearing conduct. Indeed his own for for casual insults & incompetence is well documented.
We, the taxpayer, end up paying the compensation for the consequences of their conduct.
Whilst the Government claims “The companies and their leaders involved with testing had "hundreds of years" of experience in the field.” I can tell you that anyone who really had hands on experience of systematic screening would never design a service in this way.
Which if these companies have had “hundreds of years” of experience in running national public health screening programmes including integrated software systems, datasets, comms, sophisticated failsafe, multi-language comms as well as logistics?
Sir Muir Grey, who set up the National Screening Committee to sort out the very serious errors arising from the original cervical screening programme has plenty to say about Ooerafiin Moonshot.
He calls for “an immediate pause” to this mass Covid screening of the symptomless, until it’s scrutinised by the National Screening Committee.”
Yes. Staggeringly. The National Screening Committee with decades of experience have not been consulted at all.
A negative test may wrongly feel like a route to freedom, but that’s “premature”, he warns, without improving “the woeful performance of the ‘find, test, trace and isolate’ system”.
False negative rate is between 1 in 2 and 1 in 4 when used in the community. Ie positives missed
Just watched this on Streaming. Will watch again tomorrow at 9pm BBC. Very shocking. We have one human Coronavirus expert in the U.K. : Dr David Matthews, Bristol Uni.
He was not invited on any of the Gov advisory committees.
When he heard 23/24 Jan that Chinese data suggest the RR was 2.5-3.5 he thought “Oh Shit. This is going to go and go and go... run around the world”
Why was he not invited on the Gov committees early on?
Of many other striking points is the absence of other expertise.
Despite identifying the elderly and care homes as a high risk by 18/3/20 from incoming Chinese data the people on the committees seemed to have no understanding of how Care Homes worked, were staffed, the use of agency staff and the fact that careers have lives in the community
Inquiry 'found Priti Patel broke behaviour rules' - BBC News
It “concluded that the "home secretary had not met the requirements of the ministerial code to treat civil servants with consideration and respect". bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
“They added that the investigation had found evidence of bullying, even if it had not been intentional.
Another source who saw the report called it "unambiguous in stating that Priti Patel broke the ministerial code and that the prime minister buried it".
🦠🦠 22,913 new cases. Processing was UP yesterday after a spell of being down. I was unable to book a home test today. For many that is the only practical test.
⚰️⚰️⚰️. 501 (28 day cut off) deaths
🏥 1641 admissions on Sunday so I was pretty accurate in my prediction
🛌 IN HOSPITAL. 16,409 on Tuesday
That is just over 3k off the peak in April. The rate of increase is slowing but still edging up with reductions in some areas (eg NW) being offset by quite rapid increases in hitherto low ingress regions such as the SW.
53,775 deaths (28 day cut off) total
BUT
63,873 people with COVID certified deaths.(ONS up to 6th November). There have been AT LEAST 2374 deaths since then by lagging date of death data.