- Official policy was to discharge COVID-19 patients back into care homes.
- Not all were tested first.
- Not all those who showed signs of covid in care were tested because of limits on tests.
- Testing of all discharged patients only came in on/after 15 April 2020.
1/n
From 2 April 2020 PDF about hospital discharge & admission of care home residents:
"Some of these patients may have COVID-19, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic."
"Negative tests are not required prior to transfers / admissions into the care home."
At the time (2 April 2020) there were very strict limits on the number of tests offered to any given care home that suspected a COVID-19 outbreak.
3/n
New policy on 15 Apr 2020
Hancock: "TODAY we can announce that EVERYBODY going from hospital into social care WILL be tested, will be isolated while the result of that test comes through, because that helps to protect people who are in social care."
Matt Hancock (15 Apr 2020): "TODAY we can announce that EVERYBODY going from hospital into social care WILL be tested, will be isolated while the result of that test comes through, because that helps to protect people who are in social care."
"UK expected to offer post-Brexit trade deal to Australia
Gradual tariff-free deal will be victory for free-trade Brexiters but will likely alarm UK farmers"
First rule of trade negotiation: anyone will bite your hand off if you surrender enough ground. theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
In other words, it's very easy to "negotiate" a deal if it's a capitulation to what the other side wants.
Here, it's Australian farmers having the UK market thrown wide open to them.
It's ironic, because the UK economy is more than twice the size of Australia's.
Yet they know they've got us by the short and curlies because Brexiters are desperate to be able to point to a deal, any deal, and will sign over anytime to get one...
"One hundred and ten direct flights from India have landed in the UK in the three and a half weeks since the country was placed on the travel Red List"
Not 110 passengers. 110 flights. 8,500 passengers, with an estimated 600 infected. How mad is that?! lbc.co.uk/news/revealed-…
And that's not even counting the flights that poured in during the crazy scramble between Boris Johnson announcing that India was going on the red list, and its inclusion on the list...
And then...
"'I could have been on the plane with people from green list countries': 'Red list' passengers are forced to sit with arrivals from safer nations before hitting 'super-spreader' bottleneck caused by closed terminals at Gatwick and Heathrow" dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9…
The biggest disconnect between the politically engaged and those who don't care about politics is the former think the latter have evaluated all the facts (e.g. absorbed all the Tories' wrongdoing) before deciding to vote the way they did.
But they're not remotely that informed.
Disinterest is not malice.
Disinterest is not stupidity.
Disinterest is not lack of education.
Disinterest is not a weak moral code.
Disinterest is disinterest, nothing more. They're just not enthused enough about politics to drill down into the detail.
If you treat the disinterested as exhibiting malice, or imply they're stupid, uneducated, or lacking morals, they'll push back (and rightly so). "How very dare you!"
The only way to win them over is to break through that apathy. Easier said than done, of course.