🔴Britain did not lock down sooner because ministers failed to challenge poor scientific advice, the first major report into the Government’s pandemic response has concluded.
➡️The report says the error led to "one of most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced" and resulted in a higher death toll.
It highlights a series of errors which are likely to have cost thousands of lives
✖️A lack of early testing left Britain "facing the biggest health crisis in 100 years with virtually no data to analyse."
"The UK was reduced to understanding the spread by waiting for people to be so sick that they needed to be admitted to hospital"
Unaware of the true scale of spread, ministers and scientists adopted a "fatalistic" approach of trying to manage Covid-19, rather than stop it.
⚠️This "amounted in practice" to accepting herd immunity through infection, the report concluded
The lack of testing was particularly damaging for care homes.
Between March 2020 and April 30 2021, more than 41,000 care home residents died of Covid, nearly a quarter of all deaths
✈️Meanwhile, a failure to shut borders allowed an influx of new cases.
A study by Imperial College found that 33% of cases during the first wave were introduced from Spain and 29% were introduced from France telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/1…
Britain’s pandemic planning was also too heavily based on influenza, and had failed to incorporate lessons from outbreaks of Sars, Mers and Ebola.
➡️The 2019 National Risk Register concluded an emerging virus would lead to a maximum of 100 deaths
However, the most successful part of Britain’s Covid-19 response was the vaccine programme💉
It is estimated to have saved 112,000 lives in England alone and protected nearly 50 million people in the UK
✍️"The success of the vaccine programme has redeemed many of the persistent failings of other parts of the national response such as the test and trace system."
🔴 In his new book Coming Up For Air, Tom Daley reveals his private battle with an eating disorder in the build-up to London 2012.
Today, Daley is willing to discuss his ordeal because he knows many others are still suffering in silence telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…
📊The charity Beat Eating Disorders claims that a quarter of people with eating disorders are male, but men’s traditional reticence about health issues means the true number may be higher
🗣️“I guess there is that stigma around eating disorders that problems with eating only affect women, and it’s just not the case,” insists Daley
At 90, Mr Shatner will pass Wally Funk as the oldest person to ever travel to the great beyond.
🔴Ms Funk, a former NASA engineer, was 82 years old when she joined Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's first ever flight into space back in July
🔥Space tourism race heats up
For Blue Origin this mission, the second in less than three months, represents another step forward as it tries to establish itself as space tourism's leading player.
💇A survey has announced that top of the list of "must haves" for today's retirees include a Netflix subscription and a decent hairdresser.
And guess what? That doesn’t sound unreasonable...
➡️The Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University held 13 discussion groups with over-55s and emerged with three different levels of income which would give retirees an idea of their expectations based on income per couple