We now know that because COVID spreads through the air rather than by fomites, good ventilation is crucial indoors in the winter. We knew this a year ago. Why don't we now have units for hospitals, schools and hospitals that circulate air and pass it through sterilising UV light?
Why have we not done more to investigate ongoing indoor disinfection with Far UV light? And why don't we have therapeutic treatments to roll out? We developed vaccines in the blink of an eye. Then stopped. If the government thinks this is important enough to abrogate freedoms...
...and shutter the economy, why has it not built on the success of the vaccine programme to develop ways to mitigate the spread and reduce the CFR? We *knew* COVID would be endemic. We *knew* there would be new variants. We've had plenty of time to prepare. It's gross malfeasance
This is the attitude about the British state about almost everything. There's an inertia and a can't-do malaise that pervades the whole infrastructure, from number ten, through the cabinet office, down through the civil service, right to individual hospital wards and schoolrooms.
The vaccine taskforce was literally world leading. Better than the much called Chinese techno-autarchy; better than the much better resourced US Operation Warp Speed; and certainly better than the predictably leaden, semi-corrupt EU effort. So why, knowing that COVID would...
...be endemic, and knowing it spread aerially, did we not set up two more task forces of the same structure in December 2020 (i.e. once the vaccine had crossed the final hurdle), one with the goal of developing a therapeutic cheap enough to mass-distribute that would bring the...
...the CFR of any COVID case down to seasonal flu levels (that is, reduce death by 80-90%), and a second tasked with the goal to developing internal ventilation and sterilization systems to bring indoor spread down to outdoor spread levels? Given the cost of even minor...
...economic restrictions, and the cost of lost NHS capacity and school time, the money spent would have been superb value for money, even before we get to the profit from selling on the successes. By now, we could and should be laughing in the face is Omicron.
Now, perhaps you are reading this thinking that it's ridiculous, and Omicron, or even Delta, *is* seasonal flu. But my point is that *the government* doesn't think like that. *They* think it's important enough to shut down the economy and abrogate freedoms. And yet they're...
...scrambling around as though they're shocked that when the weather gets cold a respiratory disease spreads faster; and acting as though they're shocked that a new variant has emerged, even though research has shown there was plenty of genetic room for the virus to improve.
It's pathetic. It's further proof that the UK is the worst administered state in the developed world. It feels like late-communist Eastern Europe, where the bureaucracy pretended to work, and the people pretended to believe they were efficient. We cannot continue like this.
Adding to this, does anybody seriously think that the state bureaucracy has learned and internalised the lessons from the COVID debacle, and taken steps to improve disaster response? If COVID was only a little less virulent or a little less transmissible, it would be seasonal...
...flu. Chances are that we won't be so lucky with the next emergent disease. Have they looked to address the failures from this time, and applief the new science we have (vaccine production, genomic sequencing and disease monitoring) to a new plan designed for the social...
...media world? What about the chances of a Carrington Event? Have they a plan to start right now hardening key infrastructure and the national grid against such a prospect now? What about nuclear war, given the US and China are increasingly on the edge of war in the Western...
...Pacific? Given how they *knew* there would be logistics dislocations and supply demand mismatches in the COVID recovery period, and yet we will caught with their pants down by the gas shortage and price spike, I'll bet all the money in all the pockets of everybody reading...
...this thread that the answer to that question is no. And therefore, when the next global disaster hits, the government of the time and civil service will be running around Whitehall and Downing Street like startled hens while in public claiming that nobody could've foreseen...
...such an event, and appealing to the Blitz Spirit.
The pandemic was entirely foreseeable, and we were unprepared. But even after the pandemic, and knowing of events coming our way -- winter increase in transmissibility, new variants, logistics issues -- we haven't planned.
The pandemic was entirely foreseeable, and we were unprepared. But even after the pandemic, and knowing of events coming our way -- winter increase in transmissibility, new variants, logistics issues -- we haven't planned.
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