COVID-19 — Coronavirus

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Sorry to bang on about this, but I am just really, really puzzled as to WTF has gone on here in the UK.

One month ago or more, we could see this coming. We had our original plan A which was to allow it to swiftly move through the population with a fucking humungous peak and widespread carnage. Quickly replaced by the plan B which everyone else in the world is following, of trying to suppress the virus as much as possible in order to save lives. Thank God!

But my point is that both plans anticipated a fucking great big peak. Either the first humungous one, or the one we are facing now. We saw how China had to build hospitals in 1 week to try to provide capacity. And we saw that 2 months ago.

Why are we only hearing over the last day or so about plans for makeshift hospital facilities at Excel London and elsewhere? Why did we not ask Dyson and others to get ventilators made and fucking sharpish, back in February? How come we didn't say to the supermarkets "In March, you are going to need 10x your online delivery capacity, so get ready". The supermarkets are all fucked, because they had zero notice of all of this. All of this smacks to me of too little, too late and a complete lack of foresight, or at the very least of pro-active, preparatory actions.

We've all banged on about the utter insanity of not shutting airports, allowing uncontrolled numbers into the UK without checks, of mass events still taking place etc. But that's really a seperate point. All of that make this impending surge in demand even more nailed on, and even bigger. And yet we seem to have little to prepare for it. I just cannot get my head around it.
We had a two month head start on this on China and a 2-3 week head start on Italy, to get ourselves properly prepared. But as you say, it came almost as a surprise. Very strange.

But we also had years’ head start on any coming virus because studies have been done:
Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic, Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p059y0p1 via @bbciplayer
...well in advance of any virus coming on the horizon.

The fact that Italy went into lockdown yet we had flights coming into Britain from Italy 3 days into their lockdown was ludicrous!
 
We had a two month head start on this on China and a 2-3 week head start on Italy, to get ourselves properly prepared. But as you say, it came almost as a surprise. Very strange.

But we also had years’ head start on any coming virus because studies have been done:
Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic, Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p059y0p1 via @bbciplayer
...well in advance of any virus coming on the horizon.

The fact that Italy went into lockdown yet we had flights coming into Britain from Italy 3 days into their lockdown was ludicrous!
I think our (government and public) attitude to this has at least partly been shaped by Swine Flu. The way that was predicted to be on a similar scale but turned out to be much less serious (although I believe there were nearly 400 deaths in the UK). The government should have been aware of the differences between Covid 19 and swine flu and prepared accordingly. But I’m sure that if they had Swine Flu would have repeatedly been thrown back in their faces.
 
Sorry to bang on about this, but I am just really, really puzzled as to WTF has gone on here in the UK.

One month ago or more, we could see this coming. We had our original plan A which was to allow it to swiftly move through the population with a fucking humungous peak and widespread carnage. Quickly replaced by the plan B which everyone else in the world is following, of trying to suppress the virus as much as possible in order to save lives. Thank God!

But my point is that both plans anticipated a fucking great big peak. Either the first humungous one, or the one we are facing now. We saw how China had to build hospitals in 1 week to try to provide capacity. And we saw that 2 months ago.

Why are we only hearing over the last day or so about plans for makeshift hospital facilities at Excel London and elsewhere? Why did we not ask Dyson and others to get ventilators made and fucking sharpish, back in February? How come we didn't say to the supermarkets "In March, you are going to need 10x your online delivery capacity, so get ready". The supermarkets are all fucked, because they had zero notice of all of this. All of this smacks to me of too little, too late and a complete lack of foresight, or at the very least of pro-active, preparatory actions.

We've all banged on about the utter insanity of not shutting airports, allowing uncontrolled numbers into the UK without checks, of mass events still taking place etc. But that's really a seperate point. All of that make this impending surge in demand even more nailed on, and even bigger. And yet we seem to have little to prepare for it. I just cannot get my head around it.

Instead of calling it Plan A, could we start saying Path A in future?

It’s only a small point, but if newscasts start reporting on Path A news, it will give the people studying it in the future a whimsical, reminiscing warmth whilst watching it.
 
We had a two month head start on this on China and a 2-3 week head start on Italy, to get ourselves properly prepared. But as you say, it came almost as a surprise. Very strange.

But we also had years’ head start on any coming virus because studies have been done:
Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic, Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p059y0p1 via @bbciplayer
...well in advance of any virus coming on the horizon.

The fact that Italy went into lockdown yet we had flights coming into Britain from Italy 3 days into their lockdown was ludicrous!
The fact we still had people jetting off around the world 2 weeks ago thinking it was an acceptable risk unbelievable.
 
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