It is sad that instead of us all uniting to expose the incompetence of the current Tory government we ae indulging in senseless conspiracy theories about covid 19 and about vaccines in another forum. I found myself spending too much time refuting silly conspiracy theories about how vaccines are used to reduce world populations and how the establishment wants us all to die slowly by spreading contaminated vaccines, and not spending more time on the current dire situation.
A very important documentation of the timeline of how our government dealt with the crisis of covid-19 shows a continuous serious of inadequate or late or incomplete responses and in some cases outright lies. These were not only perpetrated by the politicians but they seem to have recruited some of the medical or scientific advisers. But what is most galling is that SAGE, the supposedly independent scientific body is no such thing as Dominic Cummings sits on this committee which therefore completely invalidates its supposed neutrality. This is also bolstered by the fact that the decisions and how they are reached are not transparent. But what comes out of this extremely detailed and valuable timeline is that the government has decided from an early stage to go it alone in the face of the rest of the world, the WHO, and the EU. It is quite clear that the herd immunity theory was going to be the only way that the government will manipulate all its action. The herd immunity concept may have had a very small chances of succeeding if as they hoped, 60% of the population will have got the virus by now. But as it happens the figure is probably less than 5% and you can never achieve herd immunity with such low levels.
The government declared a triumph when the curve was ‘flattened’ and the NHS did not totally collapse. But what we have managed after about 10 weeks of wishy washy lockdown, with active quarantining of those infected in the community is a reduction of daily cases to about 2000 per day, far higher than plateau levels achieved by many European countries. This will mean that the disease will continue to be transmitted at high to very high levels the moment any easing of lockdown is permitted. But things have now gone out of hand already and I think that continued lockdown is not going to be achievable for a second wave, especially after the Cummings breaking of the law.
I would recommend
“A National Scandal”: a timeline of the UK government’s response to the Coronavirus crisis
It is an excellent depository of contemporaneous documentation of this debacle.