Cummings and goings...

[Red 4]

MarkwG said:

Tuna said:

MarkwG said:

Except it didn't have to be that way at all, which is why it wasn't that way for the governments in many other countries - the UK is amongst the worst on the planet for Covid deaths, that's not an accident. Good sound emergency planning should be at the core of the governments responsibilities to the people who elect it - sadly lacking on this occasion, since Johnson removed it. Blaming the rules that he ignored is crass - he wouldn't have followed them anyway, not his style, but in ignoring them, he bears responsibility for the outcome he gets.

Johnson has said how he admired the Mayor of Amity for not closing the beaches as the shark attacks continued; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/europe/co... ; he then shook hands with Covid doctors & patients, giving himself the infection, how ironic & idiotic. In contrast, my former company was triggering contingency plans put in place for just a scenario, back in February - which means the decisions were being taken in January to bring our people back from the Far East & from Continental Europe - no mean feat & at considerable expense, but that's how seriously we took it, having watched the effect of SARS & Bird flu previously. We ran stress tests in the company IT to check it could manage WFH tfn, & those that could, were wfh from early March. Consequently our Covid rates were negligible during the first lockdown, meaning we were able to provide the services needed with no need to panic - I take no credit for that, I only played a very small part, but if we were, why wasn't the government?

They were left to panic because they ignored all the warning signs they were given. Stupid debates about herd immunity, how the UK could "take advantage of the opportunities the pandemic may bring", then the Cheltenham races, & Liverpool vs Madrid, both were warned about, both continued against common sense & consequently brought infected people into the UK, heaping pressure on the NHS. The desperate need for PPE & Covid data was driven by their stupidity, not by bad luck. There's no excuse for that, & no credit for trying to create order from that chaos - they created it in the first place. I'd like to think any government would learn from this & never let it happen again, but I have my doubts. Any government that behaves that way again should be charged with genocide.

Edited by MarkwG on Thursday 24th June 00:56

You're conflating two separate things there - one is the advice Sage and the civil service were giving at the time, and the decisions that were made on the back of that; the other is the issue of procurement and spending.

I seriously suggest you spend a little time watching Cummings' answers to the select committee on this. They help understand why the wrong decisions were made early on, and more importantly who was responsible for those decisions. Here, by "responsible", I mean who provided the information and context in which the decisions were made. Cummings is not the most reliable of witnesses, but on these issues his testimony is not being contested, and appears to be accepted as accurate reporting on the early stages of the vaccine response.

The key point here is that SAGE and the civil service believed only two possible scenarios could play out with the pandemic. In March they believed (and had models and data to back up their beliefs) that the virus would either peak much later on in September - like a normal flu season - or that it would peak in June/July. Even their most extreme expectation was that they had three or four months before a peak would occur, and that they therefore had plenty of time to prepare. This is the advice that Johnson, Hancock and all the others were given, and the modelling assumptions throughout Whitehall.

It's easy to point at the top guy and say that clearly they were stupid and made the wrong decisions, but if they are given information that in hindsight is clearly wrong, then what decisions would you have expected them to make?

There was a serious error in analysis and data collection in the early stages of the virus, and it took around another three weeks for the alarm to be picked up that things weren't going according to the predictions. Three weeks! This is not the top level people "ignoring" signs that (in hindsight) showed what was happening - this is that SAGE and others were providing a radically different (and incorrect) analysis.

In that light, the issue of getting better data, expediting PPE and radically changing how the pandemic was managed is better understood - and the reasons for the rules being either ignored or rewritten made clear. Again, this is not to claim the decisions or procurement were always right, but as the saying goes "perfect is the enemy of good enough" - and the government were well below "good enough" when their early assumptions turned out to be wrong.

As for the "other countries" comment in your post - there isn't much evidence that other countries decision making changed the course of the virus as much as some claim. There were structural differences that made a difference to how and when the virus spread (Germany's different care home and healthcare structure, or Sweden's different legal structure for lockdowns), but at this point, we're reporting broadly similar death rates to Italy, Spain, France, the USA. Could we have done better? Yes, of course - in hindsight you can always do better, and yes, some of the decisions we made were wrong even at the time they were made. But the leadership of Scotland, Wales and England did the best they could with broadly similar information and it's resulted in broadly similar outcomes.

So whilst you can (rightly) say some of the decisions were wrong, the difference they made appears to be much less than some would like you to believe. This is perhaps one of the reasons Starmer has been so ineffective in opposition - there wasn't some dramatically better option to choose at the time that would have magically prevented the virus from doing what viruses always do.

So you're assuming I haven't, & that Cummings world view is the only interpretation. Pretty much everything he says was either done or not done, was a consequence & result of removing the pandemic oversight to focus on Brexit: in simple terms, they not only took their eyes of the ball, they removed it from the field of play & cancelled the match. Had Johnson & Cummings believed the cabinet committee structure was too laborious, too inefficient, then they needed to replace it with something better - not remove it. That was a calculated & cynical decision to save cash & time to bail out their failing Brexit plans.

The "Mayor of Jaws" label relates to Johnson's attitude towards Lockdown 2.

The advice from SAGE (in September) was to lock down. Regional lockdown were not working. Johnson ignored that advice and actively sought counsel from anti-lockdown protagonists. He was looking for confirmation bias.

The second wave killed more than the first but feel free to add your mitigation to Johnson's shambolic handling of the crisis, Tuna.

[brickwall]

MarkwG said:

brickwall said:

TL:DR - of course process went out the window. That was the correct decision.

You gotta love those defending procurement processes on here. Convenient failure of memory.

Does anyone remember what those days in early March were like? How fast things were moving? In the space of c10 days went from mass gatherings and free-flowing international travel to lockdown, empty supermarket shelves and rumours of roadblocks in/out of London.

PPE and ventilator shipments were getting intercepted by other countries at transit airports. NHS staff were wearing bin bags as protection. Schools were diverting DT machines to making visors for doctors.

Has anyone had the joy of actually going through government procurement? I did one recently - a few hundred £k. We had to submit >30 different documents. Only one of which was “here is what we will provide”, and a second “we will charge £x”. The rest were versions of “we’re kosher, honest”. Took 4 months.

Forget 4 months - in the early stages of COVID the government needed stuff in 4 hours.

In that period the only thing that mattered was speed.
Price? Irrelevant.
Slight chance it doesn’t turn up? Better that than ensuring it doesn’t turn up by not placing the order.
Happens to be Hancock’s mate? I don’t give a flying fk if it’s Matt’s mate, Osama Bin Laden, or Donald Duck - if he’s can give me what I need, right now, I’ll take it.

So of course the rules were thrown out. Of course normal processes went out the window. Of course dodgy things slipped through as a result. Money got spaffed up the wall. It it didn’t matter. That was the right choice to make - to prioritise speed over all other things.

The £530k to Our World In Data is a prime example.
1. It was the best open source of internationally comparable data on CV19. A scarce thing, and exceptionally useful.
2. It’s a non-profit, run out of Oxford Uni. It’s a kosher outfit.
3. Skyrocketing demand for its services and data meant it was about to run out of money and would need to shut.

Faced with the above 3 pieces of information, can anyone say the correct response *in March 2020* is “please provide a business case, we’ll evaluate it in a committee, and get back to you?”
No - the obvious answer is to just wire the money. Normal “process” would have got to exactly the same outcome, but with a 2 week delay, having diverted the attention of people who had much more important things to do than evaluate a business case.

Faced with the same choice, I would hope any government would make the same decision again.

Except it didn't have to be that way at all, which is why it wasn't that way for the governments in many other countries - the UK is amongst the worst on the planet for Covid deaths, that's not an accident. Good sound emergency planning should be at the core of the governments responsibilities to the people who elect it - sadly lacking on this occasion, since Johnson removed it. Blaming the rules that he ignored is crass - he wouldn't have followed them anyway, not his style, but in ignoring them, he bears responsibility for the outcome he gets.

Johnson has said how he admired the Mayor of Amity for not closing the beaches as the shark attacks continued; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/europe/co... ; he then shook hands with Covid doctors & patients, giving himself the infection, how ironic & idiotic. In contrast, my former company was triggering contingency plans put in place for just a scenario, back in February - which means the decisions were being taken in January to bring our people back from the Far East & from Continental Europe - no mean feat & at considerable expense, but that's how seriously we took it, having watched the effect of SARS & Bird flu previously. We ran stress tests in the company IT to check it could manage WFH tfn, & those that could, were wfh from early March. Consequently our Covid rates were negligible during the first lockdown, meaning we were able to provide the services needed with no need to panic - I take no credit for that, I only played a very small part, but if we were, why wasn't the government?

They were left to panic because they ignored all the warning signs they were given. Stupid debates about herd immunity, how the UK could "take advantage of the opportunities the pandemic may bring", then the Cheltenham races, & Liverpool vs Madrid, both were warned about, both continued against common sense & consequently brought infected people into the UK, heaping pressure on the NHS. The desperate need for PPE & Covid data was driven by their stupidity, not by bad luck. There's no excuse for that, & no credit for trying to create order from that chaos - they created it in the first place. I'd like to think any government would learn from this & never let it happen again, but I have my doubts. Any government that behaves that way again should be charged with genocide.

Edited by MarkwG on Thursday 24th June 00:56

I don’t disagree with you - it didn’t have to be this way. I’m not saying “there was no failure” - I’m saying that the actions they took at the time were reasonable and rational.

Yes -
- They should have had better plans (formulated months, years, advance)
- They should have acted much earlier in January and February
And if they had done these things then it wouldn’t have been such a mad scramble.

However - at the point in March where the above hadn’t been done, the optimal course of action was to completely bypass *anything* that could slow procurement down.

It was quite right to order officials to pay whatever was required to buy PPE, to throw money at airlines to fly in ventilators, to pick up the phone to every contact you had. It was quite right to abandon business cases, tenders, contract reviews and competition.

Everyone knew mistakes would be made by not doing things “properly”, but by March there was simply no time to do everything “properly” - every single day we lacked data, PPE, ventilators and everything else came with a cost counted in lives.

[MarkwG]

Red 4 said:

MarkwG said:

Tuna said:

MarkwG said:

Except it didn't have to be that way at all, which is why it wasn't that way for the governments in many other countries - the UK is amongst the worst on the planet for Covid deaths, that's not an accident. Good sound emergency planning should be at the core of the governments responsibilities to the people who elect it - sadly lacking on this occasion, since Johnson removed it. Blaming the rules that he ignored is crass - he wouldn't have followed them anyway, not his style, but in ignoring them, he bears responsibility for the outcome he gets.

Johnson has said how he admired the Mayor of Amity for not closing the beaches as the shark attacks continued; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/europe/co... ; he then shook hands with Covid doctors & patients, giving himself the infection, how ironic & idiotic. In contrast, my former company was triggering contingency plans put in place for just a scenario, back in February - which means the decisions were being taken in January to bring our people back from the Far East & from Continental Europe - no mean feat & at considerable expense, but that's how seriously we took it, having watched the effect of SARS & Bird flu previously. We ran stress tests in the company IT to check it could manage WFH tfn, & those that could, were wfh from early March. Consequently our Covid rates were negligible during the first lockdown, meaning we were able to provide the services needed with no need to panic - I take no credit for that, I only played a very small part, but if we were, why wasn't the government?

They were left to panic because they ignored all the warning signs they were given. Stupid debates about herd immunity, how the UK could "take advantage of the opportunities the pandemic may bring", then the Cheltenham races, & Liverpool vs Madrid, both were warned about, both continued against common sense & consequently brought infected people into the UK, heaping pressure on the NHS. The desperate need for PPE & Covid data was driven by their stupidity, not by bad luck. There's no excuse for that, & no credit for trying to create order from that chaos - they created it in the first place. I'd like to think any government would learn from this & never let it happen again, but I have my doubts. Any government that behaves that way again should be charged with genocide.

Edited by MarkwG on Thursday 24th June 00:56

You're conflating two separate things there - one is the advice Sage and the civil service were giving at the time, and the decisions that were made on the back of that; the other is the issue of procurement and spending.

I seriously suggest you spend a little time watching Cummings' answers to the select committee on this. They help understand why the wrong decisions were made early on, and more importantly who was responsible for those decisions. Here, by "responsible", I mean who provided the information and context in which the decisions were made. Cummings is not the most reliable of witnesses, but on these issues his testimony is not being contested, and appears to be accepted as accurate reporting on the early stages of the vaccine response.

The key point here is that SAGE and the civil service believed only two possible scenarios could play out with the pandemic. In March they believed (and had models and data to back up their beliefs) that the virus would either peak much later on in September - like a normal flu season - or that it would peak in June/July. Even their most extreme expectation was that they had three or four months before a peak would occur, and that they therefore had plenty of time to prepare. This is the advice that Johnson, Hancock and all the others were given, and the modelling assumptions throughout Whitehall.

It's easy to point at the top guy and say that clearly they were stupid and made the wrong decisions, but if they are given information that in hindsight is clearly wrong, then what decisions would you have expected them to make?

There was a serious error in analysis and data collection in the early stages of the virus, and it took around another three weeks for the alarm to be picked up that things weren't going according to the predictions. Three weeks! This is not the top level people "ignoring" signs that (in hindsight) showed what was happening - this is that SAGE and others were providing a radically different (and incorrect) analysis.

In that light, the issue of getting better data, expediting PPE and radically changing how the pandemic was managed is better understood - and the reasons for the rules being either ignored or rewritten made clear. Again, this is not to claim the decisions or procurement were always right, but as the saying goes "perfect is the enemy of good enough" - and the government were well below "good enough" when their early assumptions turned out to be wrong.

As for the "other countries" comment in your post - there isn't much evidence that other countries decision making changed the course of the virus as much as some claim. There were structural differences that made a difference to how and when the virus spread (Germany's different care home and healthcare structure, or Sweden's different legal structure for lockdowns), but at this point, we're reporting broadly similar death rates to Italy, Spain, France, the USA. Could we have done better? Yes, of course - in hindsight you can always do better, and yes, some of the decisions we made were wrong even at the time they were made. But the leadership of Scotland, Wales and England did the best they could with broadly similar information and it's resulted in broadly similar outcomes.

So whilst you can (rightly) say some of the decisions were wrong, the difference they made appears to be much less than some would like you to believe. This is perhaps one of the reasons Starmer has been so ineffective in opposition - there wasn't some dramatically better option to choose at the time that would have magically prevented the virus from doing what viruses always do.

So you're assuming I haven't, & that Cummings world view is the only interpretation. Pretty much everything he says was either done or not done, was a consequence & result of removing the pandemic oversight to focus on Brexit: in simple terms, they not only took their eyes of the ball, they removed it from the field of play & cancelled the match. Had Johnson & Cummings believed the cabinet committee structure was too laborious, too inefficient, then they needed to replace it with something better - not remove it. That was a calculated & cynical decision to save cash & time to bail out their failing Brexit plans.

The "Mayor of Jaws" label relates to Johnson's attitude towards Lockdown 2.

The advice from SAGE (in September) was to lock down. Regional lockdown were not working. Johnson ignored that advice and actively sought counsel from anti-lockdown protagonists. He was looking for confirmation bias.

The second wave killed more than the first but feel free to add your mitigation to Johnson's shambolic handling of the crisis, Tuna.

Agree, but he's actually first quoted as saying it in 2006, on his climb to the top - it's been referenced a number of times since as a way of showing how he misidentifies the context & the point, & how he's continued to behave that way. He either says these things to be contrary or because he genuinely doesn't understand the point - both are of concern for a man in the top position.

[Tuna]

MarkwG said:

So you're assuming I haven't, & that Cummings world view is the only interpretation.

No - not true. I used Cummings recounting of the timetable of the pandemic response, which you can confirm to be factual (or find proof otherwise, though all evidence is that you won't). I did not base what I said on his views, which we know veer from the psychotic to the fantastical. The point remains that Whitehall had two models - first peak in September, or June/July. All purchasing and preparations were done to that timetable until it was realised (very late in the day) that the data was painting a very different picture.

That's nothing to do with Cummings views, and if you think something else was happening in Westminster, you'll need to site a damn good source to prove it.

MarkwG said:

Pretty much everything he says was either done or not done, was a consequence & result of removing the pandemic oversight to focus on Brexit: in simple terms, they not only took their eyes of the ball, they removed it from the field of play & cancelled the match. Had Johnson & Cummings believed the cabinet committee structure was too laborious, too inefficient, then they needed to replace it with something better - not remove it. That was a calculated & cynical decision to save cash & time to bail out their failing Brexit plans.

Cummings had the square root of bugger all to do with Brexit during that stage of the pandemic as far as I'm aware - during that time it was down to Frost and his team. So I don't think you're recounting actual facts, just your opinions.

[Tuna]

Red 4 said:

The "Mayor of Jaws" label relates to Johnson's attitude towards Lockdown 2.

The advice from SAGE (in September) was to lock down. Regional lockdown were not working. Johnson ignored that advice and actively sought counsel from anti-lockdown protagonists. He was looking for confirmation bias.

The second wave killed more than the first but feel free to add your mitigation to Johnson's shambolic handling of the crisis, Tuna.

Given that the topic of conversation was the rules regarding PPE provision, I think you're jumping in with both feet to suggest I'm defending Boris' handling of the September lockdown.

But by all means use that strawman if you want to.

[APontus]

Tuna said:

Cummings had the square root of bugger all to do with Brexit during that stage of the pandemic as far as I'm aware.

Why would you be any more aware of what Cummings was doing day to day than any of us (as in, not at all)?

[Red 4]

Tuna said:

Red 4 said:

The "Mayor of Jaws" label relates to Johnson's attitude towards Lockdown 2.

The advice from SAGE (in September) was to lock down. Regional lockdown were not working. Johnson ignored that advice and actively sought counsel from anti-lockdown protagonists. He was looking for confirmation bias.

The second wave killed more than the first but feel free to add your mitigation to Johnson's shambolic handling of the crisis, Tuna.

Given that the topic of conversation was the rules regarding PPE provision, I think you're jumping in with both feet to suggest I'm defending Boris' handling of the September lockdown.

But by all means use that strawman if you want to.

Strawman ? No, Boris' "Mayor of Jaws" attitude towards the second wave was shameful.
The point is that he did not learn his lessons from the start of the pandemic and Lockdown 1. There is no strawman there. He undoubtedly made things worse and I would go so far as to say that he is responsible - personally - for deaths.
Cummings is on record. Perhaps you should refresh your memory.

In any case, you were the one who went off on a tangent.

[NRS]

MarkwG said:

brickwall said:

TL:DR - of course process went out the window. That was the correct decision.

You gotta love those defending procurement processes on here. Convenient failure of memory.

Does anyone remember what those days in early March were like? How fast things were moving? In the space of c10 days went from mass gatherings and free-flowing international travel to lockdown, empty supermarket shelves and rumours of roadblocks in/out of London.

PPE and ventilator shipments were getting intercepted by other countries at transit airports. NHS staff were wearing bin bags as protection. Schools were diverting DT machines to making visors for doctors.

Has anyone had the joy of actually going through government procurement? I did one recently - a few hundred £k. We had to submit >30 different documents. Only one of which was “here is what we will provide”, and a second “we will charge £x”. The rest were versions of “we’re kosher, honest”. Took 4 months.

Forget 4 months - in the early stages of COVID the government needed stuff in 4 hours.

In that period the only thing that mattered was speed.
Price? Irrelevant.
Slight chance it doesn’t turn up? Better that than ensuring it doesn’t turn up by not placing the order.
Happens to be Hancock’s mate? I don’t give a flying fk if it’s Matt’s mate, Osama Bin Laden, or Donald Duck - if he’s can give me what I need, right now, I’ll take it.

So of course the rules were thrown out. Of course normal processes went out the window. Of course dodgy things slipped through as a result. Money got spaffed up the wall. It it didn’t matter. That was the right choice to make - to prioritise speed over all other things.

The £530k to Our World In Data is a prime example.
1. It was the best open source of internationally comparable data on CV19. A scarce thing, and exceptionally useful.
2. It’s a non-profit, run out of Oxford Uni. It’s a kosher outfit.
3. Skyrocketing demand for its services and data meant it was about to run out of money and would need to shut.

Faced with the above 3 pieces of information, can anyone say the correct response *in March 2020* is “please provide a business case, we’ll evaluate it in a committee, and get back to you?”
No - the obvious answer is to just wire the money. Normal “process” would have got to exactly the same outcome, but with a 2 week delay, having diverted the attention of people who had much more important things to do than evaluate a business case.

Faced with the same choice, I would hope any government would make the same decision again.

Except it didn't have to be that way at all, which is why it wasn't that way for the governments in many other countries - the UK is amongst the worst on the planet for Covid deaths, that's not an accident. Good sound emergency planning should be at the core of the governments responsibilities to the people who elect it - sadly lacking on this occasion, since Johnson removed it. Blaming the rules that he ignored is crass - he wouldn't have followed them anyway, not his style, but in ignoring them, he bears responsibility for the outcome he gets.

Johnson has said how he admired the Mayor of Amity for not closing the beaches as the shark attacks continued; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/europe/co... ; he then shook hands with Covid doctors & patients, giving himself the infection, how ironic & idiotic. In contrast, my former company was triggering contingency plans put in place for just a scenario, back in February - which means the decisions were being taken in January to bring our people back from the Far East & from Continental Europe - no mean feat & at considerable expense, but that's how seriously we took it, having watched the effect of SARS & Bird flu previously. We ran stress tests in the company IT to check it could manage WFH tfn, & those that could, were wfh from early March. Consequently our Covid rates were negligible during the first lockdown, meaning we were able to provide the services needed with no need to panic - I take no credit for that, I only played a very small part, but if we were, why wasn't the government?

They were left to panic because they ignored all the warning signs they were given. Stupid debates about herd immunity, how the UK could "take advantage of the opportunities the pandemic may bring", then the Cheltenham races, & Liverpool vs Madrid, both were warned about, both continued against common sense & consequently brought infected people into the UK, heaping pressure on the NHS. The desperate need for PPE & Covid data was driven by their stupidity, not by bad luck. There's no excuse for that, & no credit for trying to create order from that chaos - they created it in the first place. I'd like to think any government would learn from this & never let it happen again, but I have my doubts. Any government that behaves that way again should be charged with genocide.

Edited by MarkwG on Thursday 24th June 00:56

A few questions - how do you plan for an unpredictable emergency like this, with no data existing before, and almost no data available at the time? If you recommend locking down the country immediately did you post on PH that the country should have been locked down with ebola outbreaks and SARS etc too? Those were outbreaks with almost no data that could have been a repeat of Covid for example.

Desperate need for covid data - how do you get something like this when almost no data exists? There's still lots of discussion about it now, with huge amounts extra data available. It was the scientists at the time talking about herd immunity, because of the lack of data. You clearly have not been involved in large projects where something unexpected happens. You can never plan for all scenarios. A new virus appearing for example in the western world would be very different on procurement of supplies, as we wouldn't have the producers of most of that sort of stuff stopping making it and at the same time using all they can. That's just one possible option in many which would lead to a very different response and way forward.

Probably those using hindsight would have complained about wasting huge sums of money on PPE that was sitting around useless and being thrown out due to not matching the latest regulations etc. until the thing hit.

I work with something that has huge ranges of uncertainties with both big economic and safety impacts. The main thing I've learned from it is despite the very intelligent people involved and the thinking about lots of scenarios is sometimes we get it right, but many times something we didn't expect happens. Then people turn up later and wonder why you hadn't planned for it before as it was obvious. It just so happens to be it wasn't obvious until it happened.

[Tuna]

APontus said:

Tuna said:

Cummings had the square root of bugger all to do with Brexit during that stage of the pandemic as far as I'm aware.

Why would you be any more aware of what Cummings was doing day to day than any of us (as in, not at all)?

I'm saying that's all I know and I'm happy to be corrected if someone has more information. I wasn't aware at the time of Cummings being involved with Frost's work on the negotiations. Were you?

[APontus]

Tuna said:

APontus said:

Tuna said:

Cummings had the square root of bugger all to do with Brexit during that stage of the pandemic as far as I'm aware.

Why would you be any more aware of what Cummings was doing day to day than any of us (as in, not at all)?

I'm saying that's all I know and I'm happy to be corrected if someone has more information. I wasn't aware at the time of Cummings being involved with Frost's work on the negotiations. Were you?

You don't get out of it that easy. You said Cummings had 'bugger all' to do with Brexit during that stage. Now you're admitting you don't know whether he had bugger all to do with it or not. In other words, you made it up.

[Fastpedeller]

NRS said:

A few questions - how do you plan for an unpredictable emergency like this, with no data existing before, and almost no data available at the time? If you recommend locking down the country immediately did you post on PH that the country should have been locked down with ebola outbreaks and SARS etc too? Those were outbreaks with almost no data that could have been a repeat of Covid for example.

Desperate need for covid data - how do you get something like this when almost no data exists? There's still lots of discussion about it now, with huge amounts extra data available. It was the scientists at the time talking about herd immunity, because of the lack of data. You clearly have not been involved in large projects where something unexpected happens. You can never plan for all scenarios. A new virus appearing for example in the western world would be very different on procurement of supplies, as we wouldn't have the producers of most of that sort of stuff stopping making it and at the same time using all they can. That's just one possible option in many which would lead to a very different response and way forward.

Probably those using hindsight would have complained about wasting huge sums of money on PPE that was sitting around useless and being thrown out due to not matching the latest regulations etc. until the thing hit.

I work with something that has huge ranges of uncertainties with both big economic and safety impacts. The main thing I've learned from it is despite the very intelligent people involved and the thinking about lots of scenarios is sometimes we get it right, but many times something we didn't expect happens. Then people turn up later and wonder why you hadn't planned for it before as it was obvious. It just so happens to be it wasn't obvious until it happened.

A good post^^^^^^^
It's all very well the 'Mr Hindsights' saying the govm have done a poor job - but would Mr Hindsight have done better? I think not.
Someone said to me a few weeks ago "It's crazy that we didn't have massive warehouses full of PPE, why were we not ready"? My response (which I don't think he expected was). "So if we had many years' supply of PPE in a warehouse which was wasted because it degraded or rats got in and ran riot through the stock, would you be praising the govm or saying they'd got it wrong?"
It's like haveing 2000 snowploughs in UK just in case we get that 1 in 100 years bad fall of snow - just doesn't make sense. What does make sense (and I think is a useful lesson which has been noted ) is that we need to have nimble resources for redeployment of manufacture in the UK if an emergency happens,

[Tuna]

APontus said:

You don't get out of it that easy. You said Cummings had 'bugger all' to do with Brexit during that stage. Now you're admitting you don't know whether he had bugger all to do with it or not. In other words, you made it up.

Seriously? The claim I was responding to was that Cummings 'cancelled' the pandemic response to focus on Brexit - a completely evidence free comment - and you're challenging me to prove my point that there was no evidence of his involvement?

You need to loosen your tinfoil hat a little.

[APontus]

Tuna said:

Seriously? The claim I was responding to was that Cummings 'cancelled' the pandemic response to focus on Brexit - a completely evidence free comment - and you're challenging me to prove my point that there was no evidence of his involvement?

You need to loosen your tinfoil hat a little.

I'm challenging you to support your claim that Cummings had nothing to do with Brexit in that period. It's very simple. Can you support it, or did you make it up?

[MarkwG]

Fastpedeller said:

NRS said:

A few questions - how do you plan for an unpredictable emergency like this, with no data existing before, and almost no data available at the time? If you recommend locking down the country immediately did you post on PH that the country should have been locked down with ebola outbreaks and SARS etc too? Those were outbreaks with almost no data that could have been a repeat of Covid for example.

Desperate need for covid data - how do you get something like this when almost no data exists? There's still lots of discussion about it now, with huge amounts extra data available. It was the scientists at the time talking about herd immunity, because of the lack of data. You clearly have not been involved in large projects where something unexpected happens. You can never plan for all scenarios. A new virus appearing for example in the western world would be very different on procurement of supplies, as we wouldn't have the producers of most of that sort of stuff stopping making it and at the same time using all they can. That's just one possible option in many which would lead to a very different response and way forward.

Probably those using hindsight would have complained about wasting huge sums of money on PPE that was sitting around useless and being thrown out due to not matching the latest regulations etc. until the thing hit.

I work with something that has huge ranges of uncertainties with both big economic and safety impacts. The main thing I've learned from it is despite the very intelligent people involved and the thinking about lots of scenarios is sometimes we get it right, but many times something we didn't expect happens. Then people turn up later and wonder why you hadn't planned for it before as it was obvious. It just so happens to be it wasn't obvious until it happened.

A good post^^^^^^^
It's all very well the 'Mr Hindsights' saying the govm have done a poor job - but would Mr Hindsight have done better? I think not.
Someone said to me a few weeks ago "It's crazy that we didn't have massive warehouses full of PPE, why were we not ready"? My response (which I don't think he expected was). "So if we had many years' supply of PPE in a warehouse which was wasted because it degraded or rats got in and ran riot through the stock, would you be praising the govm or saying they'd got it wrong?"
It's like haveing 2000 snowploughs in UK just in case we get that 1 in 100 years bad fall of snow - just doesn't make sense. What does make sense (and I think is a useful lesson which has been noted ) is that we need to have nimble resources for redeployment of manufacture in the UK if an emergency happens,

No, it's not hindsight, that's the point: all sensible governments have been predicting a worldwide viral pandemic for many years, the issue was the "when" not the "what" or the "how to deal with it". The NHS conducted Exercise Cygnus precisely to evaluate the likely outcome of one, back in 2016; the problem was the politicians didn't take the outcomes seriously. Terresa May mothballed the cabinet committee that was set up to plan for such an event; Johnson then cancelled it, 6 months before the virus hit. That's incompetent mis management, not bad luck. It's also not the same as having snowploughs on standby all the time. PPE can & is cycled through, because it is used all the time, the issue is having supply chains that can deal with the ebb & flow - & that's part of an effective procurement plan, which takes account of peaks & troughs. Rather than having a pop at the hindsightists, who were often saying as such well before it was hindsight, start holding those responsible for the mess accountable.

[skwdenyer]

Fastpedeller said:

A good post^^^^^^^
It's all very well the 'Mr Hindsights' saying the govm have done a poor job - but would Mr Hindsight have done better? I think not.
Someone said to me a few weeks ago "It's crazy that we didn't have massive warehouses full of PPE, why were we not ready"? My response (which I don't think he expected was). "So if we had many years' supply of PPE in a warehouse which was wasted because it degraded or rats got in and ran riot through the stock, would you be praising the govm or saying they'd got it wrong?"
It's like haveing 2000 snowploughs in UK just in case we get that 1 in 100 years bad fall of snow - just doesn't make sense. What does make sense (and I think is a useful lesson which has been noted ) is that we need to have nimble resources for redeployment of manufacture in the UK if an emergency happens,

The 2000 snow ploughs argument is an easy one. You can’t manufacture them fast enough. So you have to analyse the cost of not having them vs the cost of having them. A part of that cost calculation is political cost - what price a population who feel like their Government is in control?

For my money, you buy the snow ploughs. But whatever happens you do the analysis.

Re the warehouses full of PPE, we *used* to do just this. But not a mouldering stockpiling; a first in first out strategic buffer stock. It was deliberately run down not so very long before Covid. We endured all the cost & then scrapped it just before it was useful.

That is the sort of National-scale stuff that only Governments can do. When Governments don’t do it, it erodes our faith in them. We had world-class pandemic preparedness which we *scrapped* shortly before the pandemic. That was shameful.

Regarding nimble manufacturing, yes, we had that too. Unfortunately, Government chose to give PPE contracts to chums with a mate in China instead of giving them to those nimble U.K. manufacturers.

You’re right, you can’t plan for every eventuality. But you can plan for generalities. Or you can wind it all down & hope for the best. How many died, how much must we all now pay, because hope became the strategy?

[Tuna]

APontus said:

'm challenging you to support your claim that Cummings had nothing to do with Brexit in that period. It's very simple. Can you support it, or did you make it up?

You're asking me to prove a negative? Not bothered with asking MarkwG where he got his claim from?

[APontus]

I'm asking YOU where you got YOUR claim from, Tuna?

[Tuna]

APontus said:

I'm asking YOU where you got YOUR claim from, Tuna?

I don't know quite what you're struggling with here. Cummings was playing games with his Darpa plans, Covid and all the other stuff. There was a separate team, led by Frost, running the Brexit negotiations. I don't recall any news items, government briefings, or papers produced by Frost's team that referenced Cummings during the negotiations. I said very clearly that this is as far as I'm aware, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Now, unless you have any evidence to the contrary, that seems to be true, doesn't it? You've had the whole day to find any evidence, and all you've done is repeat the question.

[APontus]

Not struggling with anything. You made a claim as if you have some sort of inside knowledge. You don't. You made it up. Just admit it

[Tuna]

APontus said:

Not struggling with anything. You made a claim as if you have some sort of inside knowledge. You don't. You made it up. Just admit it

Sorry, you're imaging things. Go pick a fight with someone else.