The virus doesn’t care about politics

As I've noted before, we've politicised the coronavirus debate because that's what the media and our culture generally are set up to do. If something bad happens, it's always about finding out who's at fault. In the current situation, of course, the finger of blame is pointed inevitably at the government in general and Boris in particular. The idea that thousands died unnecessarily because of Johnson's lockdown dithering has now become an accepted part of the UK coronavirus story.

But world-wide the virus has shown that it's not interested in politics. Why for instance did both Japan and Florida escape so lightly despite clearly incompetent political responses? The only clear case of a political response having catastrophic effects was China's initial delay and denial.

Yes, the UK government has made mistakes - as have most governments, with the benefit of hindsight. The worse mistakes, probably - such as the care home catastrophe, when elderly patients were moved out of hospitals to care homes without testing, to make room for a flood of coronavirus cases that never materialised - resulted not from too little concern, but from too much. From panic, in other words...

Freddie Sayers at UnHerd - Coronavirus doesn’t care about politics:

The political argument has zeroed in on the idea that the UK and the US should have acted earlier within the month of March, by 10 days or two weeks. Through a combination of shutting their borders, locking down earlier and ramping up testing and tracing, everything could have been different, or so the argument goes. We’ll never know for sure, but it seems oddly credulous to think that that short period was a silver bullet that would have changed everything — countries that did ban flights from China early, such as Italy and the US, were hardly spared.

Back in March, the UK Government was still following its longstanding plan, endorsed by its scientific advisors — it is not spoken about much these days, but it is still there on the website if you fancy looking it up. It was based on the now-heretical principle that there would come a point when containment (with its testing and tracing) would no longer be viable, at which moment we would move to simply  ‘delay’ as much as possible and then ‘mitigate’. That is why contact tracing and community testing were dropped: it was always the plan. Some scientists still think this original approach was the sensible one, but faced with the alarming projections from Imperial College on March 16, the Government understandably ditched it.

To those who say that they should have seen what was happening in Italy, there remains the awkward fact that Neil Ferguson’s projections, based almost entirely on what was happening in Italy, didn’t materialise either. The revised Government plan was precisely designed to avoid becoming like Italy, with its horrible images of overflowing hospitals and triages in car parks — and that meant two urgent things: acquiring ventilators and increasing hospital capacity.

Off Matt Hancock went, brimming with rather more energy then than he has today, trying to succeed in his two big goals. But while the epidemic arrived, and with it a tragic number of deaths, it didn’t behave as expected. Remember the great ventilator race? As many ventilators as our good British companies could make, the Government would buy! Dyson, Rolls Royce and dozens of less glamorous and probably more relevant factories started frantically “re-tooling” for what the Prime Minister grimly dubbed “Operation Last Gasp”.

Turns out, they weren’t needed. Not only did the advertised wave of Covid patients never arrive in the promised number, it became clear that ventilation wasn’t the universally effective treatment everyone had thought. Reports emerged from New York that 88% of patients put on ventilators were dying; for many patients it turned out to be better to simply lie them on their front without ventilation. So the official number of extra ventilators the Government needed dwindled from 30,000, to 18,000, to 12,000 and then, quietly, to zero. James Dyson was sent back to his vacuum cleaners.

As for all those additional hospital beds that the situation in Italy implied we would need — the virus once again had other plans. In a huge Government-led effort, routine procedures were suspended, people were urged to avoid hospital, and existing patients were cleared out of wards. The Nightingale Hospital in East London was opened on time with its 4,000 additional beds, and thousands of further additional beds were created around the country in other Nightingale facilities.

From this unprecedented effort close to zero beds were ever used; these hospitals are perhaps the only example in history of a highly expensive and entirely unused government facility escaping any media criticism. As it turned out, the frantic preparing-for-Italy action plan may have only made things worse, as it led to additional avoidable deaths from other untreated conditions and accidentally seeded devastating secondary infections in care homes.

So, first the flu-like pandemic we had been initially well prepared for didn’t happen; then the Italy-style crisis that we subsequently prepared for with impressive speed didn’t happen either. All these well-intentioned government action plans, scrutinised by the political media, ended up struggling to be relevant amid a pandemic that defied prediction.

Now we're all set for “test and trace”, another government initiative that will very likely go down in flames....

Comments

[Martin Adamson]

Don’t think Florida’s response was incompetent. Making sure nursing homes were disinfected & not used as a dumping ground for potentially infected patients is one of the few political decisions globally that can be shown to have unambiguously succeeded.

[Mick H]

Yes, fair point...

[Recruiting Animal]

If 2 weeks in March would have made no difference, would an earlier warning by China have made a difference? It would have only been a few weeks, as well.

Perhaps it was the influx of people to Wuhan during the New Year festival and then the large number of flights out of Wuhan immediately after that was the killer.

But that would mean that some earlier actions at least could have made a strategic difference.

[Mick H]

Yes, it was containable in those early days, if the Chinese authorities had made the right decisions.