Quote:
Originally Posted by ianch99
There is also a opposite need amongst some to apologise for the Government at all and every opportunity. No decision even one clearly resulting in the deaths of thousands should be questioned at a point when further decisions made by the same people and the same process could lead to even more deaths. A need I am sure has more to do with a political alignment to current Government than a need to establish an objective understanding of the facts.
'Wait until all the decisions, good and bad, have been made and only then ask if they were the right decisions at the time" - better still, question the decisions as they are being made and make sure that you have the best people in charge of the decision making process when the next big decision needs to be made.
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It’d also be much easier to be complementary about the Government if they had actually been seen to take appropriate actions at the right time. We were told we were “two weeks behind Italy” yet no effort seemed to be made to learn from this - instead we ran the risk that we’d be different and unsurprisingly we were not.
I’ve been hugely complimentary about the furlough scheme, abandoning herd immunity and now quarantining arrivals. Now if we got a decent test, trace, isolate scheme on the go we might get to where we should have been in early April.
There’s one side of this debate lacking objectivity and it’s those that can’t accept there’s any error at all. Something that would be beyond parody in North Korea given the death/infection count.
I used to think folk viewed politics too much like supporting a football team, but even supporters of football teams are objective enough to see when their own team plays badly.
What people don’t seem to appreciate is that until we get these things right we are going to be stuck in some varying degree of lockdown/economic restrictions and social distancing and huge sections of the economy either closed or not commercially viable.
Instead some appear to be getting bogged down that this is down to pure chance, measures that aren’t 100% aren’t effective or that the virus simply will go away by itself. This is the same guesswork as “it’s just the flu”; “cultural differences”; “multigenerational households”; “the virus will die out in the summer”.
Unfortunately for some their ideology is against the state doing anything - even if it is co-ordinating a national effort to stem a pandemic and protect the economy. Something the private sector simply couldn’t do because there is no profit in it. In times of global crisis you’d think it’d be important to have perspective on these things.
There’s no return to normal because the Government eases restrictions. People need to be confident that they can go about their day to day lives and we won’t have a second wave. Otherwise those on furlough now will be saving “just in case”, those concerned about the health risk will stay home more. All of this affects economic demand. That means people need to be confident that the prevalence of the virus is low, people who catch it are quickly identified, isolated and then their contacts isolated and tested quickly.