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**Hugh** · 08-10-2021, 15:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by nomadking

Here we go again.........

Before 2020, an independent report judged the UK as being the 2nd best country in the world for being prepared for a pandemic.
Another independent report identified that the UK had a large store of supplies ready for a pandemic.
Which country had enough PPE?
Government funded research was being done using the MERS virus to develop a vaccine for it, to test the methodology for something similar coming along. That is how Oxford University managed to get a vaccine so quickly. They were effectively working on it before COVID 19 actually appeared.
Government funding was also being used to make the UK more self-sufficient on vaccine production.
Of course all those things don't get reported by the media as it doesn't suit the agenda.

As you say, here we go again…

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ent...b6d14c3363e8d2

Quote:

The planning

In those subsections that looked at planning for a pandemic, the UK scored highly – successive governments for years have compiled, maintained. and updated national plans on how to cope specifically with influenza pandemics.

Academics, think tanks and health bodies all did what was required of them and contributed to plans that were in place in case the worst happened.

In 2011 the Department of Health published the “influenza pandemic preparedness strategy”, and it was updated regularly and remained the go-to document when coronavirus struck.

The GHS Index highlighted this in its third subsection, titled “rapid response to and mitigation of the spread of an epidemic”.

Explaining what they examined, Priya Bapat of the EIU told HuffPost UK: “So, do you have these emergency plans in place and do they cover lots of different types of diseases?

“Do they incorporate planning for vulnerable populations? We looked at exercising response plans, so – you have these plans on paper but, in the last year, have you actually tested them out in a scenario planning exercise?

“Do they have a plan on how to communicate with the public?”

When it came to the UK, the answers were “yes, yes, yes and yes” and it scored 91.9 out of 100, more than 10 points ahead of any other country.

The implementation

But the UK didn’t score quite so well on subsection six, which looked at how well a country can actually implement the plans it has.

“Six looks at aspects that aren’t traditionally looked at like the strength of the government and social economic risks and infrastructure,” said Bapat.

“And if you look at the UK, some of the areas where it scored lower have been the story of this outbreak. One aspect in particular – when you look at high income European countries, the UK has the lowest doctors per capita than any of those countries except for Poland...

… The leadership

The UK had the plans, so why didn’t they work?

“Even though the US and the UK had the best environments in terms of plans in place and thinking about what they would need in terms of capacity,” said Bapat, “when it came to the moment that everyone had been preparing for, the decision-making really hampered the actual ability of the country to respond.”

Documenting the UK government’s delayed response to the pandemic is an ongoing process but there are already a number of things the public inquiry that Boris Johnson has committed to might want to examine.

The nationwide lockdown was by some accounts too late and “cost a lot of lives”; face masks in shops are only being made mandatory on July 24 after months of dithering; contact tracing has been discussed endlessly but is still not up and running; and quarantine rules have changed like the seasons.

tl:dr - great planning, crappy leadership & implementation of the plans.

Lions lead by donkeys.