4 thoughts on “The Herald’s politicising of health crises? Just a bad habit? Just an SNP thing?”

1. And Where’s Boris Johnson. Is he genuinely ill or trying to avoid being linked with awful Covid-19 stats.

   Heard on RT ( think it was Thursday) at a Covid-19 press briefing Boris telling how whilst in a ward of Covid-19 patients he had shaken everyone’s hand and would continue to do so.

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2. John,

   Is the UK government’s handling of covid19 yet more UK exceptionalism,like Brexit?

   http://www.progressivepulse.org/ireland/covid-19-in-great-britain-and-northern-ireland

   “The “exceptionalist” approach of HMG was a combination of a variety of factors. I suspect primarily the need to show the world that British exceptionalism was indeed real – that the UK was truly World-Leading. This seems to have backfired, first in needing to get into line with the rest of the world, second in the higher cost it will surely entail, both in lives and economic impact.

   It may even prove disastrous. Again from the Byline Times article by Nafeez Ahmed:

   My back-of-the-envelope projections suggested that the Government’s refusal to attempt to slow and curtail the spread of the virus could lead to as many as 458,752 deaths – possibly as high as 1.6 million in an absolute worst-case ‘do nothing’ scenario.”

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3. And some more?

   This looks just awful.No wonder Professor Pollock was so powerful in the advice she gave to the Scottish government.

   “Several models produced by SAGE scientists indicate that using contact tracing to contain the outbreak would be extremely difficult without sufficient speed, but they still emphasised that identifying people infected and isolating them systematically on a mass scale would at least help to reduce or control the epidemic.

   Independent scientists who have reviewed the SAGE corpus say that it reveals a fatally incompetent scientific process. According to Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh’s Medical School, the SAGE corpus inadvertently reveals why the UK Government “got it wrong… SAGE analysis was overcomplicated, too academic, relied on incomplete data, overlooked testing and health service capacity. Why didn’t we go fast down the path of test, isolate, trace while delaying spread for health services to prepare?”

   According to the New York University complex systems scientists – Dr Chen Shen, Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Dr Yaneer Bar Yam – early assumptions that the outbreak might inevitably grow beyond control in a way that would mute the point of mass testing and tracing, was completely unfounded. Dr Chen and his co-authors point out that the Imperial College scientists, along with their other colleagues and SAGE, have consistently overlooked data from China and elsewhere.”

   https://bylinetimes.com/2020/03/23/covid-19-special-investigation-part-one-the-politicised-science-that-nudged-the-johnson-government-to-safeguard-the-economy-over-british-lives/

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4. “David Farren, a consultant in medical microbiology and an infection control doctor in Northern Ireland, believes that the UK-wide consolidation in the number of pathology laboratories resulting from a review in 2006 left the UK less equipped to deal with a pandemic of this scale.
   but also due to a lack of personnel to perform the tests.

   Lord Crisp, NHS Chief Executive and Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health from 2000 to 2006, told The Telegraph that the lack of testing of staff was an “obvious bottleneck” that the Government needed to address.”

   Comment at Slugger O’Toole by “Devil Eire”.

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