I don’t see this Tory administration as being competent. Not at all.
That seems to be based on assumptions rather than their actions.
As for Raab being the next fuhrer: there is a cabinet of power hungry Tory sociopaths which might have a say. This could finally be Gove’s opportunity for example.
I did say semi-competent. They have, at least, introduced a national lockdown, promised to pay 80% of the wages of people who can’t work during it, opened an emergency field hospital, and written off £13 billion of NHS debt. All of this may be too little, too late, and it does not compare favourably with South Korea or Germany, both of which seemed to have kept their fatality rate below 1%, but it is a lot better than touting dubious miracle cures and complaining about the number of ventilators hospitals are asking for.
I don’t see how this would be an improvement.
Only your tory government did follow a crackpot racist’s ideas about herd immunity and used a non peer reviewed position paper which used a different disease as its model as a fig leaf for their decision.
Not competent. Not at all.
None of them is an improvement as their defining characteristic is being a career sociopath. This overrides any possible competence.
Agreed.
Hence my position that Boris’s recovery is the current least worst option.
The Mash is on the case, as usual:
Eventually a herd immunity is what we will need to achieve. Not by the route that the Government promoted and not as the sole policy, it needs to be achieved through a vaccine or other existing or developed treatment (rather than presumed immunity of those who have contracted it and survived, since the death toll would be horrific and NHS devastated) and by a test, track and isolate regime.
“Herd immunity” is now established as shorthand for a strategy of letting the virus spread, so you should be careful about how you use the phrase.
Michael Gove is now self-isolating, so he’d be out of contention for a while.
Which might be correct, but the term was in usage before it was hijacked and misrepresented as hack science and therefore continues to be used in a valid context.
Nevertheless, given our current context, we should be careful how we use it.
Weird choices of countries to compare us to, almost like someone is trying to grind an axe not make legitimate comparisons. Canada for example has 2.7 hospital beds for every 1,000 people so fewer per capita beds than us. Same for the UK. So that’s two countries with straight up “medicare for all” that have less beds than our terrible system. Huge amounts of beds in Mongolia probably are due to other factors like the difficulty of delivering care in an outpatient setting to their population.
Our situation is difficult enough without exaggerations. I don’t think US hospitals “across the country” are “rationing care” due to overall lack of hospital beds at this point.
We should be careful not to succumb to the temptation of using it as shorthand for a potentially disastrous policy, because it is a part of the solution.
We’d have more in the UK if it weren’t for tories and neoliberals letting the NHS wither from lack of funding for the last 40 years. This bed crisis has been talked about for decades, and now it’s here.
If you follow the money you end up at the US health insurance industry.
Many people who enter the ICU do not come back. It will ironic if Boris Johnson dies before England BREXITS itself into ruin when there’s NO link to the European Union.
Good luck trying to stave off new meanings given to old terms by the herd.
How about Rodrigo Duterte or Jair Bolsonaro?
And we should be careful not to say anything that could be misunderstood as support for that disastrous policy.
Given all the work he has done in the world I can only say I hope he gets the care he deserves.
Oh well, those seem reasonable reactions. Let’s just be careful.
No. It’s a tougher call, I grant you.
