Propwash wrote:
Are you talking here about the UK response or global? If the former, could you give an example of a country that responded in a way that we should have followed? And I ask that out of genuine interest.
PW
The whole point of learning from past experience is to recognise you rarely get everything right, and some things can definitely be done differently going forward. Trying to be defensive, downplaying failures or deflecting by saying nobody got it right is counterproductive to doing better next time.
Suggesting FD has some big down on the UK every time he makes a criticism misses the point that we did a lot wrong. And, we need to learn from that. We dithered. There is no way around this, and we need to learn from that.
Even you said a year back
Propwash wrote:It seems that all through this pandemic the government (including the devolved ones that seem to have escaped the same levels of criticism aimed at the UK's despite similar decisions and outcomes)) have trodden a middle path for fear of being seen as too draconian or too lax. The opposition parties have been no better in their thinking. Perhaps they should have jumped one way or the other. I recall a line from my initial training: "When action is required to be taken, it must be taken with sufficient firmness to render it effective."
I make no judgement about which way the authorities should have chosen to go, but being decisive should have been a pre-requisite.
PW
By all means look at other countries. Not to compare our overall performance with the overall performance of those countries, but to drill down to the detail of individual actions that worked and ones that didn't.
As an example, I think we shut our borders too slowly. We didn't quarantine effectively. Especially with all those people coming back from their ski trips. We didn't, as individuals, take it seriously enough at first. Too busy worrying about our day to day lives and our holidays. We slipped up terribly by letting the virus escape from hospitals into care homes with a subsequent horrendous death toll.
We did get the vaccination programme right. There we truly excelled, although other countries are now doing better.
Other countries- take a bow Australia and New Zealand - got off to a much better start, but then didn't perhaps adapt enough to the opportunities offered by the vaccine. So, different countries got different things right and wrong.
It just doesn't matter how other countries compared overall. Just an honest appraisal with the benefit of hindsight of what things worked and what didn't, and in what part of the process. Because next time those lessons might really matter.
And, frankly, I don't care if FD raises issues. We need to be very firmly focused on the ball here. The only point I take issue with FD is
We also now know that the initial response was pretty sh1tty.
We actually knew back then. That is perhaps our most important lesson to learn. We dithered, and weren't decisive. As you said last year.