COVID-19: Government's Failure Early on Identified.

 The BBC (always happy to bash the government) has reported that a report by MPs has condemned the early response to COVID-19 in the UK. 

It was one of the worst health failures ever, apparently. 

I can agree with that. I blogged early on in the Pandemic that the government was wrong to rely on the herd immunity model, considering we were dealing with a new novel virus and we didn't know what the affects on the population would be.

Even if, in the early stages the virus was fairly benign, there's no telling how lethal any future mutation could become. 

It's only when the reports of millions of deaths in Italy and the overwhelming of their health service started appearing that the UK government shat its pants and started actually doing something. By which time it was too late and the virus was out in the wild.

Had the virus been more lethal, we would be looking at a catastrophe the likes of which we haven't seen since the Black Death. The lacklustre response to treat it as just another Influenza or SARS-like virus was proven wrong. 

This was a virus that initially was more lethal, it was also able to spread before symptoms became apparent and herd immunity wasn't really an option given the lethality of the virus to various people. 

Hopefully the government will learn from this and in future have a more robust response to novel viruses. 

The correct response is to close the borders immediately and then control the numbers of people wanting to enter the country. Keep the numbers manageable and also provide quarantine facilities on arrival.

The safety of the majority of the people in the country outweigh the needs of the small number of travellers returning to the UK. That point should have been made absolutely clear at the beginning of the pandemic. The security of the majority should be absolutely paramount in all situations. 

The dinghies arriving on the South Coast are a case in point. In the interest of national bio-security, they should be refused entry and returned to France. Just because it's not a land border shouldn't make a difference. If it was, we could just chuck them back over the fence. In this situation we should pick them up and then steer back to the nearest French port and drop them off.

The government need to step up and start making hard decisions in the interests of National Security.

Because one day, there will be a virus that isn't as (relatively) benign as COVID-19.