Matt Hancock Apologises for Tyranny? Hmmmm.....

 In the Covid enquiry the other day, Matt Hancock apologise for what he called an "error" in handling the Covid Pandemic. 

Hardly an error Matt, this was a magnitude more than that.

Prior to the Covid Pandemic the UK had pretty well thought out and pre-planned responses to a range of pandemic scenarios. 

The worst being an Ebola or Marburg outbreak within the UK. The best being another SARs-like outbreak. In between there are scenarios for human-transmissible Avian 'Flu, Swine Fever, Foot and Mouth, etc.

In terms of lethality, Covid comes closer to SARs. 

But...and it's a big but, the UK Government and Governments around the Western World looked at the Covid outbreak in Italy and panicked.

I posted back at the start of 2020 asking why if Covid as it became known as was rife in China and Europe, why weren't we closing borders? If there was something novel and from Italian statistics quite deadly, why weren't we pulling up the drawbridge and keeping the infected out?

I posted about Covid for the first time on the 11th of February 2020. I'd been watching reports inline for a month at least before I decided to post about it. I do remember postings online before Christmas of 2019 highlighting the outbreak in China and the bunch of military personnel that had attended the military games in China that had all become infected.

We even had a quite clear case of infection at a French ski chalet where the people renting the chalet came from Singapore and then went on to infect others at the chalet and showed quite clear symptoms BEFORE they returned to the UK but were still allowed to board a plane back into the country.

That chalet was ground zero for a huge number of subsequent outbreaks in Europe. 

Here in the UK I don't know what signals the Government were getting, but the best option after several Asian counties started reporting infections would be to have closed the borders and only let UK residents into the country and even then be subject to quarantine for a couple of weeks before being allowed into the population. The "close at hand" Ebola/Marburg response for and outbreak in Europe.

Instead, it was business as usual. borders open even to known Covid hotspots including China.

And then Italy happened. Hospitals full, doctors triaging patients, effectively deciding who should live and who should die. At the time the UK government didn't have the information that Covid had been in Italy since August 2019, the increase in patients with this new respiratory infection just exploded overnight.

Again, no borders closed.

Even when we'd had a few Asian plane passengers arrive with symptoms.

Then the ski chalet people arrived in the UK and it just went ballistic.

Brighton, Bognor, Southampton, and then the rest of the country as those plane passengers infected on the flight dispersed.

I posted on the 13th about the individual outbreaks, including an infected prisoner transferred to jail from Singapore.

Even on the 11th, I was calling for a limited lockdown of infected areas. The Ebola/Marburg "In country" response. 

On the 11th, I quite presciently noted this in an update:

UPDATE

Doing a mental exercise here: just think if the Government gave out advice to anyone in contact with an NCoV carrier to self-quarantine. Who would pay their wages while they were waiting the two weeks or a month to see if they had contracted the virus? How would the government stop or encourage people to stay indoors?

Given the severity of the virus and the infectious nature, surely another step for the government would be to underwrite any loss in pay and/or benefits for those that had to self-quarantine?

Otherwise people will just go to work as normal.

Back then the outbreak could have been limited if the government had acted to stop infected people from passing the virus on. 

Instead the government dithered until the only response was a complete country-wide lockdown.

We got the too-late sledgehammer response of a national lockdown, with all of the impact we now know it had on businesses and the economy in general. The government had several opportunities in January and February to try and limit the infection. Instead they failed to act in any visible or practical way.

I then posted on the 18th of February postulating the idea of a government support scheme for those (at that time) small numbers that were infected, paying them to isolate so they didn't lose money by self-isolating and thereby stopping the spread.

Another opportunity missed.

Then again at the beginning of March I asked questions about the nature of the virus and criticised the government "suck it and see" response.

Back then I said "Viruses have the ability to spontaneously mutate. They pick up attributes from other viruses in the hosts. The more people get infected with NCOVID-19 the more chance there is of a mutation picked up by the virus that makes it more deadly, harder to stop or impossible to vaccinate against."

Luckily, the Virus went the other way, wiping out several generations of South African mice to produce the Omicron strain which was thankfully a magnitude less deadly than the initial strain of Covid. It's only by luck that the scientists that engineered Covid gave it an ability to infect laboratory mice so they could watch it's progress in the lab. That was the weakness that allowed Covid to mutate into the less deadly strain through the mouse population.

I already assume that loophole will be fixed on the next engineered virus to make it more stable.

Anyway back to the matter in hand: No Matt Hancock, I will not accept your apology. As the minister responsible, you were well aware that there were pre-gamed scenarios in place and responses ready to cope with a pandemic like Covid. 

Instead you and all the other cabinet ministers shat themselves and started a train of events that would ruin the economy. 

Instead you acted too late in most cases. Too late to allow a limited response that wouldn't swamp the NHS, a limited response that tacked hotspots individually and limited damage to the economy, a limited response that would have prevented paying most of the population to stay at home, a limited response that would have kept the hospitality businesses viable.

Nope, no apology is worthy of the crippling of the country your government foisted upon us.

#FuckYouMattHancock.