‘Throughout this crisis,’ said Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock in a video message to the nation today, ‘we’ve been working incredibly hard to protect people in social care and today we can announce that everybody going from hospital into social care will be tested, and will be isolated while the result of that test comes through, because that helps to protect people who are in social care who are after all some of the most vulnerable people in the country.’
I had to watch this several times before I could fully comprehend what I’d just heard.
So, let me get this absolutely straight: we’ve spent the past few weeks sending hordes of elderly people out of hospitals where coronavirus is rife, back into care homes without testing them for the virus?
This is the very epitome of the phrase ‘lambs to the slaughter’, isn’t it?
Yet this strategy supposedly constitutes ‘working incredibly hard to protect people in social care’?
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said today (pictured) that ‘everybody going from hospital into social care will be tested, and will be isolated while the result of that test comes through’
The result of this appalling negligence – there’s no other word for it – is that Britain’s care homes are now exploding with coronavirus, both among the residents and the heroic care workers trying to look after them, often without adequate Personal Protection Equipment.
The situation is so catastrophically bad that the Government has no idea how bad it is.
I asked the Care minister Helen Whatley on Good Morning Britain today if it was true, as the Daily Mail screamed on its front page, that as many as 4000 people may have died in care homes – but she hadn’t a clue.
In fact, she laughed as I asked the question, just as she laughed again later in the interview during a startlingly inappropriate and jarring performance that exposed both her shocking ineptitude and the Government’s worrying reliance on incredibly inexperienced people to handle the worst crisis we’ve faced since World War 2.
I’m on a WhatsApp group chat with a few top TV news journalists and we all agreed this morning that we could never recall a time when both the government and opposition ranks seemed to be so lacking in calibre, with the honourable exception of Chancellor Rishi Sunak who has been commendably authoritative during his press briefing stints.
Nobody pretends this is an easy time to be running the country, or any country.
But it feels increasingly, disconcertingly evident that many of the people charged with doing so in Britain don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
It was bad enough that we were so woefully under-prepared for the pandemic, given we had literally held a three-day training exercise in 2016 to prepare for one.
Care minister Helen Whately laughed as I asked a question on Good Morning Britain today
Named ‘Exercise Cygnus’, it was intended to determine the UK’s readiness for a new respiratory flu pandemic – in other words, exactly what we have now with COVID-19.
All major government departments, the NHS and local authorities were included in it.
The full report from that conference has been buried, so information arising from it is very hard to find.
But what we do know is that our then Chief Medical Officer, Professor Sally Davies, told the World Innovation in Health conference afterwards that the exercise ‘killed a lot of people’ because it showed our national health system would get run over.
She explained: ‘It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies…it becomes very worrying about the deaths, and what that will do to society as you start to get all those deaths.’
Davies added that any such pandemic would be compounded by ‘the lack of vaccines and then the global traffic and lack of solidarity….a severe one will stretch everyone.’
The exercise also exposed a chronic lack of basic equipment to fight such a pandemic – including PPE for health workers, ventilators and critical care beds.
Yet despite all this, when the exact kind of deadly new flu pandemic they were talking about actually happened, Britain remained chronically short of PPE, critical care beds and ventilators.
So much so that Matt Hancock was forced to beg British manufacturers on March 14 to make the latter for him.
‘If you produce a ventilator,’ he told them, ‘we will buy it. No number you produce is too high.’
A woman waves to her mother on Easter Monday at Stanley Park care home in County Durham, where 13 residents have died after suffering coronavirus symptoms
And what’s been the result of this plea?
A complete and utter fiasco that perfectly exemplifies the government’s incompetence.
Today’s Financial Times revealed that the minimum specifications set out by the government to the manufacturers to make these ventilators rendered them useless.
Alison Pittard, dean of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, the professional body for intensive care practitioners, said the government requested ventilators that would stabilise patients only for ‘a few hours’ when in fact they are required for much longer periods of time.
‘If we had been told that was the case,’ she said, ‘that the ventilators were only to treat a patient for a few hours, we’d have said: ‘Don’t bother, you’re wasting your time, that’s of no use whatsoever.’
As a result of that shameful failure in basic planning, many of the ventilators made cannot now be used.
This is just the latest in a series of appalling mistakes.
There’s a lot of muttering now in top Tory ranks, echoing President Trump’s rhetoric, about how the Chinese misled the world at the start of the outbreak.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been commendably authoritative during his press briefing stints
And Beijing has a lot to answer for. And one day it will.
But even allowing for some delay in the truth emerging from Wuhan they still had plenty of warning.
It is inarguable now that Britain reacted with disgraceful complacency for weeks after the virus broke out in China, refusing to take it seriously enough so that proper preparations could be made – particularly with regard to the crucial testing being recommended by the World Health Organisation.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, now recovering from a life-threatening bout of coronavirus himself, was still jovially telling us in early March that he was shaking everyone’s hands in hospitals containing coronavirus patients, while fellow European countries like Italy were beginning to suffer severe infection and death rates.
And on the very day the WHO declared this officially a global pandemic, March 11, Johnson allowed huge mass gatherings to go ahead including the Cheltenham Festival, football matches and pop concerts.
Why?
Acting on expert scientific advice, the UK government was operating a ‘herd immunity’ policy of deliberately letting people get the disease which had to come to a screeching halt when new advice from the same experts showed it would cause 500,000 deaths.
That was why we were one of the last countries to order any kind of lockdown, and even when we did it, we inexplicably kept all the airports open even to flights from the worst virus-hit places and allowed millions of non-essential workers to carry on working.
As for testing, we did barely any tests early on and then the Government announced in mid-March we would stop all testing except for those seriously ill in hospital – only to do another U-turn on that decision days later and announce we would now be ‘ramping up’ testing everywhere.
Because we were so late to the intensive testing game, we are still only testing a small fraction (14,000 a day) of the number of people being tested in countries like Germany (70,000 a day), and are operating at levels 40% below what Boris Johnson promised by this stage (25,000 a day), and a million miles away from the 100,000-a day vow from Hancock by the end of this month.
The result of all this dithering, policy U-turns and chaos is now starkly clear: Britain’s death toll is rocketing by nearly 1000 a day, and that doesn’t include the 1000s more dying in care homes.
We’re already the 5th worst country in the world for coronavirus deaths, would be even higher with the care home deaths included, and are on track to be easily the worst affected country in Europe.
And the lack of widespread testing means many of our health workers are stuck at home in quarantine, and our ability to ease the lockdown is severely impaired because we have no idea who’s had the virus among the public at large.
Meanwhile, we are told every day to stay home, protect the NHS, save lives and little else.
Not a word about how they are going to get us out of lockdown, allegedly because we, the dumb public, can’t be trusted to stick to the lock-down rules AND contemplate an end to it.
Michael Gove was forced to self-isolate when his daughter showed symptoms of coronavirus
What patronising arrogance!
More likely, they can’t tell us what their plan to end the lock-down is because, without adequate testing or effective treatments, they don’t have one.
The shocking complacency and incompetence would be bad enough when so many lives – and yes, so much money – is at stake.
But there’s also been stinking self-serving hypocrisy by our leadership.
Michael Gove, one of the most senior Government ministers, was forced to self-isolate when his daughter showed symptoms of coronavirus.
If that situation happens to anyone working on the NHS frontline, it’s almost impossible for them to get a test for their child, so they are compelled to stay at home for 14 days without even knowing if there is a good reason to.
But Gove spoke to the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and asked him if he could have a test for his child.
Thousands of people attended the Cheltenham Festival in Gloucestershire, above on March 13
He was told he could, his daughter was tested, thankfully found to not have the virus, and Gove was free to go back to work.
Yet most politicians are doing their work from home, and I see no good reason why Gove can’t either.
Instead, he got an incredibly valuable test to free himself from restrictive isolation when most NHS staff and care workers can’t.
That too is shameful.
The first duty of any government is to keep its people safe and to protect public health.
This government has spectacularly failed in that duty during this crisis so far.
The only question now is how many lives will be lost and how many more will be economically blighted for years.