If there is an easier definition of successfully being in power than ‘making unpopular decisions, and having the ability to justify them' then I am not sure what it is. And by that criterion Johnson is failing.
The British Medical Journal and Health Services Journal issued a rare joint editorial yesterday to express their concern about the proposed Covid lockdown easing over Christmas. In their opinion these create the possibility that ‘New Year is likely to see NHS trusts facing a stark choice: be overwhelmed or stop most elective and non-urgent work.'
They concluded:
[The government]should now reverse its rash decision to allow household mixing and instead extend the tiers over the five day Christmas period. In order to bring numbers down in advance of a likely third wave, it should also review and strengthen the tier structure, which has failed to suppress rates of infection and hospital admission.
This joint editorial is only the second in the more than 100 year histories of The BMJ and the Health Service Journal. We are publishing it because we believe the government is about to blunder into another major error that will cost many lives. If our political leaders fail to take swift and decisive action, they can no longer claim to be protecting the NHS.
The science is, in that case, clearly against the government. They apparently wobbled during yesterday, wondering whether to change their advice. And then they decided to leave their plans in place, unaltered.
It is, of course, possible that the science is wrong. That is always a possibility. Extrapolations of data, and past experience, do not always successfully predict what might happen. But the US provides a somber foretelling of what is likely: the Thanksgiving holiday has given rise to a spike in cases.
I know all the issues about not seeing family. It will be a first for me not to do so. It's hard to imagine Christmas without seeing quite a lot of brothers, in-laws, nieces, nephews and more. It's just what's always been done. And always been enjoyed.
But this year the trade off is with the chance of someone having the medical treatment that they need in the new year in an NHS already at its limits due to the stress of what has already happened, and is to come. I already know a nurse who has had to leave because the stress of Covid has been too much. She is far from alone.
The government has called this wrong. It's not following the science. It is not protecting people. It is not protecting the NHS. It is allowing short term popularity to influence its decision making at what is highly likely to be considerable long term cost. That is recklessness that should, I think, be considered criminal. And I stress, I mean that in a legal sense.
Other countries have changed their minds. The are locking down. No government in the UK has yet shown that courage, led by Westminster. All of them will pay a very high price for this if they do not.
2020 has been bad but at the current rate 2021 might make it look not so bad after all, even if vaccines really do work. The government is gambling on memory being short-term. I think they're wrong. Bad decisions always become apparent. This is an appalling one.
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I think this point was made by someone on Newsnight last night –
The libertarians on the Tory backbenches are also the arch-Brexiteers, and the PM can’t afford to upset them if there is going to be a vote on a deal.
I do think some judgement has to be applied to the fabled “scientific advice”, but I’d prefer if it wasn’t judged to suit libertarians.
Nine months into the pandemic, do we have a functional test and trace system in place yet?
Testing is much more widespread, although I still worry about how false positives and false negatives are tested. The error rates from the lateral flow tests, particularly when performed in the field by people other than healthcare professionals, seem very high.
Still only 85% of positive tests are referred to the tracing system, and about 85% of contacts are being tracked and reached. That has jumped up in recent weeks because they have changed how they count who is “reached”. They are now saying they have “reached” everyone in a household if they speak to one person who will tell everyone else. Even on that looser definition, they are “reaching” about 75% of identified contacts (and less outside the household). It that good enough?
Lateral flow tests are useless…and prove nothing, but people think they give them an all clear message
Money is wasted because from the outset the need to make everything local was ignored
“Useless” is rather strong: no test is perfect, particularly when deployed in a screening scenario, when you are trying to pick up a few positives in a sea of negatives. You need to factor in the prevalence and sensitivity (false negatives) and specificity (false positives) to work out how much value a test has, and how much harm it might cause.
One of the themes of this government is its preference to short-circuit usual channels (one person’s regulatory safeguards is another’s bureaucratic red tape) to reach its own cherry-picked conclusions – whether that is the time to lock down, or the nature of the tier restrictions, or the way to do test and trace, or procuring PPE – rather asking for the advice of experts, for example in this case not speaking to the government’s own UK National Screening Committee. eg https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4744 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4848 Another case would be setting up a new outsourced private sector contact tracing organisation from scratch, led by management consultants, rather than speaking to the people in the public and private sector who were already doing this sort of thing as their day job.
I could excuse ministers moving fast and getting things wrong at the beginning of an emergency, but we are nine months in now and this is likely to go on at least another three to six months in my estimation. Repeating mistakes (sometimes more than once) is simply inexcusable.
For this test, sensitivity might be low (high proportion of false negatives) but specificity is high, so you know a positive test is almost certainly real. You just have to be honest with people (another shortcoming of this government) and tell them that a negative result might not mean they are in the clear, and they might need two or three tests to get a degree of certainty to believe a negative result.
£700m spent on the Innova lateral flow tests, by the way. What is that, the annual pay of about 20,000 nurses, or around 10,000 doctors? And how much will the big pharmaceutical companies make from the manufacture of the vaccines largely developed using pubic funds? Many billions no doubt. Yes, we need them to make the things, and they should be paid adequately for that service, but they should not be profiteering.
I agree, useless was strong
But actually, not strong enough
The test is deeply misleading. It has a 50% false native rate i.e. you could have Covid and it will not find it in 50% of cases
And it costs a fortune
What is the gain?
As you correctly identify, when conducted in field, the lateral flow test has a significant level of false negatives, so “negative” is not necessarily the end of the story. If you are infected, you might test negative but equally you might test positive. That is not so helpful.
But there is a high degree of specificity, so you’ve got it without much doubt of you test positive. That is a result worth having. You can believe the positive tests and act accordingly.
And then you have to retest the negatives. All things being equal, you should catch 7/8 of the positives after three tests. You can legitimately feel aggrieved if you are one of the few to get a false negative several times in a row, but no test is ever going to to catch them all in any event.
How useful that all is depends on the prevalence in the population.
We had the same issue at the start of the pandemic, when hospital patients were tested multiple times just to make sure, in case of false negatives, so the number of tests being done was far in excess of the number of people being tested.
I thought when this “plan” was first mooted it was a bad idea. I’m just disappointed that the Scottish Government is going along with this nonsense.
I saw Desmond Swayne on Ch4 news last night.
What a complete arse.
Who the hell votes for a jerk like that in?
Telling us that the scientists had gone mad and were running the show – far from it.
Mad….
Swayne, Julian Lewis, Christopher Chope, Caroline Nokes – welcome to the wonderful world of central South England. It’s akin to living in an 19thC lunatic asylum, down here. If the revolution did come, and some latter-day Robespierre decided to vapourise the area, I’ll accept the hit 🙂
Who votes for cretins like Swayne PSR? Other cretins? Or people who say ‘but, but, Corbyn would’ve been worse’.
I agree with Richard that Corbyn would have been a very poor PM; but as bad as Johnson and his appalling cabinet now leading us to multiple disasters?
God, English politics is utterly awful. Hopeless voting system, hopeless Tory/Labour duopoly, hopeless (a lot of them) electorate.
I could be wrong, but I see little evidence that this government is in it in order to make things better for us, the people.
Yet another example of how the Govt has abandoned the “Precautionary Principle” – let’s be rid of these troublesome experts or as Hancock mansplained to MP Philippa Whitford, “a consultant surgeon with nearly four decades in medicine, to “go back [and] study the details” after she cited a scientific study raising concerns around the efficacy of certain Covid tests.” (The National) (an insult which seems to have evaded the English press)
There will be some who think the 5-day Xmas window is a target rather than a relaxation when forming a bubble for 1 day maximum is recommended, as Nicola Sturgeon said. I was disappointed that the Scottish Govt went along with this relaxation but NS is issuing fresh guidance strongly advising people not to mix unless it’s absolutely essential.
She said: “If you haven’t made plans to form a bubble yet, please don’t. If you’re still swithering, please decide against. And if you have made plans, but think they’re not really essential, perhaps think about postponing until later in the year.”