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Tax Research UK Blog is written by Richard Murphy unless otherwise stated and published by Tax Research LLP under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Design by Andy Moyle
I think you could change ‘European’ to ‘Everyone else’s’
I was not sure about Trump……
I did think about it
“Hospitals could stop treating the most severely ill coronavirus victims if the outbreak escalates.
Patients with a poor prognosis may even be taken off ventilators in favour of those with better survival chances.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8110943/Most-frail-not-critical-care-doctors-warn.html
I know the above quote is from the most dubious source of information in the UK but ask the ‘what if’ question. ‘What if’ the statement is true? Will your granny or disabled child be held in a state of chemically induced stupor while they slowly drown in their own mucus? And if that happens will the blame lay with the overworked, under resourced NHS staff or is there a more culpable candidate? Ten years of austerity. A decade of warnings that the NHS is being denied essential resources. The only response – “the NHS is safe in our hands” and as Boris Johnson bellowed to the myopic sychophants on the green benches behind him “We are the party of the NHS”.
Bojo will claim the decision to, effectively, euthanise old, frail or disabled patients is clinical. What he will not say is the medical staff will have no choice given the paucity of tools at their disposal. The tools were removed piece by piece as the Tory party rewarded their rich supporters for their loyalty.
The British people are being given a very early example of what this govt looks like under pressure when it’s being asked to govern, not play politics. And it fails miserably. Brexit means that this shower of incompetents have 5 years to wreak havoc on all our lives.
Surely enough of my fellow Scots will smell the coffee and we can escape this disaster by getting independence.
My feelings on this are well known
It is clear that the government’s Covid-19 policy of “herd immunity” under the unclear scientific theory of flattening an exponential increase in cases on the curve is a pure fig leaf to hide behind as an excuse for first not recognising the severity of the situation and only making puny suggestions to contain the outbreak when at last the penny dropped. Unless the government can immediately enact an action plan on the lines of Italy or Wuhan we are in for a very rough ride indeed. This includes setting up in every constituency testing and recuperation stations and an emergency expansion of the production of oxygen and ventilator equipment.
I’m not a expert but,
Given the reported Modus Operandi of CoVid19 should the strategy be:-
1) Quarantine (while well!) all those identified as vulnerable to the virus, (Elderly, Diabetic et al)
2) Get everyone else infected as quickly as possible, or at least sufficient population to make onward transmission unlikely ( Herd immunity)
3) Introduce the vulnerable back into circulation in a measured way to optimise medical resources
No one knows who 2 is
And without testing no one knows who can be relied upon
So thus strategy fails
I have been having similar thoughts. Some points and caveats.
1 The government seems oddly pussyfooting when it comes to measures to protect the vulnerable. Clearly they should isolate, but that is not the advice.
The advice is (I have just checked on the NHS website) that those who have symptoms should self-isolate. Which does not make any sense when the virus a) has a long incubation period, and b) frequently is symptomless, as a result of which, most people who are infected are not known to be so, and therefore are wandering about freely, potentially infecting the vulnerable who have not been advised to self-isolate,
2 The herd immunity strategy which is being talked about now is a recent arrival in policy terms, it does not appear at all in the most recent strategy document on the government website, which is the “Coronavirus Action Plan” of 3rd March.
If the government really is going for this, then the isolation of all the vulnerable should be an absolute necessity. But it does not seem to be happening. Why not?
3 Allowing people generally to be infected in order to generate herd immunity on the face of it is a plausible strategy, as the virus ends up with nowhere to go. The problem is that of ensuring that only people who can ward off the virus are infected, that no vulnerable people get the virus.
So for example, schoolchildren continue to go to school, but all those who for whatever reason are vulnerable (asthma, diabetes, etc,) must stay at home. But how do we ensure that this separation is perfectly carried out? And how do we know in advance who will not get complications?
The strategy may be plausible but it is damned difficult to implement.
jane, my wife has offered a refinement, where we seek to infect less vulnerable people in sequence, so there is work cover throughout the crisis.
Gosh, My idea IS the govt strategy. ( Not a claim of authorship)
Credit to Johnson, going against the populist flow on a policy like this takes BALLS!
I hope humble pie is eaten by those who denigrated Johnson, when the models demonstrate Johnson took the scientifically right option in the face of dogmatic opposition!
Hey, it even make better economic sense at the same time!
Peter
What nonsense are you talking?
Johnson is being populist and ignoring every shred of science
Richard
Update and reply #Peter dawe
1 On the Westminster Hour tonight (Radio 4 – Sunday 15th) was the first govt. announcement that the elderly and vulnerable will be asked to self-isolate at some point for maybe 4 months.
Various points were made by the assorted panellists:
i) that the announcement was not made “properly” but through selected journalists,
ii) that the timing was critical. If asked to do so too early i.e. when the risk of going out is actually quite low as it is now, then that would be to extend the already huge demand of isolation for 4 months even further, for no good reason.
iii) that communities will have to be encouraged to “rally round” and schemes invented to keep these isolated folk fed watered, provided with loo roll, called up so as to reduce isolation;
iv) oh and able to watch TV by scrapping the abolition of free TV licenses for the over 75’s;
v) that Local Authorities are no longer remotely capable of leading any imnitiatives on this, having been gutted by this government;
vi) that LA’s should get a guarantee of government support for this, which was absent from the budget.
2 So the policy of isolation for the vulnerable is now officially floated, which alone can justify any policy of herd immunity.
But the delivery of said policy, the commitment for example to fund LA’s adequately for their role in this, or the ability of the NHS to correctly identify all vulnerable groups, and of course the capacity of the NHS to offfer care due to lack of beds and ventilators, oh, and staff, are all in doubt.
To listen to the Tory MP on the panel, who was the newly elected chair of the Treasury Select Committee, the Tory government will rise to the challenge which will involve some huge changes in Tory ideology and policy (fiscal rectitude and all that) amongst Ministers and backbenchers alike.
I am not close enough to any of those involved to make any predictions. All we can do is put the right questions, make the right comments without putting people’s backs to the wall, and hope they learn to become proper human beings.