What if I paused before hitting the publish button? What if I went away, thought things through, came back and edited the post? What if I cut the bloat and got to the point? What if I had a point worthy of a post? This post answers that question.

Two Months of Lockdown

Bournemouth Gardens are in full bloom, so I took a stroll through them while pondering the state of play with the coronavirus. The furlough scheme, bringing on board the medical experts as partners, rapidly adding extra capacity to the NHS and not recommending anyone inject disinfectant gets five stars. 

The shambles with PPE was a disgrace. A bigger disgrace was the total lack of basic preparedness for a pandemic. I’m not talking about the expensive stuff, like ventilators and ICU beds. I’m talking about having a coherent, effective plan. As opposed to the sort of plan befitting a Monty Python scene.

Vietnam led the way, going into hard lockdown and employing a basic but effective contact tracing system. It worked. Yes, they have experience with  novel viruses. But it’s long been clear that a serious pandemic would happen sooner rather than later. We should be learning from others experiences.

We now face employing the Swedish approach, because we’re way too late to employ Vietnam’s. This could, potentially, have been stopped before it had much of a chance to get started. The government was found asleep at the wheel.