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A damning article published yesterday in esteemed medical journal The Lancet penned by the journals editor in chief himself Richard Horton.

 

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“When this is all over, the NHS England board should resign in their entirety.” So wrote one National Health Service (NHS) health worker last weekend. The scale of anger and frustration is unprecedented, and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the cause.


Government's Contain–Delay–Mitigate–Research strategy failed. It failed, in part, because ministers didn't follow WHO's advice to “test, test, test” every suspected case. They didn't isolate and quarantine. 


They didn't contact trace. These basic principles of public health and infectious disease control were ignored, for reasons that remain opaque. The UK now has a new plan—Suppress–Shield–Treat–Palliate. 


But this plan, agreed far too late in the course of the outbreak, has left the NHS wholly unprepared for the surge of severely and critically ill patients that will soon come. I asked NHS workers to contact me with their experiences. Their messages have been as distressing as they have been horrifying.


 “It's terrifying for staff at the moment. Still no access to personal protective equipment [PPE] or testing.” “Rigid command structures make decision making impossible.”


“There's been no guidelines, it's chaos.” “I don't feel safe. I don't feel protected.” “We are literally making it up as we go along.” “It feels as if we are actively harming patients.” 


 “We need protection and prevention.” “Total carnage.” “NHS Trusts continue to fail miserably.” “Humanitarian crisis.” “Forget lockdown—we are going into meltdown.”


“When I was country director in many conflict zones, we had better preparedness.” “The hospitals in London are overwhelmed.” “The public and media are not aware that today we no longer live in a city with a properly functioning western health-care system.”


“How will we protect our patients and staff…I am speechless. It is utterly unconscionable. How can we do this? It is criminal…NHS England was not prepared…We feel completely helpless.”


England's Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jenny Harries, said on March 20, 2020: “The country has a perfectly adequate supply of PPE.” She claimed that supply pressures had now been “completely resolved”.


 I am sure Dr Harries believed what she said. But she was wrong and she should apologise to the thousands of health workers who still have no access to WHO-standard PPE.

 

I receive examples daily of doctors having to assess patients with respiratory symptoms but who do so without the necessary PPE to complete their jobs safely.


Health workers are challenged if they ask for face masks. Even where there is PPE, there may be no training. WHO standards are not being met. Proper testing of masks is being omitted.


Stickers with new expiry dates are being put on PPE that expired in 2016. Doctors have been forced to go to hardware stores to buy their own face masks. Patients with suspected COVID-19 are mixing with non-COVID-19 patients.


The situation is so dire that staff are frequently breaking down in tears. As one physician wrote, “The utter failure of sound clinical leadership will lead to an absolute explosion of nosocomial COVID-19 infection.” Front-line staff are already contracting and dying from the disease.


The NHS has been wholly unprepared for this pandemic. It's impossible to understand why. Based on their modelling of the Wuhan outbreak of COVID-19, Joseph Wu and his colleagues wrote in The Lancet on Jan 31, 2020.


“On the present trajectory, 2019-nCoV could be about to become a global epidemic…for health protection within China and internationally…preparedness plans should be readied for deployment at short notice, including securing supply chains of pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment, hospital supplies, and the necessary human resources to deal with the consequences of a global outbreak of this magnitude.”


This warning wasn't made lightly. It should have been read by the Chief Medical Officer, the Chief Executive Officer of the NHS in England, and the Chief Scientific Adviser. They had a duty to immediately put the NHS and British public on high alert.


February should have been used to expand coronavirus testing capacity, ensure the distribution of WHO-approved PPE, and establish training programmes and guidelines to protect NHS staff. They didn't take any of those actions. The result has been chaos and panic across the NHS.


Patients will die unnecessarily. NHS staff will die unnecessarily. It is, indeed, as one health worker wrote last week, “a national scandal”. The gravity of that scandal has yet to be understood. 

 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30727-3/fulltext?ref=drnweb.repubblica.scroll-2&fbclid=IwAR3QrP5NsJNO2mOANV8w1tCg7TgCpTMiQS17M9og_kNAeuWaOy8zchZgixM#

 

 

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20 minutes ago, les186 said:

I'm talking about all programmes, like old films for example. I need help, I might pop round to William and Kate's after this virus "blows over".

We've been saying the same thing. Funny how things change, like seeing smoking in old films

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1 hour ago, JFK-1 said:

A damning article published yesterday in esteemed medical journal The Lancet penned by the journals editor in chief himself Richard Horton.

 

 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30727-3/fulltext?ref=drnweb.repubblica.scroll-2&fbclid=IwAR3QrP5NsJNO2mOANV8w1tCg7TgCpTMiQS17M9og_kNAeuWaOy8zchZgixM#

 

 

What Richard Horton do you advocate the Government should listen to?

 

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A Question Time rant from Lancet editor Richard Horton is doing the rounds this morning after he savaged the “national scandal” of “being in this position. We knew in the last week of January that this was coming – the message from China was absolutely clear that a new virus with pandemic potential was hitting cities.” Hindsight is a wonderful thing…

 

Richard claims the message by the end of January from China was absolutely clear – why then, in late January, did he Tweet:

The WHO at the time downplayed the possibility of Coronavirus becoming a global pandemic, and parroted the Chinese authorities ‘findings’ that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. Something Horton called “clear and confident”…

Richard’s own journal, The Lancet, included a report on the effects of Coronavirus in China published weeks later in the February edition, which said “2019-nCoV still needs to be studied deeply in case it becomes a global health threat” – implying they did not, at the time, see the virus as a global health threat. Richard is arguing that governments around the world should have seen what he, the editor of one of the world’s premier medical journals, only sees in retrospect…

 

https://order-order.com/2020/03/27/lancet-editor-slams-government-for-listening-to-his-advice/

Personally I give more credence to the Japanese opinion of WHO.

 

More on Horton:

https://order-order.com/?s=Richard Horton#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=Richard Horton&gsc.page=1

Edited by forlanssister
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The EU and the Scottish Government just became irrelevant.

 

In recent weeks we have seen the power of the sovereign nation state deal with a crisis in a way that has not been seen since 1945. The British Government has been able to spend almost without limit to keep our people safe. It has taken other extraordinary measures to keep us in our homes and to keep essential services running. Other European countries have taken similar measures. Some have gone further by closing their borders, though others have been unable to do as much as Britain because they have a shared currency. There have been two lessons. The sub-national and the supra-national have become irrelevant.

 

Nicola Sturgeon may give press conferences and she may try to give a Tartan tinge to the crisis, but in essence she is either repeating the advice she heard from the British Government or else she is failing to implement initiatives such as the volunteer scheme in England that would be useful here too. We have discovered that the Scottish Government is not really a Government at all. In time of crisis it is Rishi Sunak who controls the money that will pay Scottish wages and help Scottish businesses keep going. It’s hard to see how the Scottish Government is contributing anything except getting in the way of a united British response to a deadly disease. 

 

 

 Devolution is failing the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The devolved parliaments are saving no lives. The last thing we need is confusion and separate health care. We need a single National Health Service for the whole of Britain. We don’t need division and those who want to split our country. We likewise don’t need those who have spent the past decade concentrating on Scottish independence rather that Scottish hospitals.

 

There are quite a lot of people in Northern Ireland who would like to be governed by Dublin. Are these people going to refuse the money that the British Treasury will be giving them in the coming weeks and months? The Irish Government frequently has an opinion about Northern Ireland, but it will not pay the wages of anyone in Northern Ireland and it will not help any Northern Irish businesses. Perhaps the Irish Government should promise to pay back any money that we give Northern Ireland before making any more murmurings about unification. Could the Irish Government even have met the expense of both subsidising Northern Ireland and dealing with the present crisis there?

 

When this crisis has passed let us work out the bill and present it to Dublin. This is the price of voting for Sinn Féin, talk to us again when you have paid it. The same point of course should be made to Nicola Sturgeon about independence. Scottish nationalists can talk again about separation when they’ve paid back their wages. 

 

All over Europe the sub-national has become irrelevant. No one cares about Bavaria’s response to Covid 19. When we count cases and deaths, we are counting the whole of Poland, France and Spain. Each country is fighting the disease together, united and with common purpose. The sub-national has dropped out of the equation. But so too the supra-national has contributed little compared to the nation state.

 

The decisions by various European countries to close their borders and the decisions to do whatever is necessary to help keep their countries working effectively have all been taken by national Governments. We have discovered that EU rules about free movement and the various rights of EU citizens have become meaningless. 

 

Does anyone care what if anything the European Parliament has said about Covid 19? Is anyone listening to the European Commission or its president Ursula von der Leyen? Angela Merkel’s opinion is far more important, because she and her Government can act. The EU is paying no one’s wages. The EU is bailing out no firms. The EU is saving no lives. The EU is a complete irrelevance. 

 

Every country in Europe has its own policies. The Swedes and the Dutch are following the advice of their experts. The Poles and the Czechs are deciding how long their borders will be closed and the rules and regulations of social distancing. There is no EU Government that is controlling anything, deciding anything or even doing much to help. The European Central Bank has done what it can to help the Euro, but it has been unable to do what the Bank of England and the British Chancellor has done because there is no agreement on pooling and sharing the debts of the member states of the Eurozone. 

 

This is the difference between being a part of a nation state and being part of the EU. If a Scottish bank or business is in trouble the British Treasury will come to the rescue. If Scottish people have no wages or indeed if Scottish hospitals cannot cope, then the British Government will respond to the crisis. They will do this even if you hate Britain and want to leave. The EU wouldn’t pay your wages if you lived in an independent Scotland. It wouldn’t bail out your business. It wouldn’t organise a flight to get you home. 

 

People all over Europe are going to realise quickly that neither the sub-national (Scotland, Catalonia etc), nor the supra-national (EU, UN etc) did much to help. Why pay those who don’t help? Individual citizens working with their national Government will solve this crisis. Both the EU and the Scottish Government just became irrelevant.

https://www.effiedeans.com/2020/03/the-eu-and-scottish-government-just.html?fbclid=IwAR1hQdJ9e-nKsdtWH3SxNZAJjUDA5HR01zolNq6x0uLXCKz6jBHGXl595AU

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