The honeymoon will be shorter than most

@Whitewavemark2 - exactly!

Care workers who claimed to have "no PPE" at the START of the crisis couldnt have run out yet

They obviously werent using it before. And they should have been. And why didnt that bother then before it was themselves vulnerable?

How many vulnerable people were they cross contaminating before hand with MRSA flu noro TB MARO ESBL KP etc....

Why did they have "no PPE" right back at the BEGINNING?
2 possibilities:
1. They had a stock to start with and they or their colleagues stole it when the outbreak started
2. They werent using it before when they should have been

Had they run out 2 weeks in, that would have been different.

Carers and NHS workers are a mixed bag as much as anyone else.

Supply issues arent just about getting supplies IN. Its also about not wasting what you HAVE. Sharing and using it correctly. Not missusing it. Not damaging or contaminating it. Its not just about have or dont have.

Lots of issues went on at ground level too. Thefts went on. PPE and hand gel had to be collected up and locked away in some hospitals due to staff taking it home in the early days. There ARE bad care workers who DID underuse PPE when "only" service users were at risk out of laziness or apathy, meaning that it wasnt getting re-ordered as often as it could have been, who only cared about using it when THEY THEMSELVES were at risk.

No accurate review will find any tier not lacking or having weak links.

There isnt one villan responsible for shortages. Not only that but some claims of shortages werent shortages at all but missmanagement of stock that WAS in place. Its lots of contributing factors: swiss cheese effect. From global right right down through to users.

notanan I think most people have accepted that any government would have found this crisis very difficult to deal with.

However, had the government, which has been in position since 2010, taken seriously the warnings given in 2016 and in the summer of last year that this country was severely unprepared for a major health crisis, we would at least not have started on the back foot. Also, the government was well aware that there is a severe crisis in the recruitment and retention of nurses yet did nothing to address that issue, instead imposing wage restraints that in effect meant nurses were both taking a pay cut whilst working in an increasingly under staffed and stressful environment.

I don't agree with the concept of heroes and villains either but in fact some sections of the population are treating the prime minister as if he were a hero, when in fact he could just as easily be characterised as ineffective and irresponsible. When, for instance, you compare the prime minister's briefings to those of Angela Merkel, who has a firm understanding of the science and of the use of statistics to identify trends, his contribution is often what some commentators have described as "waffle".

Why is it that the mainstream press (which is almost always highly supportive of the Conservative Party in both donations and editorials) has also severely criticised the government's handling of this crisis? The Mail and the Telegraph are hardly left wing rags.

The number of deaths in the UK now stands at over 26,000 and will presumably continue to rise for some time, since we are still in a state of disorganisation re PPE, staff to patient ratios and testing. This is despite the fact that we are an island with no borders with other countries - unlike the rest of Europe whose open borders obviously pose more of a risk of transfer of the virus from one country to another.

I would imagine that many people who have friends and family working in hospitals and care homes will take great exception to you implying that theft and misuse of PPE is responsible for the shortages. Your sarcastic reference to "hero carers" in nursing homes, suggesting that that they only care about their own safety and not that of their residents is, I think, way beyond fair comment.

The people who want a heros Vs villans situation simply wont want to hear a thorough analysis as it wont be as simple as blame the government.

They wont want to hear about PPE missuse and theft and disagreements about its use at clinical level which had nothing to do with the government. They wont want to hear that there WAS PPE in areas where that was the case. They wont want to hear that the hero carers in nursing homes didnt bother using PPE before CV when it was only other residents, and not themselves at risk, so it wasnt needing to be regularly reordered and restocked.

They want goodies and baddies.
The truth wont pain a goodies Vs baddies picture. It'll be shades of grey from top to bottom. And that will be dismissed as an "attack" on the NHS to defer from the government.

Well said PurplePatch - reading about the different problems in other countries it’s obvious that they all could be held to account on many things.

Thank you for your understanding SirChenin

When this is all over and the political inquests start, I think different countries will fare differently on particular aspects.

For example, on the NHS not being overwhelmed I think the UK will do better than some countries. on testing I think it will do worse, on lockdown probably a week too late, on PPE be only one of many who had inadequate supplies. (I googled other countries who were complaining of lack of PPE then gave up after the US, Canada, India Italy, Spain and the WHO statement "The chronic global shortage of personal protective equipment is now one of the most urgent threats to our collective ability to save lives".)

Comparisons are invidious. It is nonsense to try and compare densely packed global hub cities such as London, New York and Brussels with, say, New Zealand with its tiny population smaller even than London and spread out over a country the size of the UK.

It is also probably unfair to compare Europe with south east Asian countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong with their
experience of dealing with epidemics such as SARS.

The best we can hope for is that every country's governments are willing to admit where they got things wrong, where they could have done better and how they will learn from each other for the future.

SO much work will have gone into so many things that we didnt even notice because they werent disrupted at our end

E.g. the national grid kept going despite sickness levels causing new challenges

Even our bins still got collected

Our phonelines stayed open

We got our regular prescriptions

None of that came easily behind the scenes. Keeping those things running in a pandemic took huge logistical input

I didn’t say they had nailed it. I’ll leave you to it, I need to get on with work.

Our food and utility supplies were maintained throughout which is no small thing and shouldnt be taken for granted. Black markets did not get to swoop in to fill a vacume like they did elsewhere

Nobody anywhere has nailed it!

We've done a lot better than many others though

And lots wasn’t done.

Urmstongran Quote [Why Firecracker? What happened? I missed it.] End Quote.

Urmstongran, the problem is the Kier Starmer stood up at the dispatch box at Prime Ministers Question Time and nothing happened. ?

A lot of good HAS been done. Compare us to other countries where no provision whatsoever was made for keyworker childcare, where lockdown poverty from there being no support for the self employed has seen a surge in organised crime, where bereaved keyworkers families get no payments to keep a roof over their heads.

Lots has been done here that wasnt done overseas even by some of our nearest neighbours

Why Firecracker? What happened? I missed it. (sat in the sunshine ??)

Well actually it seems the honeymoon is over for Kier Starmer after just two PMQs lol.

That to maddy

I would say they’ve made a lot of mistakes but I do understand about recognising when the negative feelings start creeping back in and taking steps to help yourself deal with that - whatever those steps are.

I find it interesting that some people (I don’t mean you here maddy ) automatically view realism as negativity and don’t wish to discuss anything that interferes with their positive thoughts - or if they do they very quickly push them to one side.

If criticism of the government for perceived ineptitude in this crisis is what some forum members are looking for then it certainly will not be forthcoming from Kier Starmer.

I am working from home at present and stopped at lunchtime to view prime minister's question time. I felt that Starmer's performance was the worst of any Labour leader at PMQs in my living memory.

His questions were too long and detailed, and he spread his six questions over a range of topics which meant he never at any time placed any real pressure on the government which could have been the case with a series of questions on the same issue.

The above amounted to another total loss for the new Labour Leader following his failure to come to grips with the enormous crisis which has erupted throughout the whole Labour Movement following the leak of the antisemitism report.

The Parliamentary Labour Party just seems to stagger from one failure to another and one crisis to the next.

Time for real change in this whole Labour Parliamentary set up.

Incidentally I think the government has done a lot of good things and as said before, made some mistakes.

growstuff and SirChenjin
Actually I agree with you both. It’s just that for me too much negativity causes my mental health to suffer and I begin to get symptoms of clinical depression. I already take tablets for that and normally they keep me well and happy. However I found I was watching too much news and reading too many negative threads on here and the old familiar feelings began to creep back, especially in the mornings. I made a decision to avoid too much negative press or threads and it has helped me.
Obviously I’m not looking through rose tinted specs growstuff, as I said earlier my daughter and son in law are doctors and have a limited amount of PPE. My son in law, a GP, did a weekend shift where he had to visit nine different care homes and some of the patients he saw were Covid19 patients, and he had only two face masks for the whole shift. They have three young children and I’m very concerned and frightened for them. I’ve said this on a couple of other threads so apologies if you’ve read it before. However it doesn’t help me or them to soak up as much negativity as I can.
I said in my earlier post and other posts that I have criticised the government for waiting too long before lockdown and for allowing planes to take off and land normally, undoubtedly bringing many cases of Covid19 into the country. This country was slow to act and is paying for that with increased deaths in my opinion. Having said that we have to go forward from where we are.
When this is over, and who knows when that will be, there will be an inquiry and all failings of government and health authorities will be identified, and hopefully we will all learn how something like this can be properly managed in future.

“20k uk civilians died in WW11? And the rest.”

Around that number were thought to have been killed in London during the blitz, total civilian deaths of 67k including some from the colonies.

That was bad enough but other European countries had far greater losses and Russia many millions

newnanny It was a most impressive achievement to construct large hospitals within a short space of time. However, it is not just space and beds that are the problem. Experienced and fully qualified nurses are needed to treat the patients in those beds.

Extracts from The Guardian (April):
"Dozens of patients with Covid-19 have been turned away from the NHS Nightingale hospital in London because it has too few nurses to treat them, the Guardian can reveal.

"The planned transfer of more than 30 patients from established London hospitals to the Nightingale was “cancelled due to staffing issues”, according to NHS documents seen by the Guardian. All the patients had been intubated and were on a ventilator because they were so unwell.

"One member of staff said: “There are plenty of people working here, including plenty of doctors. But there aren’t enough critical care nurses. They’re already working in other hospitals and being run ragged there. There aren’t spare people [specialist nurses] around to do this. That’s the problem. That leads to patients having to be rejected, because there aren’t enough critical care nurses.”

In 2019 the Guardian reported:

"The NHS is relying on less qualified staff to plug workforce gaps because of a huge shortage of nurses, according to a new report.

"Support staff, such as healthcare assistants and nursing associates, have been used to shore up staffing numbers, said the Health Foundation charity.

"At present, there are almost 44,000 nursing vacancies across the NHS (12% of the nursing workforce), but this could hit 100,000 in a decade, the report said.

"The report said: “In 2009-10 there were equal numbers of nurses and support staff, with one clinical support staff member for every full-time equivalent nurse in the NHS.

“By 2018-19, the number of support staff per full-time equivalent nurse had risen 10% to 1.1 full-time equivalent per nurse.”

So far as other industries providing ventilators and PPE, it was the industries themselves that were proactive in contacting the government and many who came forward claimed that their offers of help had been ignored.

As with most things during this crisis, it has been the general public and businesses who have taken the initiative provide community support and to help with the provision of vital equipment - the government has been criticised for its lack of application to these urgent matters.

As for the suggestion by somebody that it is only those on the left who have been critical of the government's performance, that is quite patently untrue.

The New European reports:

"The Daily Mail uses a “statistic that humbles ministers” by reporting that of the 550,000 NHS staff only 2,000 people had been tested.

"It’s “the latest shocking example of our testing scandal” but the newspaper claims it has stung “Boris into action”.

"The Times uses the headline “virus testing plans in chaos” as it claims Boris Johnson has been forced to shift strategy on the government’s testing regime after criticism of the slow pace of checks on NHS staff.

"The Daily Telegraph is the most critical with the headline “Questions without answers”,m t asks why the UK is lagging behind other nations on testing, why so few NHS workers have been tested, and asks when new antibody tests will be ready."

If we didn’t have negativity we’d still be sending children up chimneys and slavery. Negativity and criticism is a good thing - it pushes for change for the better and holds people and Govts to account.