THE MONDAY AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE

On Sunday evening 10 May, PM Johnson broadcast a pre-recorded message that set out some sensible overall concepts.

But his talk has been widely slated for a lack of clarity, and that consensus hadn't been developed with either the devolved
administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, nor with Labour and other political parties.

Frankly it looked like a Year 12 school project that had gone horribly wrong.

Could it get any worse?  Hold my beer!

Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, did a round of media interviews on Monday morning that confused people even more.  And resulted in some of the things he said having to be corrected.

Later in the day, a round of briefing papers were released to Parliament, and PM Johnson appeared in the Commons to answer questions.  Again not good.

This is Keir Starmer, Labour leader, trying to make sense of the documents in the Commons this afternoon

The story so far is set out in this damning article "Motor misfires as PM tries to steer away from car crash of night before"


TONIGHT'S PRESS CONFERENCE

So what about tonight's press conference, Monday?

A bit better than Sunday night but still some major issues:
  •  Johnson's waffle was excruciating
  • Questions from public and media clearly showed people were confused.  As basic as what starts today, what starts Wednesday?
  • The PM is expecting people to use their "common sense" without any education as to how the virus spreads, and how to "Control the virus".
  • Nowhere near as clear as other countries as to what people should actually do.  There was a slide of what people would do, but omitted face masks.  In contrast, take this clear example from Thailand:
  • Johnson indicated that the messages needed to be more subtle than "Stay home".  All the more reason to be crystal clear
  • Prof Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government, said that businesses fall into three groups.  I had only thought two - essential and non-essential.  Wouldn't a graphic of that be useful, showing the business types, which will change group over time, and what easing lockdown will mean to them?
So it's not about the strategy, which seems reasonable.  It is about the amateurish communications.

Indeed this is the scathing opinion of how information has been conveyed from one of the SAGE team, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter of the University of Cambridge

CONCERNS ABOUT TESTING

Nonetheless there was something very troubling in the testing statistics.  PM Johnson announced that 1,921,720 tests for the virus have so far been carried out, of which 223,060 have tested positive. That's only 12%.  On the face of it, some 88% of people tested have been let loose into the community. Sounds strange.

As the principle reason to have a test is because of having symptoms, I might expect the opposite.  Only 12% testing negative, released into the community.  That's a difference of 76%, some three quarters.

There are potential reasons for this, such as including tests sent out and not returned, testing of family members who are genuinely virus-free, and other illnesses with similar symptoms.  We need to know the number of people testing negative with and without symptoms.

But on the face of it, the "false negatives" look far too high.  Infectious people let out into the community.  If so, dangerous.


CONCLUSION

I must emphasise that I am only interested in what is best for this country, and to defeat this virus.  I'm not trying to make any party-political capital out of this mess. I  simply couldn't find any credible positive articles to balance these generally negative ones.

It's just that I'm deeply concerned that no matter how good the strategy might be, it is being so poorly communicated.  That cannot carry on.

I'm also deeply concerned about the seemingly high level of "false negatives" in the testing.  This means people who should be self-isolating are going back into the community.  This will be explored further in a separate post.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

R, R, WHERE R'T THOU R? (Updated 29 May)

Image
R has gone AWOL.  The king of the COVID metrics is missing, presumed dead.  Yet so important.  That's what I wrote early on 28 May.  I then found something that made me fall off my chair.  I'm now returning to the topic late morning on 29 May: R is so important as an indicator of how well this coronavirus is being kept under control, and a key part of assessing whether lockdown restrictions can be eased or indeed need to be tightened .  But R is only useful if reflecting the transmission rate now.  The problem is that it isn't.  I am shocked! RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS OF R On 15 May, Sir Patrick Vallance, joint chair of SAGE, tweeted this: We'll go to that web page in a moment.  But before that.... Sir Patrick has tweeted nothing about R since 15 May (as at 10 pm on 29 May).  Nor has Professor Chris Whitty , the other joint chair, presumably as his brief is medical matters.    . So I looked at all the slides...
Read more

SAVE THE SUMMER. SAVE THE ECONOMY. THE POLITICAL ISSUES

Image
The proposal for a second lockdown to save the summer and save the economy is subject to political will.  Several issues need to be overcome. This is a non-partisan post, being neither Leaver or Remainer as far as Brexit is concerned..  Nothing in this post takes away that the Conservative party won the 2019 General Election.  Brexit is done, with the EU already notified that the UK does not wish to extend the transition period beyond December 2020.  No, this is solely about overcoming COVID-19, for which the government needs to be trusted by the public.  This post is fundamentally about leadership. Firstly any government initiative would be undermined were Cummings to remain in post.  Cummings showed that rules don’t need to be followed.  The new lockdown rules would need to be followed for this proposal to work.  He can;t be part of the leadership.  He must go The government has repeatedly said that easings of lockdown restrictions...
Read more