[dijit]

I appreciate you taking the time to comment in these threads, especially as people who see that you're a tory person will probably disavow the things you say on the face of it.

That said, I hope you don't take it as a rebuttal for the sake of it if I disagree.

The "solution" that our government suggested was to do nothing, not just to not to lock down at all but to quite literally do nothing.

This could have been the right thing to do and indeed was based on a pandemic model that had been created before. But was widely criticised at the time because the pandemic model which was used in the model had a significantly lower unmitigated R value.

It's possible for some to conclude that "they did the best with the information that they had at the time" owing to the fact that typically we always operate with an uncertain future, and looking back on passed decisions can be done with the clarity and certainty that only living with consequences can grant: but that does not apply here. Boris and co. intentionally downplayed the pandemic, intentionally killed off PPE plans and intentionally prevented the roll out of testing where needed.

This is before we even _think_ about lock-downs.

Lock-downs are not a panacea and they do nothing to stop a pandemic, they merely slow it while we work on a vaccine or until the population is sufficiently immune (without overwhelming healthcare).

The key thing for the current government is, then: do not overwhelm healthcare.

Which is harder to do when your party has chronically underfunded it for over a decade.

[detritus]

I'm not a Tory. You're perhaps conflating me with the first responder who admitted as much. That said, I can't stand ANY of our political masters and think party politics is mostly dysfunctional and inefficient.

Do I think Labour or the LibDems would have done any better, given they'd likely end up relying on much the same scientific input? Nope.

[dijit]

yes I think I'm confusing you two, my bad.

I do think that the conservatives have done worse than the others would have, but that's not really supported with any evidence other than it couldn't have been handled much worse.

The real fact I'm trying to bring home is that the healthcare capacity is one of the most important things and it is one of those things that has been in atrophied for many years.

The current governments approach, while quite slow, miscommunicated and contradictory: would have worked better if we had a working and well funded healthcare system.