So, you do want to continue this argument.
Let's just focus on the facts:
- The virus was out beyond China in December.
- To prevent it reaching the UK you would have needed to close our borders completely by Christmas
- Closing the borders would have locked out hundreds of thousands of British people who were out of the country. As that is never going to happen then you would be looking at quarantining every British person returning; not 'self-isolation' but proper quarantine measures, as were applied to those returning from Wuhan. Anything else wouldn't risk further spread.
- Given that (2) and (3) were 100% impossible then the virus was always going to reach the UK.
- If the virus was always going to get here then we're just talking about the rate of transmission because imposing restrictions on people back in January was also 100% impossible.
So, your 'headless chicken' panic mode was worse than my alleged complacency.
Feel free to continue the argument if you really must. Preferably just move on - and cut out the name calling.
Originally Posted by: Gandalf The White
I think that some of us are still getting too hung up on the point of whether or not it was ever going to be humanly possible to keep Covid-19 out of the UK completely for the duration. As I've mentioned before, I don't think that would have been possible in view of the way it has affected literally the entire world, and I don't think even MM has tried to argue that it was either.
The way that I think about it is like this: If I had been in Boris Johnsons' shoes as Prime Minister in charge of a government faced with the coming of a crisis like this, I would like to think I and the government I led were as proactive a possible in trying to ensure that the virus had the least bad impact on this country as was possible, both in terms of the human cost and damage done to the economy. In my view, the goverment was at least a month too late before they began to warn us of the dangers of the virus to this country. That has been and still is my main criticism of their actions.
We know that the first cases of it in the UK were confirmed in York just before the end of January. That, IMHO, was when HMG should have first sounded the alarm about the threat that the virus posed to the UK based on what was known about events overseas. As I said in a previous thread the other day, it may have been the case that COVID-19 had already reached the UK sometime before this; there again it may not have been. We shall never find that out now one way or the other now. Like I said the other day, the government could only act on what was known and not on anything else.
My own view is, as an ordinary person on the street, is that if the government had acted in early February and taken appropriate steps to, for example, prevent people from this country travelling to Italy and other places for a holiday at half-term where the virus was getting out of control at that time and taken steps to bring back British people from affected countries overseas by way of specially chartered flights and then those people put into quarantine/self-isolation upon their return, it might have made the task of trying to control the spread of the virus in the UK a bit easier than has proved to be the case. In case anyone thinks I am trying to be part-political in any way, believe me I am not. If this horrendous crisis had arisen at any time in the period between 1997 and 2010 when the Labour government led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in power, I would have been every bit as critical of them had they responded in the same way as I have of the Johnson government.
Edited by user
05 April 2020 14:53:56
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Reason: Not specified
Lenzie, Glasgow
"A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody." – Thomas Paine