Tuesday, July 07, 2020
Onto the blame game
It appears that the next phase of the coronavirus pandemic is the blame game, where the government tries to get in its excuses ahead of a public inquiry so that all their mistakes can be attributed to somebody else.
We have already seem ministers lining up the scientists in this regard, arguing consistently that they are following the science, when in reality they are making decisions on the basis of a large range of information, some contradictory, and in some cases putting off decisions at a huge cost.
The Guardian reported only a few weeks ago, for example, the view of Professor Neil Ferguson that the number of coronavirus deaths in the UK could have been halved if the government had introduced the lockdown a week earlier. That is one assertion that a public inquiry will certainly want to explore.
Now, we have the Prime Minister arguing that some of the deaths in care homes came about because many of them did not follow proper procedures on coronavirus,
Mark Adams, the chief executive of Community Integrated Care, which provides care to a range of people in England and Scotland, has called this claim “clumsy and cowardly”, arguing that care homes are still having to provide much of their personal protective equipment (PPE), and are only now getting sufficient access to testing.
Mr. Adams sums up the government's whole approach to taking responsibility for its decisions when he says: “I think this, at best, was clumsy and cowardly, but to be honest with you, if this is genuinely his view, I think we’re almost entering a Kafka-esque alternative reality where the government set the rules, we follow them, they don’t like the results and they then deny setting the rules and blame the people that were trying to do their best. It is hugely frustrating.”
When we eventually do get the inevitable public inquiry into this pandemic it is going to have a lot of misinformation to unravel to get to the truth.
We have already seem ministers lining up the scientists in this regard, arguing consistently that they are following the science, when in reality they are making decisions on the basis of a large range of information, some contradictory, and in some cases putting off decisions at a huge cost.
The Guardian reported only a few weeks ago, for example, the view of Professor Neil Ferguson that the number of coronavirus deaths in the UK could have been halved if the government had introduced the lockdown a week earlier. That is one assertion that a public inquiry will certainly want to explore.
Now, we have the Prime Minister arguing that some of the deaths in care homes came about because many of them did not follow proper procedures on coronavirus,
Mark Adams, the chief executive of Community Integrated Care, which provides care to a range of people in England and Scotland, has called this claim “clumsy and cowardly”, arguing that care homes are still having to provide much of their personal protective equipment (PPE), and are only now getting sufficient access to testing.
Mr. Adams sums up the government's whole approach to taking responsibility for its decisions when he says: “I think this, at best, was clumsy and cowardly, but to be honest with you, if this is genuinely his view, I think we’re almost entering a Kafka-esque alternative reality where the government set the rules, we follow them, they don’t like the results and they then deny setting the rules and blame the people that were trying to do their best. It is hugely frustrating.”
When we eventually do get the inevitable public inquiry into this pandemic it is going to have a lot of misinformation to unravel to get to the truth.
