Scumbag 'nasty party' has failed spectacularly !!!

Seems I'm not the only one to criticise the scumbag 'nasty party' !!!


Coronavirus: UK's response has 'failed spectacularly', says former Conservative MP


A former Tory MP has hit out at the government's coronavirus response, describing it as "unacceptable".

Dr Phillip Lee, who quit the Conservative party in 2019 in protest at the government's handling of Brexit, said the Boris Johnson administration has "failed spectacularly" over the COVID-19 pandemic.

The former MP, who lost his seat in the 2019 election when he stood as a Liberal Democrat, told LBC that the government's primary goal should be reducing the loss of life.

He said: "The scale of unnecessary loss of life in this country is unacceptable. What angers me most is we could have done so much better.

"I'm very conscious of the fact that comparing figures at the moment by country is somewhat difficult for a variety of different reasons."

He added: "We have to ask ourselves why our governance has failed so spectacularly."

Lee said that it was "utter nonsense" for the government to claim their response to coronavirus was a success.

His comments come a day after after it was announced that a total of 26,097 people have died in hospitals, care homes and the wider community in the UK after contracting COVID-19.

It is the first time data on the number of deaths in care homes and the wider community has been included in the Government's daily updates.

The total is around 17% higher than previous data showed and includes an additional 3,811 deaths recorded since the start of the outbreak.

Of these, around 70% were outside hospital settings.

The change in measurement means the UK death toll is the third highest in the world, behind the US and Italy, based on data from Johns Hopkins.

The US had reported 58,355 deaths and Italy 27,359.

The Government pointed out other countries may report figures differently and any lag is unclear, although France and Italy also include deaths in care homes.

 

Yet another spectacular failure - brought about by arrogance, ignorance and incompetence of the scumbag 'nasty party' !!!


Public health professor says NHS testing system ’emaciated’ by Tory cuts

PA
Apr 30th 2020 8:28PM
Conservative government cuts have "emaciated" the testing system and made the ability to track down coronavirus cases more difficult, a public health professor has claimed.

Gabriel Scally, a former regional director of public health, said he was "very worried" about the country's ability to get to the levels of contact tracers needed, saying 10 years ago it would have been possible – but cuts have damaged this.

His anger was in response to Conservative former Cabinet minister David Gauke's defence of reductions in public spending, warning of an "even more difficult situation" without austerity as he tried to focus on resilience.

But the Bristol University professor told BBC Newsnight: "I think that's nonsense if I may be so bold.

"The resilience has been stripped systematically out of the system, you cannot, when a big problem like this hits, you can't just reinvent things and put them back the way you wish they were.


Confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK.
"If you make the system as lean and emaciated as it is there will not be the public health staff there, there will not be the health visitors, there will not be the environmental health officers and you can't magic them up out of nowhere.

"Simply testing key workers, health service workers and the over 65s really won't cut it, so it needs to be a comprehensive programme," he added.

Meanwhile, Sir Paul Nurse, chief executive of biomedical research centre the Francis Crick Institute, labelled the Government's target of 100,000 coronavirus tests per day "a PR stunt".

On April 2, Health Secretary Matt Hancock pledged to reach the target by the end of the month.

However only 52,000 tests were carried out on Tuesday.

Speaking on BBC Question Time, Sir Paul said there had been no visible strategy behind the 100,000 target.

"It was, as far as I'm concerned, a bit of a PR stunt which has gone a bit wrong," he said.

"Where was the strategy under that? I haven't seen a strategy under it. It just sounded good."

"Testing was absolutely critical. It hasn't been handled properly"

Geneticist Paul Nurse says the government's coronavirus testing target number of 100,000 tests per day was a 'bit of a PR stunt'. #bbcqtpic.twitter.com/K3Wd5r6xiR

— BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) April 30, 2020

Sir Paul added that the Government missed the opportunity to make hospitals safer by mass testing healthcare workers regardless of whether they were showing symptoms.

"If we had had local testing connected to local hospitals, we could have made hospitals a safe place," he said.

"(Instead) what we had is the potential for having care workers working on the wards, working with sick patients who were carrying the disease and weren't being tested.

"They had such restricted rules on who could be tested that they didn't simply make the decision that we have to test everybody that is a frontline worker and, in particular, they wouldn't test anybody who had no symptoms.

"We were allowing potentially for frontline care workers to be on the wards potentially infecting people because we weren't testing.

"Now that may have been because they didn't have testing capacity throughout the country but you can't simply say we don't need to do it because we don't have testing capacity and even when we could provide testing capacity we couldn't do it because of the NHS rules.

"Testing was absolutely critical, it hasn't been handled properly."

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick said he thought Government testing for coronavirus would have been a "success" even if the 100,000 target was not met on time.

Mr Jenrick made the remarks to Sky News on Friday morning before the announcement of the official testing figures.

"I think we will either have met it or be very close, and in that sense the target will have succeeded because it will have galvanised people across government, in the private sector and across the country," he said.

"This in itself is just a stepping stone, we need to go beyond 100,000, but we have seen now a very substantial increase in testing in quite a short period of time, so in that sense it's been a success, but there's more to be done."