In a word - no. We are not ready, and haven't even begun to learn the lessons from the first wave. I can't see the government agreeing to such a review, not with their eyes on budgets and the stock market, and they will wriggle out of this for fear of their catalogue of incompetence being revealed in all its glory. With the behaviour of sections of our society, the chances of a second wave are increasing day by day, and I have little confidence that the government will deal with it any better the second time around.

“The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on this planet is the virus,”.

Biologist Joshua Lederberg (Nobel prize (half) for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic materials of bacteria).

And there will be no second wave. It has been banned. Mr C****ngs (PM) has disallowed it.

No matter what the govt says or does, people will pay little attention to it.

Fortunately, treatment options for "the virus" have improved dramatically (it also helps that it preferentially attacks, badly, the aged). We can but hope that the HoL and the HoC become viral ground zero.

A second wave is likely, in fact almost certain.  I think that the government is assuming that these secondary outbreaks will be contained locally and in certain areas lockdowns etc might be reimposed; the economy cannot afford a second national lockdown.

What controls might be reimposed is hard to tell. The government have given themselves wide powers to “do what is necessary” which could conceivably mean a complete and utter shutdown of everything in a particular area. You can’t really plan for that; you can’t predict when it will happen, where it will happen, what actions the government might take, and how long for.

It you are cautious might decide that the best thing to do is to take it slow and not over commit to anything, but then you will simply slowly kill your business off. On the other hand you could take the Boris at his word and just go for it and steal a march on your rivals by opening up fully for business and firing on all cylinders. In that case a sudden reimposition of a lock down could kill your business quickly.

How you might plan for this apart from take yourself up into the hills with enough ammunition to hold off a zombie army? I have no idea!

Let us not lose site of the fact that the plan was never to STOP the spread of Covid19 but to CONTROL its spread so that the NHS could cope. We will sadly continue to see deaths attributed to Covid 19 for some time to come, just like we see approximately 10,000 deaths a year from flu (more when we predict the wrong strain and don’t immunise) its not (and may never be) over. Had we closed our boarders to restrict its entry it is likely we would have to do that for at least 2 years until a vaccine could be found, but again no guarantee it we can do that. While some may not like the term we need to build up herd immunity – just like we have to the common cold as we will never cure it. History tells us of many communities wiped out by visitors bringing in unknown diseases. That is where we could have found ourselves if we had isolated.

For me this has been a PUBLIC HEALTH emergency not a real Health and Safety At Work Issue,(unless you are in the health care sector or laboratory)  but then everything is Elf and Safety when they want it to be.

I will continue to follow government guidance to help restrict that spread of Covid 19 as that’s as much as I can do – even coming from a research science background, very few of us will never be Virologists and able to do more.

This sadly is unlikely to be the last pandemic that will occur, its certainly not the only communicable disease that you may catch at work, in the supermarket or on the train etc, and while the death toile may not be so high what is the price of 1 life – and what precautions do we take against those?

 My understanding of the our handling of the situation is as follows:

Before the pandemic struck there was an audit of the major countries in the world, to see how prepared they were for a pandemic. The UK did surprisingly well. We had all the right procedures in place and a plan to deal with the outbreak. Unfortunately this was based on an influenza pandemic, since that seemed the most likely with "Avian Flu" doing the rounds. I am not sure why this isn't more public than it is.

With influenza you, apparently, don't shut down (I don't know why). Our government kept on a blinkered path, following the plans laid out, despite the fact that it was obvious that this was a different beast.

I will highlight a few of the key points from the research below linked at the end of this post. Read the full document and you will see what I mean.

4.18 There are no plans to attempt to close borders in the event of an influenza pandemic. Modelling suggests that imposing a 90% restriction on all air travel to the UK at the point a pandemic emerges would only delay the peak of a pandemic wave by one to two weeks. Even a 99.9% travel restriction might delay a pandemic wave by only two months.

4.21 There is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/213717/dh_131040.pdf

The Asian countries had previous experience with SARS, which is one reason they were far more prepared for this sort of disease than Europe and the US. Obviously, in hindsight, we should have been working closely with them from the start.

Again the cynic in me would suggest this has underlying racist causes.The US president even refers to the virus like it has an ethnicity. We don't do those "funny meat places" (actual quote from one of our employees), therefore it doesn't affect us. Let them deal with it. Never mind the conditions that we keep out livestock in. Sorry going on a rant again. hard not to with the current situation and a public that seems not to even care about their fellow humans, let alone a non-human being.

Back in 2004 the government passed the Civil Contingences Act to improve our ability to withstand what life threw at us or at least it was supposed to

An emergency is widely defined but includes: an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom.

It is for the government to decide whether something actually is an emergency.

To support them they established the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), which provides assistance to COBRA. Where I worked in the Civil Service we were briefed that CCS had worked up 26 scenarios which it thought of as emergencies under the Act and as required they made preparations for dealing with these emergencies. One such scenario was an outbreak of an airborne infection emerging in the Far East. The money was on some sort of flu pandemic. As the years past it seems that we ie the government became complacent. They tended to solely focus on termism as the only serious scenario and the other stuff began to fall by the wayside. After all it cost money to maintain stocks of things like PPE. My own department had two strategic stock piles to deal with an outbreak of bird flu, foot and mouth or some sort of other animal disease including rabies. We dipped into the stock pile during various outbreaks but then instructions came not to replace the stocks of gloves, face masks etc. Someone mentioned that we needed to be lean to save money and we could rely on a just in time approach. Of course the supply chain itself was lean and relied on a just in time approach so there was no surge capacity. The government also ran down its labs as it was easier to contract out those sorts of services to the private sector and so it went.

The inadequate response to the outbreak is the product of at least a decade  of  lean just in-time management, which is of course the opposite of what contingency planning should be about: it is by its very nature fat not lean.

Edited by user 26 June 2020 10:36:34(UTC)  | Reason: too many conditions