The issue isn’t I don’t think hospital admissions, but more about sickness leave / isolation in the emergency services. They need to look at reducing the 10 day isolation period as I’ve known people come the last few days are just sat there twiddling their thumbs
I`m curious why those Nightingale hospitals haven`t been reinstated, if there are fears over hospital capacity again.
Yeah I don't think they were ever used in a meaningful way in 2020 due to not being able to staff them.
It was kind of propaganda really wasn’t it? And i know it boosted morale in some circles It was showing the government as looking like they were doing something Maybe they would have been useful if things had got really bad? Not sure who would have staffed them though. Go to always seems to be suggesting the Armed Forces for some reason
They were real, not just propaganda. My company (at that time) that I was working for helped install some of the equipment inside them. They just weren’t needed.
The fact remains that they could only ever have been staffed by moving staff from other hospitals though.
I more meant that it didn’t seem like they were ever needed so making the real buildings was the propaganda move. Something that has been done throughout history I guess if those worst case numbers had been hit ? Or if people had been less compliant etc
In fairness at that point, we really didn't know what we were dealing with. It was a sensible contingency (and yes, maybe armed forces medics could have been drafted in?) that thankfully wasn't required.
Yeah, you'd much rather have plans in place that don't get used than find yourself completely ****ed because you didn't plan. Like, perhaps in the future restocking our supply of pandemic-preparedness equipment shouldn't be a budgetary cut, as it was in Canada, the UK and US..."why are we spending millions on stuff that reaches its best-before date and gets tossed before ever getting used?" sounds reasonable right up until "throw hundreds of millions at whatever friend of the PM promises they can source off-brand Chinese masks that don't actually work" becomes a reality.
That's the problem with any 'Insurance' - You (countries, in this case) only ever need insurance as a 'just in case' situation. The argument is (probably) that no infectious diseases have happened since whenever, so why spend money on something that might never happen? For those of us with a classical bent (Ooh, er, missus) I point you to Cassandra, who was always right, but no-one believed her. Maybe Chris Whitty is a descendant? I completely agree with your second point about paying large sums to mates of people in government to source dodgy PPE, but in a society where altruism is only ever seen in crossword clues, people who are not influencing decisions will always lose out.
I agree, except the number of qualified medical personnel in the armed forces isn’t that great nowadays.
And therein lies the issue. A pandemic was going to happen at some point; we had gone an atypically long time since the last truly devastating one, and had a couple near misses. But from a political standpoint, the odds are that it'll be someone else's problem. And do you want to spend money to safeguard against something that will, in all likelihood, not be something you're going to deal with? Similarly, Omicron exists in part because the governments of rich countries opted to protect the patent rights of pharmaceuticals rather than force them into licensing the mRNA vaccines to hasten production and deployment in poorer countries, because that too was deemed not our problem. But of course it was always going to be our problem because viruses do not care about borders, and if Omicron proves to be less deadly and outcompetes Delta and Friends it's only going to be sheer dumb luck that brings this to an end. A lack of altruism is a major problem, but so too is confusing long-view self-interest with altruism and then deciding that you don't need it, heh.
There's a limited and declining pool of qualified medical staff and those that maintain the infrastructure. Many are close to burnt out exhaustion. When I see staff being haranged by rabid antivaxx conspiraloons, invading the hospital and intimidating schoolchildren l feel like declaring open season on them.
Was supposed to have a meeting with an architect this afternoon. He's had his Pfizer booster this morning and has had a bit of a reaction and now feels like a complete bag of crap apparently. I had a sore arm but that was all after my booster but felt ill after both of the AZ jabs previously. He had no ill effects after his first 2 AZ jabs and the booster has laid him low. Just goes to show how different people's reactions can be to the same sequence of jabs.
Yeah, I had no side affects from my first 2 jabs (both Pfizer) and felt a bit crappy but not bad with my Moderna booster. And I know people who had the same and knocked them for 6.
A sensible government, especially in the UK where we have the NHS, would set up their pandemic stock preparations as part of a distribution hub, so that hospitals are routinely supplied from there. That way date sensitive products are dated rotated, like fresh food in supermarkets, and should never go out of date.
The internal market set up by Thatcher and extended by Blair created so many extra layers of bureaucracy just to deal with the centralisation of NHS supplies.
