In March, when boris first announced lock up, I had my first and only conversation with my sister about this. We are close, we really agree on most things in life, but when I said to her that the response seemed hugely disproportionate to the problem, she made exactly your point to me, why would the party of business do something so economically destructive?
The conversation ended pretty quickly after that, she thought I was being ridiculous and I was making her anxious.
But it does seem like at every turn, the govt have allowed the situation to look as bad as possible and have worked on the basis of worst case scenarios.
The way deaths are classified, the ONS duplication situation, the dying within 28 days of a positive test, previously, dying ever having tested positive.
I realise now that we are coming from the same position regarding the pcr test. It could be used as an effective tool, if care was taken to minimise the false positive by carrying out each test twice, (is that each positive result or every result?) if it were carried out by trained staff in clinical settings and perhaps if the cycle threshold were lessened.
Given that virtually all policy is based on data obtained via the pcr test results, and that we have acknowledged there are serious issues with the implementation of it, it leads me to worry that this is another way in which the government are choosing to make the situation look as bad as possible. The vast sums of money being thrown around could have paid for the double test scenario for example.
I still want that open, public debate, where all the cards are laid on the table and words of one syllable used, making all information available to everyone, but it won’t happen.
I honestly believe there is more to this than protecting the public from a virus, everything leads me to feel that. I don’t know what or why.
