Boris does it again!

[Inka]

@Docb True about the ‘amateur’ bit and being out of his depth, but he has advisors, he has a Chief Medical Officer, he has SAGE. The problem is he’s desperate to be liked and not to be the bearer of bad news (ie restrictions) he’s also far too focussed on croneyism and ‘money for the boys’ rather than doing what’s right for the country and its citizens.

He wilfully underestimated the virus very early on, and even when people started dying here, he still acted like it was a minor nuisance rather than a pandemic. If he’d acted immediately - shut the borders, stopped flights - Covid wouldn’t have taken hold here in such a big way and would be a lot easier to eradicate and keep out. We have no chance now.

Tens of thousands of people have died already and he’s done far more damage to the economy by trying to carry on as normal - so he’s achieved precisely nothing.

 

[Eddy Edson]

without closing our borders apart from goods then lockdowns are just a pointless affair. 3 lockdowns and borders remain open allowing people to come and go as they please. i spoke to a carer and in the last lockdown they were selling flights to Ireland for £5 sort of speaks for itself.

all lockdowns do is reduce 'r' then as soon as they relax it is here we go around the merry go round.

The UK's coronavirus border policies and execution seem to have been a nexus of f'ed-up-edness between the science advice (which said don't close borders - oops!) and the govt (which is just generally incompetent and weak).

Michael Gove seems well on top of things ....

https://twitter.com/x/status/1346381745218859009

Now they're talking about requiring a negative test from people wanting to enter the UK. That policy has been discussed over & over here in Oz and the best advice always seems to come down to pointing out that it will let too many infections through, and that there's no alternative to enforced, segregated quarantine on arrival.

You really have to stop just about all infections at the border, not just most of them, and for that you need quarantine. Not just for passengers, but also for air crew. Over the last few weeks, for example, about 0.5% of arrivals in Melbourne have tested positivie for CV, but that rises to almost 1% for aircrew. Not taking aircrew seriously was responsible for most of the current little outbreak in Oz. That's now being tigthened up.

You also need to have excellent TTI waiting to clean up infections which do leak through, because a few always will. To do that adequately, you need to be able to very quickly identify cases, establish genomic links, and trace and enforce isolation for both contacts and contacts-of-contacts - on average 200+ isolations per index case ... It doesn't take many index cases to swamp whatever TTI capacity you have.

 

[Paulbreen]

Since May I have visited the UK 5 times, I work in aerospace support so considered an essential worker, coming over has been via ferry because I feel safer than going on a plane but the border is a joke, never even asked to show my paperwork other than my passport.
My customers on the other hand all required a negative test result within 2 days of the visit.

 

[grovesy]

I have an ex-collegue who now lives in Australia and she posted on Facebook to another ex-collegue she wishes we close our borders down.

 

[nonethewiser]

Bungling Boris, says on Andrew Marr schools safe & parents should send them there on Monday knowing new lockdown was inevitable, so kids mingle in school go home & spread virus to family members, all for sake of 1 day.

Man & government are bunch of clowns, made exceptions at start as pandemic was unknown & any party would have made mistakes but not anymore.

 

[Lucy Honeychurch]

That was exactly my observation, dreadful!