Our politicians use data they don’t understand

BORIS JOHNSON’S briefing ahead of England’s new national lockdown using “experts” and lots of technical graphical presentations of dire situational forecasts is very impressive and enlightening.

Unfortunately, as an engineer, it’s always been pleasant and at times amusing to observe non-technical people, in fact those who don’t even understand or enjoy technical data or representations like graphs, such as politicians, use or abuse technical data to try to justify their unjustifiable actions.

Our politicians, across all four UK “nations” haven’t got a clue and are flying by the seat of their pants, and are using data and graphs, that they don’t understand themselves, to demonstrate why our next dire steps towards further hardship and disaster, are imperative. It’s comical but horrifying.

Wales is setting the example by jumping the gun to point-score over Boris, making it even worse

I wonder where and when we’ll land? Only God knows, because we certainly don’t.

Gareth Halliwell Marcross, Vale of Glamorgan the same time but few cases were found but we definitely knew about it 17 years ago and of the devastating potential of the virus.

Mr Chelmis states we were unprepared this year to tackle any virus. This is not true, in fact we had prepared well for a flu pandemic but flu is different to the new virus Covid-19. For a start there is a vaccine and you do not need huge stocks of PPE.

We were, however, unprepared for this new virus regrettably. As to why, you would have to ask Blair’s Labour Government who were in power in 2003 and the health experts at PHE etc. Clearly the planning should have started years ago – you can get a lot done in 17 years. This lack of foresight resulted in a very high death toll and left the government with little or no ammunition to fight it.

We have learned from the Asian countries but too late.

Richard Winder

Dinas Powys

We have learned from the Asian countries but too late

Richard Winder Dinas Powys