Government ignores expert advice on Covid

ANTHONY Pick (Conservative) lost his West Berkshire Council seat in the 2019 Newbury Wash Common election, by a substantial margin, for good reason.

Because he has a tendency to rewrite history, as he did in his recent letter ( Newbury Weekly News, November

12).

He complains that the criticism of the present Government’s handling of the Covid crisis is easy ‘in hindsight’. However, as usual, he is rewriting history.

Let’s look at the facts: i) In 2016 the UK health agencies undertook a pandemic flu exercise (project Cygnus).

The findings from this identified a lack of ventilators, lack of PPE and a lack of stockpiles of antibiotics and other medications.

The recommendations coming out of this exercise were completely ignored by the present Government. ii) Prior to the March 2020 lockdown the Government had already been warned by scientists and by countries such as China and Korea (who had experience with SARS) that they needed to enforce social distancing and introduce public hygiene measures immediately.

This advice was ignored.

Instead, sporting events such as Cheltenham were allowed to go ahead with the results that we all saw. iii) The Government was advised in February/March 2020 by Taiwan that the secret to effective control of the virus was effective track-and-trace (demonstrated by their continuing success in keeping on top of the virus).

Core technologies were offered to them which were ignored.

Apple and Google explained that they were working on a backbone technology to allow this, which was ignored.

Instead, the Government decided to go their own way, do their own thing, and millions were wasted on technologies that didn’t work and only within the past month have we a system which shows some promise (but still has a long way to go). iv) New Zealand went into lockdown and closed their borders and controlled the virus.

Other countries implemented testing of international arrivals.

The present Government ignored these actions (and continues to do so). v) We were warned of a second wave in April of this year which the present Government seems to have ignored and sleepwalked into.

More recently, the Government’s scientists warned the Government to lockdown early but as usual they ignored the advice until it was too late.

The old adage that if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck might be applied to the actions of the present Government with respect to Covid, except that they still keep misidentifying it as a dove.

ANTHONY HARRIS

Castle Rise

Snelsmore Common