MorePlaymakersNeeded wrote:
There's no government on the planet that plans for the consequences of a pandemic.
Every government has plans. There's a team in the Cabinet Office that plans for all sorts of things. There's a plan for what happens if the National Grid goes down (which involves urgent action as you have about 5 days before the cooling towers in nuclear power plants melt down and Sellafield becomes Chernobyl). There's a plan for what happens if terrorists detonate a nuclear "dirty bomb" in a city centre. There's a plan for foot-and-mouth style agricultural diseases that can wipe out livestock and food supply.
They've had pandemic plans for years. In the mid-2000s they were very concerned about avian flu developing into human-to-human transmission. I remember going to a talk a number of years ago about civil contingency planning where the speaker said pandemic of a new virus is the highest on the potential impact ranking in terms of potential deaths and economic impact. The other big threat like that is antimicrobial resistance because if superbugs develop that are resistant to our limited range of antibiotics it will knock medicine back centuries as we wouldn't be able to do most hospital treatments without risk of infection that couldn't be controlled.
Emergency planning gets undermined by being low down politicians' priorities, there aren't votes in it and it costs money, and also there's an attitude that anything that sounds really bad "could never really happen", they think "yeah they told us the millennium bug was going to knock planes out of the sky". We'd have been better prepared for this in the mid 2000s than now, because capacity has been degraded and the health system has become more fragmented after the Lansley reforms in the early 2010s.
In a crisis, the more centralised a system is the better for co-ordinating action at pace, and more fragmented health systems are more exposed in something like this (the US is especially vulnerable). Ours has got fragmented with multiple "reforms" which get brought in every few years that introduce more separations between different bodies, usually under the premise of driving efficiency, creating an internal market for competition between providers and so on - but when trying to work fast like now it means lots of different bodies, each with their own limited budgets and targets, are needing to work together but also have their own vested interests.
Also running down capacity over time means you haven't got spare capacity to respond at speed to crises.
There was a review of pandemic capacity a few years ago when Jeremy Hunt was Secretary of State for the NHS, it concluded that the NHS would be overwhelmed and identified a lot of things that needed to be fixed. The response then was the classic "defensive lines": NHS is the best in the world, world-class healthcare infrastructure well placed to deal with anything blah blah. Hunt is now doing a decent job of asking questions as chair of the health select committee, but the elephant in the room is that if he'd taken this seriously back then we would have been better equipped to deal with things now.
It would still be tough but the better prepared you are the more the NHS can cope with an increase and less severe lockdowns we'd have had to have.
The antimicrobial resistance is a real threat too - health professionals and scientists are very concerned, and the big risk factor comes from the overuse of antibiotics of which a large part comes from intensive farming practices adding antibiotics in to animal feed. They have been saying for a while now that this should be banned but the large agrifoods companies have strong lobbying power and so nothing gets done. If we are hit with a superbug down the road, no doubt we'll also have governments claiming "nobody could have forseen this, stop trying to make political capital out of it".
