Crosswords1 min ago
Covid
Will all the various countrywide emergency planning officers and staff please admit they were useless and form an orderly queue to repay their telephone number salaries?
Answers
No best answer has yet been selected by Madgeorge. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.March 2015 ...
In 2014, the world avoided a horrific global outbreak of Ebola, thanks to thousands of selfless health workers -- plus, frankly, thanks to some very good luck. In hindsight, we know what we should have done better. So, now's the time, Bill Gates suggests, to put all our good ideas into practice, from scenario planning to vaccine research to health worker training. As he says, "There's no need to panic ... but we need to get going."
How many meetings and seminars were held by planning people (not in a Premier Inn I bet) who then went on to pass on the details to their deputies, assistant deputies, assistant assistants etc,etc who were aware they were underfunded and unprepared yet kept taking their salaries (and keeping their fingers crossed) without blowing any whistles?
Perhaps I am too cynical ?
Where I worked we'd had huge, very detailed contingency plans in place for about 20 years for millennium bug, SARS, ebola, bird flu, etc , but by 2015 I felt people were getting weary of it and people on the whole were no longer taking it seriously. And it was all theoretical anyway- there had been no proper major tests lasting more than a day. So I'm not surprised that when Covid came along, the plans were not sufficiently robust and were not oven-ready- and there was a fatal mix of panic and lethargy/scepticism that took over