Topic: Red Rishi's Eat Out to Get COVID-19

[Sebastian Cobb]

Absolutely. With improved treatments, probably most people who die from it now will be lasting more than 28 days after diagnosis.

And the less resilient ones already got dunted in the first wave.

[Uncle TechTip]

If what we think about infection rates is true, 15% or lower, a lot of vulnerable people are still to encounter this virus.

[BlodwynPig]

Toadious on GMTV this morning from Ian Fucking Dale and Jacqui Fucking Smith. There seems to be a centrist coalescence between the majority of Starmerites and soft Tories represented by Sunak. Dale started a mild jab at Rishi's plans but rolled it back once it was apparent that Smith was on Sunak's side. "This isn't about party lines, most of Labour were very supportive of the Chancellor". Then the demon herself Kate "Tears for Derek" Garraway editorialised Sunak as the man in control with ALL ON HIS SIDE, ACHIEVING THE UNACHIEVABLE, STRONG AND STABLE...the media fully on board with the dethroning of Boris in favour of this new evil.

[idunnosomename]

starting to think this didn't help at all!

[BlodwynPig]

starting to think this didn't help at all!

Blodwyn's Razor correct again.

[NoSleep]

I was waiting at the bus stop after my fortnightly shopping expedition at the supermarket and noticed that the local Wetherspoons had notices in its window for "Rishi's Dishis" (cheap eats) and "Sunak's Specials"(cheap beers) with the latter singing his praises for putting pubs in the same tax bracket as supermarkets. The people coming and going from the pub look a sadder bunch than usual.

[JamesTC]

I was waiting at the bus stop after my fortnightly shopping expedition at the supermarket and noticed that the local Wetherspoons had notices in its window for "Rishi's Dishis" (cheap eats) and "Sunak's Specials"(cheap beers) with the latter singing his praises for putting pubs in the same tax bracket as supermarkets. The people coming and going from the pub look a sadder bunch than usual.

Seen it when walking past round my way too.

Had to pause as I was a little shocked considering I live in the safest Labour seat in the country.

[Pink Gregory]

put a fucking brick through it

[BlodwynPig]

Reminds me about a story my gran told me about when she was walking round "that London" in the 1970s and seeing big posters stuck to pubs windows "Don't get sick, get thalidomide...and have a free half of Mild on the house". This was several years after the scandal had broke.

[thelittlemango]

Rumours that this is coming back in the coming months, Red Rishi will be serving up generous helpings of his trademark 'Rishi Burgers' to us all once more :)

[shiftwork2]

Have you got a source?

Because, surely, fucking hell no.

[Zetetic]

Daily Mail trailed it yesterday:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9296877/Rishi-Sunaks-axe-fuel-tax-hike-slash-hospitality-VAT-slashed-upcoming-budget.html

[idunnosomename]

yeah the industry want it so it will probably happen. vaccine britain. eat out. reading and leeds. fourth wave. no christmas 2021.

i mean after that all's dandy except we killed another 100k oldies

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Where are the gammons perspiring about the need to GET DEFERCIT DOWN

[BlodwynPig]

yeah the industry want it so it will probably happen. vaccine britain. eat out. reading and leeds. fourth wave. no christmas 2021.

i mean after that all's dandy except we killed another 100k oldies

I read that as: CROWDS OF MUSIC LOVERS WILL HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY (FOR A SMALL FEE OF 500 QUID A TICKET) TO SEE THE DANDY WARHOLS AT LEEDS AND READING (SIMULTANEOUSLY) IN RISHI'S SUMMER OF BEST OF BRITISH. ALSO IN THE FESTIVAL LINEUP WILL BE QUEEN WITH ADAM ANT, BUSTER MERRYFIELD AND SIR ELTON JOHN FEAT. GARY BARLOW.

"THIS IS TRULY WHAT EVERYONE HAS BEEN WORKING TOWARDS OVER THE LAST YEAR - THE PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT ICKLE VIRUSES AND DEAD WRINKLIES ANYMORE. LET'S EAT OUT AND LISTEN OUT FOR BRITAIN" SAID MR. SUNAK FROM HIS PENTHOUSE SUITE IN THE BAHAMAS.

[JamesTC]

Where are the gammons perspiring about the need to GET DEFERCIT DOWN

Rishi is paying for all this himself!

[Emotional Support Peacock]

Where are the gammons perspiring about the need to GET DEFERCIT DOWN

They all died of Covid.

[MrMrs]

ffs

[idunnosomename]

Rishi is paying for all this himself!

what a lovely young man.

[Blinder Data]

From the Times the other day - when laid out in black and white, it's damning:

‘Rishi Sunak was the main person responsible for Covid’s second wave’

The latest extract from Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s new book Failures of State looks at the grave cost of Boris Johnson’s reluctance to follow the advice of scientists in favour of measures to boost the economy

The government had been warned about the consequences of a second wave but, by the end of July, the scientists on Sage were reporting that they had no confidence that R was not now above the one threshold. The government’s limited room for manoeuvre was acknowledged by Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, at a hastily arranged press conference. “We have probably reached near the limits, or the limits, of what we can do in terms of opening up society,” he said.

The following Monday, August 3, was going to be the start of Eat Out to Help Out, come what may. According to a Conservative MP source, both Matt Hancock and Michael Gove were concerned about pressing ahead, but “the voices that were prevailing in government, for whatever reason, were those that were pushing a case that was based purely on economic recovery at all costs as fast as possible”.

By mid-August, positive tests had risen to more than a thousand a day. The Commons all-party coronavirus group wrote directly to the prime minister. “It is already clear that to minimise the risk of a second wave occurring . . . an urgent change in government approach is required,” said the letter.

When it arrived at Downing Street, Boris Johnson and his fiancée Carrie Symonds were on holiday in a cottage on the coast of Scotland opposite the Isle of Skye — almost as far away from London as you could be while still in the UK. Trouble had kicked off over A-level results, but Johnson was out of the firing line and it was not his style to return from holidays for work. However, the holiday was cut short after he was tracked down by an intrepid newshound, and the couple were advised to leave by their protection team. The letter was waiting for Johnson when he returned to work. He never replied and went on to ignore the MPs’ advice concerning a zero-Covid strategy.

The Eat Out to Help Out initiative was hailed as a triumph for chancellor Rishi Sunak, but it was too effective, according to researchers from Warwick University, who found that it had increased Covid-19 cases by between 8 per cent and 17 per cent. The report’s author, Professor Thiemo Fetzer, wasn’t alone in concluding that the scheme was a mistake. “It wasn’t about support for restaurants, otherwise it would have counted for takeaways,” a Sage source said. “It was to break our fear and it worked.” He added: “We were obviously going to have to reverse that. It just seemed insane.”

The country’s largest study of virus infection by Imperial College found that between August 22 and September 7, R was estimated to be 1.7, which meant it had already hit the figure identified in a report commissioned by Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, as the “reasonable worst-case scenario”.

When the schools went back in the first week of September, the £12 billion track and trace system — which had been heralded as a saviour by the government — was still in serious trouble. The system had continually failed to locate potentially infectious people with sufficient speed and to make matters worse, it became completely swamped as children returned to school. Daily positive tests rocketed.

On Wednesday, September 9, the prime minister finally gave in to pressure and applied the brakes again — but only with the lightest of touches. At a media briefing, Johnson, flanked by Whitty and Vallance, announced that from the following Monday, people would only be allowed to meet in groups of six.

Nicholas Davies, an assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who sits on the government’s Spi-M modelling committee, said his colleagues were not consulted about the new rule, or indeed about Eat Out to Help Out. “They seemed to be making decisions and it wasn’t really clear what the rationale for them was,” he said.

Johnson, however, wanted to sugar the announcement that day. By early September it still wasn’t clear whether a vaccine could be safe and effective. Instead, his government had devised an ambitious stopgap. He called this plan for quick turnaround “mass testing” “Operation Moonshot”.

When Hancock spoke in the Commons the following day about “verifying the new technology” for the “moonshot” initiative, parliament’s official Hansard transcription of the debate recorded a word in square brackets at the end of his sentence. It read: “Laughter.”

***

On September 16, Whitty and Vallance urged the prime minister — who had firmly ruled out a second lockdown that afternoon — to impose a two-week circuit breaker lockdown to bring R under control. Hospital admissions for the virus had increased by 100 per cent since the beginning of the month. Without a drastic intervention, they argued, the country was now on track for 200 to 500 deaths a day by early November.

The grim reality of the situation began to dawn on the prime minister. “That was the moment when he knew we needed to do something,” one aide told The Sunday Times.

Johnson appeared to have accepted the scientists’ argument. “There’s no question, [we] are now seeing a second wave coming in,” he said as he toured a new vaccine factory two days later. “I don’t think anybody wants to go into a second lockdown, but clearly, when you look at what is happening, you’ve got to wonder whether we need to go further than the ‘rule of six’.”

The proposal for the two-week lockdown went before the Cabinet Office’s Covid-19 operation committee that day. Hancock and Gove were said to be in favour of the tougher measures, but one key member was not onside. Sunak later met with Johnson to express deep concern about the damage a lockdown would do to business and jobs. Rumours circulated afterwards that Sunak had threatened to resign if there was a lockdown, but this has been denied.

Invitations were sent out to a series of experts to join in a clandestine rendezvous with the prime minister. When the experts dialled in to the Zoom call they found Johnson and Sunak at the end of Downing Street’s long mahogany cabinet room table.

Three of the four academics who had been invited to speak were advocates of letting the virus run its course with the use of lighter restrictions. One was Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s top epidemiologist, viewed across the world as the poster boy for herd immunity. His presence said much about the way the prime minister and his chancellor were thinking, and it opened them up to accusations that they were re-engaging with the “herd immunity” strategy which had proved unpopular back in March.

Professor John Edmunds, the government’s leading modeller, was there to articulate the view of his fellow members on Sage that an immediate two-week “circuit breaker” lockdown was vital.

The prime minister had a big call to make. He had made the mistake of underestimating the virus during the first wave in March and then delaying measures to restrict its spread. This had caused many thousands of extra deaths. When he emerged from his convalescence in late April, he had said that he would not risk a second spike in the virus by “letting the reproduction rate go back over one”. This was the speech in which he seemed to have accepted that losing control of the virus would cause a new wave of “death and disease” and also an economic disaster.

Yet now he took the political path of least resistance. He summoned his top team and put a stop to the preparations for a circuit-breaker lockdown. By choosing not to lock down he appeased his chancellor and those who felt the economy’s short-term prospects should be the priority. But mostly, he was winging it.

Johnson’s decision flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.”

At 11am the next morning, September 21, Whitty and Vallance took the unprecedented step of holding their own press conference, with no politicians present. It was a clear attempt to make the prime minister change his mind. Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier.

Our Sage adviser source blames the chancellor for his “one-eyed” approach in putting the nation’s finances first. “I thought the chancellor was in charge. He was the main person who was responsible for the second wave.”

As the days sped by, with local control measures having little effect, there was a fierce fight within cabinet. Hancock and Gove, nicknamed “the doves”, were pushing for firmer measures, which were being resisted by the more hawkish Sunak. His approach went against the findings of the World Bank that early strong lockdowns and control of the virus were the best hope for a country’s economy.

On October 12, Johnson addressed the nation once again to provide more grim news. “There are already more Covid patients in UK hospitals today than there were on March 23 when the whole country went into lockdown, and deaths, alas, are also rising once again,” he admitted. Holding out against bringing in a lockdown, he announced that he was “simplifying” and “standardising” the local rules, with three tiers of restrictions. Tier three was the highest alert level, in which pubs, cafés and leisure centres would be closed.

The rift between Johnson and his scientists was clear. Whitty, who was standing alongside Johnson, admitted he was “not confident, nor is anybody confident” that even the third tier would be enough to curtail the spread of the virus. Davies, the Spi-M member, did not believe it would either. “It was a moment of increasing concern and worry for a lot of us because it just felt like the decision making was disconnected from the science . . . It does sometimes feel like shouting into the void.”

Sage broke with protocol and rushed out the minutes of the key meeting from three weeks earlier, at which the scientists had urgently recommended a circuit-breaker lockdown. The next day, Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, backed the scientists’ call for an urgent shutdown across England.

In the Commons on October 14, the prime minister mocked Starmer. “Opportunism is, I am afraid, the name of the game for the party opposite,” he said. “The whole point is to seize this moment now to avoid the misery of another national lockdown, into which he wants to go headlong, by delivering a regional solution.” Sunak took Labour to task for wanting a lockdown that could be “counted in jobs lost and businesses closed”. There was no way, he said, that the UK would be allowed to “blithely fall into another national spring-style lockdown”.

The terrible consequences of the second wave were already being witnessed in the hospitals. We spoke to a doctor treating Covid-19 in Manchester, which had been under restrictions since July. The hospitals in the city were admitting so many new patients each day by the final week of October that, as in the first wave, seriously ill coronavirus patients were starting to die without getting access to life-saving mechanical ventilation. This included patients in their thirties and forties. “That is pretty scary,” said the doctor.

One of the problems was that large numbers of staff were having to self-isolate because they or their contacts had symptoms of the virus. The doctor told us that the situation became so desperate that a quarantining colleague awaiting his test result for the virus was ordered by managers to treat vulnerable patients undergoing chemotherapy. “That is obviously not best practice,” the doctor said. Remarkably, the Manchester hospital was still short of protective masks. “It’s basically a mess. It’s only a minority of us doctors who haven’t had the virus now.”

On October 28, with deaths now topping more than 300 a day, the scientists on the Spi-M committee made one final appeal. They produced a report setting out the dire consequences of the government’s continued inaction. As if to emphasise the point, they had written “not government policy” in large red capital letters on the first page of their report. While the modelling committee had previously avoided making overt economic projections, the gloves were off now. The scientists wanted to show that the delays in bringing in a “rapid and decisive” lockdown were both killing people and would damage the economy. That day, both Germany and France announced national lockdowns to curb their own second waves of the virus.

On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.

The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day.

Johnson’s delay had an enormous human cost. According to estimates from Imperial College, more than 2.5 million people were infected between the day the prime minister ignored his expert advisers’ calls for a circuit breaker on September 22 and the end of the second lockdown on December 1. The figures suggest that if he had brought in measures to just hold daily infections level between those two dates, 1.3 million fewer people would have been infected. With the virus’s death rate estimated at between 0.5 per cent and 1 per cent, it suggests that between 6,700 and 13,400 people might never have lost their lives had stricter measures been introduced earlier. And this was only the start of a winter outbreak that would continue to take lives and place a huge strain on the economy over the months ahead.

***

In the summer of 2020 the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group, representing more than 2,000 sets of relatives, wrote to the prime minister and the health secretary demanding an immediate statutory inquiry into their handling of the pandemic to learn lessons so future lives could be saved. They argued that there was a legal obligation to carry out an inquiry under human rights law, as the government had failed to take reasonable steps to safeguard life. They also asked to meet Johnson and Hancock to put their questions in person. Both requests were refused by the government’s lawyers. Johnson has said an inquiry will be held “in the future” but has declined to say when.

The families are now seeking a judicial review to force an inquiry, and have enlisted Pete Weatherby, QC, and the human rights lawyer Elkan Abrahamson, who have previously represented bereaved families of those who died at Hillsborough, Grenfell Tower and the Manchester bombings. The lawyers say the prime minister’s actions during the pandemic have left the government vulnerable to civil claims being brought for negligence and the violation of human rights. Weatherby and Abrahamson believe that Johnson’s conduct could also amount to “the criminal offence of gross negligence manslaughter”, although they believe it is unlikely that the Crown Prosecution Service would take up such a case. That may change, they note, if further evidence emerges at a future public inquiry.

Abrahamson says the government’s lawyers are “ferociously” fighting attempts to hold an inquiry that would get to the truth. “If you’re not entirely confident you can justify your actions, you don’t want them to be scrutinised,” he observed. “We as the public are entitled to know why decisions are being taken and are entitled to answers and entitled to challenge those decisions . . . but we’re not getting any of that.”

Extracted and abridged from Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott, published on March 18 (Mudlark, £20)

[NoSleep]

Surely it was Corbyn?

[olliebean]

Whoever's fault it was, I'm sure Starmer supported them fully.

[BlodwynPig]

That'll give Sunak's PM campaign a boost!

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Interesting, though more reinforcing what most of us suspected was happening.

[idunnosomename]

Can we just have Gove as PM pls now

RUUUPERRT

[Fambo Number Mive]

Going from the Telegraph's man as PM to the Times' man as PM, eew. Maybe all the right wing newspapers will get a turn. At least the Sunday Sport's person will have a sense of humour.

Gove has managed to stay in the background with COVID, but I still think Sunak will be the next Prime Minister.