England has lost its mind

[Zetetic]

Westminster administration continuing to make it clear that they will withdraw wage support etc. across the UK according to England's lockdowns alone.

[idunnosomename]

hopefully he gets his head kicked in and loses his sight in his other eye

[Zetetic]

If you own a business and display article 61 of the Magna Carta in your windows you can't be fined or forced to close your business.

[Zetetic]

Aaron Bastani writes an article on the awfulness of a London-centric Britain, but forgets what that bit stuck on the side is called and can't be bothered to look it up.

[Zetetic]

Is it better to be forgotten or remembered entirely for the purposes of sneering?

[Zetetic]

"There has been no meaningful support from the acute cell or NHS England. In fact, they are blocking us from acting in a rational way that would help us to manage the acute pressures."

"I am utterly demoralised by the catastrophic leadership failure at a national and regional level. "

"At the moment I feel that I have lost all confidence in, and respect for, the regional NHS England team. We have quite literally been abandoned by them and then criticised for failure to cope with unprecedented circumstances. It is a desperately poor show."

- Tristan Cope, Medical Director of Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Trust

The English regulator is now preparing to take action against the Trust for various issues.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-liverpool-hospital-nhs-patient-safety-england-cqc-b1504979.html

[Zetetic]

English Government cultivates outbreak at offices in Wales:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/23/minister-faces-fury-over-mass-covid-outbreak-at-top-government-agency

[Zetetic]

Turns out a bunch of the results coming back from English labs are just fucking lies anyway:

Imagine if this happened, and then you didn't bother to implement any sort of semi-automated checks as to whether your labs were producing even vaguely plausible results.

[Glyn]

Imagine if this happened, and then you didn't bother to implement any sort of semi-automated checks as to whether your labs were producing even vaguely plausible results.

Have had messages from the local school asking us to disregard negative PCR tests if there has been a positive later flow. Complete switch around from them as previously they told us to disregard the lateral flow results until a PCR had been done. Have heard of similar messages across South Wales schools (and from Track & Trace) but is this all just anecdotal or is something up with the lab results ?

[olliebean]

While false negatives are relatively common with the lateral flow tests, false positives are quite rare - less than 0.1%, and in fact probably lower than with the PCR tests. I would think the only reason to require a positive PCR test to confirm a positive lateral flow test is because they're harder to tamper with.

[Glyn]

While false negatives are relatively common with the lateral flow tests, false positives are quite rare - less than 0.1%, and in fact probably lower than with the PCR tests. I would think the only reason to require a positive PCR test to confirm a positive lateral flow test is because they're harder to tamper with.

Makes sense, there has definitely been a recent change in the school message from 'you can only trust a PCR' to 'don't trust a negative PCR if a lateral flow says otherwise or you have a lot of obvious symptoms'. Seems perfectly sensible but have heard of similar messages in the local area so was wondering if there were particular known problems with PCR lab results or if it is just more sensible messaging to account for false negatives.

[Zetetic]

I would suggest that schools' messaging on this has probably been prompted by an unusually large number of PCR negatives following LFD positives amongst their pupils etc. Perhaps followed by PCR positives on re-testing.

There is more public reporting about this than I was aware of:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/12/calls-for-inquiry-as-negative-covid-pcr-tests-after-positive-lateral-flow-reported
https://www.gponline.com/no-evidence-new-covid-variant-blame-officials-investigate-potential-pcr-false-negatives/article/1729916

Personally, I am inclined to believe that this is not related to a new variant.

[Zetetic]

I hadn't realised this had been going on, very obviously, in SW England for weeks. Fucking hell.

[Milo]

I'd still be more inclined to put it down to a lab fuck up or a dodgy batch of reagents than a new variant.

[Zetetic]

I'd still be more inclined to put it down to a lab fuck up

Mmm.

But if so, that would make it all the more astonishing that the English administration has let it go on for weeks before trying to foist the lab on us. [nb]Particularly if we'd previously told them never to use that dogshit lab for our tests ever again. But we'll see.[/nb]

[Zetetic]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nhs-test-and-trace-pcr-wolverhampton-b1938911.html

There is no way that English civil servants did not know this was the problem at least a fortnight ago.

[Zetetic]

This wasn't subtle or tricky to make sense of - it was a ten-fold-plus difference in positivity between labs for near identical sets of tests.

[steveh]

Also under investigation for its consumer service under the Dante Labs name for not bothering to send out or process tests that people had paid for, refusing to give them refunds and ignoring complaints.

[steveh]

Plus The Sun did an expose on them back in January: 'LIVES AT RISK' Workers at Covid testing centre shown 'fighting, boozing and snoozing' in shocking video.

We passed our finding to the Department of Health who said: "We take evidence of misconduct extremely seriously and will be investigating this material with Immensa as a matter of urgency."

The CMA announced their investigation into the company on 24 September at which point you might have thought someone would look at what else they were up to.

[Glyn]

All just proves that the mainstream media have nothing on the primary school receptionist grapevine

[Zetetic]

Dr Harries, chief executive of the UKHSA and head of NHS Test and Trace, said local public health teams had been querying tests over the last few weeks, but it was only in the last few days that the problem was pinpointed.

"It is the location of the laboratory, combined with the geography and the time period, that has allowed us to understand this now," she said.

This isn't true.

[Zetetic]

What the fuck:

UKAS is the National Accreditation Body for the United Kingdom. UKAS is appointed by government, to assess and accredit organisations that provide services including certification, testing, inspection and calibration.
...
Neither Immensa Health Clinic Ltd nor its related company Dante Labs Ltd has been accredited by UKAS.
https://www.ukas.com/resources/latest-news/statement-immensa-health-clinic-dante-labs/

Announcing the investigation into Immensa on Friday, Dr Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, said the lab was "accredited to all of the appropriate standards", while on Monday a government spokesperson said: "The lab was fully accredited by the UK's independent accreditation service before being appointed."

[bgmnts]

Can't believe she fibbed like that.

Fuck knows where the Hippocratic Oath comes into all this

[Zetetic]

This is all extremely weird, unless you start from the point that the broader English civil service simply doesn't give a shit about anything happening outside of London at this point.

I've no idea why they'd care about protecting Immensa, both for the weeks where they'd have to pretend they didn't know where the problem was and now, but it makes sense if they simply didn't care any more about labs taking samples from elsewhere in the UK.

[Milo]

How does UKAS not have a list of accredited labs plus a list of covid testing labs that someone puts side-by-side once a week?

[GMTV]

Giving work to non accredited private labs when an accredited NHS lab could do it.....

[Cuellar]

What a year it's been for Dante...labs

[George Oscar Bluth II]

English civil service

Hi there's no English civil service, English government, English parliament or so on, you're talking about UK government civil servants here directed by a government elected by the voters of the United Kingdom. Thanks.

[Zetetic]

The Government sits in England. All its ministers, with the exception of those dedicated to extra-England territories are from English constituencies, I believe (or the Lords). 91% of the people who voted for this government did so in England. The DHSC is English in scope and staffing. PHE was English and its successors remain so.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

England has no political representation and no leaders, the UK government acts as the de facto government of England on certain issues, but it is not an English government. DHSC is a department of the UK government.

91% of the people who voted for this government did so in England

See your problem here is with English dominance of the United Kingdom, that's fine, and it's one of the reasons the country doesn't really work as "a union" in the way anyone might understand such a thing. But don't invent things that don't exist, like an English government, to make your point.