Read on Twitter
I think I was wrong. I thought that people in the government understood some of the science and just took a different, somewhat more maverick view. But now I am sure that’s not right. What has happened in the last few days has added to the evidence that no senior politician has
Got a grip on even the very basics of coronavirus or strategies to contain and suppress it. Instead all along they seem to have believed that the public health interventions that the public (and not the government) have pushed for were something like superstitious beliefs. As in
No. 10 never actually believed a lockdown could save lives. Same with school closures. In fact the way they have behaved and spoken means they probably all just believed that public health interventions just slow down the dying but the same number of people die. They are wrong
On this. But it would explain certainly why they are all so fast and loose with lockdown. I suspect amid this, Cummings was the intermediary between scientists and the government. I think he has probably got the science wrong - and will have pushed for the government to view
Any idea the absolute number of deaths could be pushed down as superstition. His understand of most things is superficial, and what we know about Cummings’ intellectual habits is that he’s a magpie for bad ideas that sound good, and stubbornly transforms them into “explanations”
What I realised is that there have been points where the penny dropped for certain people. Like I think in mid-April Matt Hancock (however mediocre he is) probably picked up some international newspapers and realised that what he was being told in government was wrong, and
The virus could in fact be contained and suppressed. But Boris quickly bullied that idea out of him, and he has spinelessly gone back to cheerleading. Certainly people in government have not understood the slightest thing about how brutally mechanical the spread of this virus
Is - or how large and quickly outbreaks can occur. They clearly still do not understand that when a single person can make an outbreak that infects hundreds of people in 1 week and thousands in 2 weeks, making an exception for themselves in the rules is tantamount to murder.
Cummings will go soon. Hopefully the Government will fall too, after this massacre of innocent people. I really hope whoever takes over next has even the most basic grip of the science, what has been happening in the rest of the world, how it differs from the UK’s approach. They
Need to see it doesn’t have to be this way. And frankly I have little hope for that milquetoast Starmer. He, in his lawyerly way, is so absorbed in Boris’s own positions and finding small holes in them that he doesn’t see the bigger picture. He also clearly hasn’t understood
The basic science of the thing. It’s all very infuriating.
