1/ Thread/ The government’s handling of Covid...

Everyone I speak to thinks the same.

The government (and Vallance & Whitty) have sorely misjudged the general mood. Why is this government unable to have an honest conversation with the public and reduce the confusion and fear?

2/ They willfully attempted to ramp up fear levels by using doomsday scenario charts and applied flawed methodology to create a fanciful worst case scenario that was presented as a real possibility - which was then parroted by the media.

3/ The question is: what were the government hoping to achieve? Did they think everyone would simply look at the charts and freak out? Or did they assume we’re all so terrified already we’d just blindly take those charts at face value?

4/ The government have wilfully mismanaged virtually every aspect of the pandemic. This has caused widespread confusion and panic. We have the worst government at exactly the worst time.

5/ The government have created, overseen and amplified a shambles on the Coronavirus crisis for 6 months....

6/ Sending infected patients back to care homes to spread the virus round a vulnerable cohort.

7/ Cancelling exams that could have been held in Covid-secure halls and then overseeing a shambles on A-level results.

8/ Failing to get children back into school in June.

9/ Failing to develop a functioning test / track/ trace system - for 6 months. Germany managed to have this in place within weeks of the start of the pandemic.

10/ Failure to effectively roll out the NHS volunteers programme - despite 700,000 people signing up.

11/ Total mismanagement over the PPE procurement programme.

12/ Allowing the UK to become one of the only countries in the world not to have a test and quarantine programme at airports.

13/ A total lack of a consistent and coherent strategy with inconsistent and unworkable rules such as the rule of six and the 10pm pub curfew.

14/ Creating a wider health crisis with reports of empty hospitals, GP surgeries and delayed treatments and operations for non-Covid patients.

15/ The government’s only strategy seems to be: deny everything, acknowledge nothing, blame everyone else (especially the public), over promise and under deliver. A negligent mantra of: ‘it barely matters…soon people will forget’.

16/ Watching a weak, incompetent, bizarrely unaccountable government repeatedly mismanage a crisis really wakes you up to the powerlessness of the individual in times of trouble.