“Every step of the way, we have been guided by the advice of the scientists”

That is the biggest yet of many government lies. The advice of scientists has been wilfully ignored and the people have been fooled.

Don’t look aghast at Trump’s America for bumbling, fumbling, outright lies, and delay. We have all that here at home.

If government policy really had been based on the advice of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE),  we would not now have over 30,000 COVID deaths and so many deaths among medical front-line staff.

 

Compare that 30,000 with Greece.  Its health service has been devastated by the stringent cuts imposed by the EU, but the country’s death toll is only 151.

Greece closed its borders at the outset.  Britain has yet to get round to it.

From all corners of the globe, thousands of British tourists and foreign travellers have been importing the virus every day. The most obvious  of all precautions escaped this government.

 

On 26 February SAGE recommended a combination of measures from four options:  closure of schools; all symptomatic cases to stay isolated at home for 13 weeks, and social distancing for 13 weeks. The first three measures were particularly recommended. The form of social distancing recommended by SAGE implied immediate closure of bars, restaurants and  gatherings.

It was not until three weeks (18th March) later that Johnson got around to closing schools.

This all seemed drastic, but  the SAGE members were very worried. On 17 th February they estimated an unchecked epidemic would probably mean around 80 per cent of the population becoming infected. On 26th February SAGE made its first estimate of the fatality rate, which they put at roughly 1 per cent, a mere 660,000. That warning did not scare our brave boys at Westminster. They decided to let the Cheltenham race meetings go ahead. Well, that is, after all, the first big event of the social season.

The SAGE papers started to be less forceful. Either they were being leaned on to be less strident, less frightening, or they had  become infected by the government’s hubris/carelessness. Perhaps they were wondering whether Johnson’s theory of “herd immunity” might be right. In other words, if you expose sufficient people  to the infection and each one who does not die has developed immunity, eventually most of the survivors are now immune. That costs lives, but at least it costs least money and least disruption.

Finally, on 16th March, SAGE returned to its line of urgency. It recommended social distancing, school closures, household isolation “for a long period”.

After 4 days of slowly chewing the cud, on 20th March we had Johnson’s Churchillian lockdown speech.

Not until mid-May did we get to border checks and the digital safeguard experiment being tried out on the Isle of Wight.

 

The government which starved the NHS of funds during 10 years of unnecessary austerity, flogging off chunks of it and abysmally failing to take heed of warnings that the country should be prepared for global pandemics with stores of PPE, sufficient hospital capacity, trained staff and medical equipment.

Ignore the crocodile tears shed for the sacrificial lambs in the ICUs and care homes; the hypocrisy of these Tories  matches the lunacy of Trump.

I write this a few hours before another master-class in bamboozling the people.

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“Stay alert” instead of “stay at home,  if that is what we are to get, is a nuance too far. It comes hot on the heels of press briefings during the past week which have already sowed confusion, giving silly people an exc use for behaving irresponsibly.