Andy Munro comments on the current situation.
You wouldn’t wish the COVID-19 virus on anybody, but to see Boris Johnson and several of his top team apparently struck down/self isolating makes you wonder whether they’ve been following their own mantra, namely wiping the door handles in Downing Street and keeping two metres apart. As far as I know, they are only major leaders to be struck down.
As regards the way things have been played, while I see the sense of ‘flattening the curve’ why the heck didn’t we get in early sorting out the testing kits, hearing the advice of the WHO and also in the knowledge that we would undoubtedly need many further down the line? Seeing the top rostrum bleating about not being able to get hold of enough of the kits now, seems a bit pathetic.
It all seems a touch of too little, too late and if we are heading for a Spain/Italy scenario then the government has to take some blame. Even the semi-lockdown has been introduced too late and been accompanied by guidance which has at times been confusing and ambiguous.
In some ways, the Prime Minister’s Churchillian bluster seems quite impressive but his trademark superficiality only works if it is backed up by sound advice from “the best medical experts in the world”. This doesn;t seem to be the case as we lurch into a corona crisis, with September now looking like the earliest time that we will be able to move around freely again.
