Richard Lutz is repulsed by the government’s incompetency and deceit over Covid-19.

classic bombast

Now that the Prime Minister is back in the driving seat, it may be time to question how he and his cabinet have the gall to say it is all going well. A fistful of bullet points will do:

• 30,000 deaths, the largest fatality figures in Europe
• 400,000 protective gowns from Turkey in a warehouse because they don’t come up to UK standards
• Purchases of 500,000 Covid tests from China. They are substandard and unusable 
•  Hollow promises that 100,000 tests would be carried out by the beginning of May. The figures were  ludicrously inflated by sending out 40,000 postal tests with no idea if they were used
• The scandal over NHS staff treating Covid patients without proper PPE equipment
• Failure to prepare for the pandemic in early March after WHO warned of a worldwide crisis
• The appalling failure to deal with lack of protective provision in old folks’homes.

And the list goes on. And sadly I think will enlarge like a poisoned boil. Day after day, press conferences deliver shallow guarantees and blatant lies that reveal how cabinet minister after cabinet minister (and the PM) actually believe we are stupid enough to swallow these childish deceptions.

Take the 100,000 promise over Covid testing.Yesterday for the first time I heard about the Goodhart Law. It says that when a scientific measure becomes a target, it stops being a measure.

To wit: Boris Johnson’s team guaranteed these 100,000 daily tests. That was the measure of a success. But then when it dawned that it was a shallow empty promise, they started juggling facts and lies.It became a self imposed target and any trick was used to achieve this bar. The night before the deadline, the government came up with the shabbiest of efforts and said 40,000 tests were in the post and the daily test total was 120,000. 

But they had no idea if the test packages were used; some had no return envelopes if the recipients even wanted to use them and there seems to be no back up testing team to administer the results if they reached the six figure target. It was a shambles. Daily test figures now realistically stand at about 70,000. The self-imposed measure of success became a target and the whole affair imploded.

Johnson and his team are transparent liars. They are shallow incompetent deceivers who  have been found out. They simply can’t tell the truth because it is so unpalatable. And they can’t even successfully lie their way out of a bumbling attempt to handle the medical crisis. And that has boosted the death figures to 30,000.The government has blood on its hands.