Where to begin?
It would be fair to say this has not come out of nowhere, we’ve known about the spread of Coronavirus (or more correctly Covid-19) in China since last year. However over years we’ve become accustomed to outbreaks of infectious respiratory diseases in various parts of the world and related concerns about pandemics (e.g. SARS in 2003 and Swine flu more recently) but they’ve never really amounted to much in global terms. Thus people have become complacent about the real and genuine risk to us all.
It’s all very well to blame governments for failure to prepare, but they are always prisoners to economic reality, and the immediate concerns of the electorate. It is probably true that prior to this outbreak the NHS could have used extra some extra ventilators and other equipment if ithey were available, but how many extra, 100, 1000, 10,000? If government bought that many in normal times would most just sit on a shelf underused? There would have been many who would argue that there was other equipment/drugs or services that the NHS needed more, and they would have been right.
Governments cannot have every single bit of equipment they might need for every conceivable situation readily to hand in the volumes required, there is quite simply no money for that. Thus they have to ensure there is some equipment and that there are contingency plans in place for the rest.
The electorate as a whole might never have countenanced a government stockpiling tens of thousands of expensive ventilators, oxygen cylinders, and additional millions of facemasks and other PPE ‘just in case’, when the NHS needs so many other things. Hardly anyone alive has experienced a global pandemic like this and few would really appreciate how bad it could be or the speed at which it might take hold (we do now). Arguably we are very lucky that this virus is not so deadly in the grand scheme of things, and yet that is of little comfort to the tens of thousands who have got seriously ill and the millions in vulnerable groups among whom the risk is much higher. It would be true that many have foreseen this type of event and argued strongly that we should be more prepared for a pandemic, but you will find that is the case for most disaster scenarios and most have never happened (yet).
Having been involved in government contingency planning in the past I am well aware that unless a plan has been tested for real it is unlikely to work like clockwork or anywhere near it, so the fact that not everything goes well is just the nature of the beast. All of these plans undergo desktop exercises to some degree but such testing is of limited usefulness. One can be sure that after this the next pandemic contingency plan will be much much better, but that is of little help now.
Currently Twitter is bouncing with accusations and counter accusations about whos fault this is, the media is full of all sorts of stories, good and bad to prove a political point. My own experience, particularly in relation to what government is doing (and I mean at all levels, i.e. UK, SG and councils) is that in these situations external commentators and journalists alike are rarely in possession of all the facts or aware of all the approaches government is considering and investigating, particularly given the situation; information and advice is constantly changing and being updated. It’s almost certain mistakes will be made, and when it is all forensically reviewed in the aftermath some of these will be picked on and pursued relentlessly to make political points. They key response of government should be to stick to the scientific advice when it is clear and when it is not strive to obtain consensus agreement for any approach, oh and for god sake don’t take advice on a science matter from a political advisor, unless it's about how to sell what your actual scientists agree you need to do to the voters (even then it might bite you back).
The UK gov is getting a lot of stick from the usual suspects, and by that I mean the people who would be attacking it anyway and who are attempting to use this crisis to further their own agenda. The Scottish Government is similarly being criticised (and I admit, sometimes by me). In the context of Scottish politics there is a bit of a tit for tat going on between hard core independence supporters and hard core supporters of Scotland's place in the UK as to who’s administration is more incompetent. But few of these people have access to what is going on and being discussed; for example what has been agreed in COBRA and the associated advice both in UK gov and SG. The UK strategy is SG strategy for now, although Sturgeon has on occasion seemingly chosen to be out of step in the timing of some interventions, arguably this looks to many cynics as if that could be more of an attempt to appear to be ahead of the UK in taking the initiative, but time will tell.
The recent announcement that Sturgeon's administration is setting up a new advisory expert group for Scotland at first just appears to be yet another attempt to look as if SG is autonomous and in control. However, on reflection it is perhaps an admission that its current advisors might not the be quite the right people for this crisis. This doesn’t mean that Chief Medical Officer Cath Calderwood (a obstetrician/gynacologist with much senior health management experience) or the Chief Scientific Advisor Sheila Rowan (a gravitational physicist) are incapable, only that in terms of immediate disease control strategy their own areas of expertise may not be so useful (particularly Rowan’s!). Calderwood’s experience in health management and in-depth first hand knowledge of the NHS is almost certainly very valuable in terms of NHS operating procedures and how it copes with what is happening/coming so she absolutely has a role to advise there but she is not an epidemiologist, unlike for example Chief Medical Advisor to UK gov Chris Whitty. In terms of considering appropriate courses of action to tackle the disease spread the SG may have found itself a little short and having to defer to UK advice, hence the expert group being drafted in to reinforce current advisors. Inevitably this will lead to disagreements with UK over certain points of strategy or the interpretation of data, whether these will be used constructively in a spirit of cooperation, or milked for the purpose of fostering yet more anti-UK grievance and promoting differentiation and division remains to be seen, but many of us aren’t hopeful.
