by
Les May
THOSE of us who had the
benefit of a ‘Good Sunday School Education’ are familiar
with the story of Adam and Eve. You remember the one,
Adam picks fruit from the forbidden tree, God gets grumpy and
banishes the pair of them from the Garden of Eden.
Christians interpret this as
‘mankind’s fall from grace’; I interpret as, ‘when
you are in the deep doo-doo look around for someone else to blame’;
Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the Serpent. No one said, ‘you’ve
got me bang to rights Gov, I done it’. And that’s the story
of mankind in a nutshell!
The latest example of this is
Michael Gove blaming China for failing to curb the spread of
the SARS-Cov-19 virus which causes the disease Covid19.
So do Gove’s comments stand up
to close scrutiny or are they best interpreted as an attempt to
deflect from the fact that his government was unprepared for any kind
of health crisis?
This is what the World Health
Organisation (WHO) had to say in it’s first Situation Report
published on 21 January 2020:
On
31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases
of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan
City, Hubei Province of China. From 31 December 2019 through 3
January 2020, a total of 44 case of patients with pneumonia of
unknown etiology were reported to WHO by the national authorities in
China. During this reported period, the causal agent was not
identified.
On
11 and 12 January 2020, WHO received further detailed information
from the National Health Commission China that the outbreak is
associated with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan City.
The
Chinese authorities identified a new type of coronavirus, which was
isolated on 7 January 2020.
On
12 January 2020, China shared the genetic sequence of the novel
coronavirus for countries to use in developing specific diagnostic
kits.
From
3 January Thailand
and South
Korea
introduces
screening measures for travellers from parts of China. On
9 March The
Independent
was reporting that travellers from Italy entering
the UK from Italy
faced
“zero
checks”
for coronavirus
at the airport. At
this time 16 million people, a quarter of the population were under
‘lockdown’,
there
were more than 7000 cases and the death toll was 366.
As
I pointed out in my article of 15 March the story from the government
is that they are going to do something ‘when
they get round to it’.
Gove
is trying to fool us into thinking that he can shift the blame for
the shambolic situation with regard to personal protective equipment
for NHS workers,
the lack of testing for infection, the lack of critical care beds and
shortage
of ventilators,
away from the government. We all know that China initially
suppressed news of the seriousness of the disease inside
the country,
but as we see above cases were reported to the WHO from 31 December
2019 onwards.
It
beggars belief that Public
Health England
and the Chief
Medical Officer were
not monitoring the Situation
Reports
from the WHO and passing
on to government ministers advice as to how this infection could
spread in the UK. The inaction after the first of these on 21
January is down to political decisions taken by this government.
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