Bee in Lavender

I've been doing some sorting out today, as well as watching the tennis. I nipped into the garden to take a blip and thought I'd try to get a bee in flight. Not a great shot, it's harder than it looks! 

Covid Update
Matt Hancock (former Health Secretary) has been giving evidence to the Covid public enquiry this week. He said the pandemic planning was 'completely wrong'. Emphasis was put on dealing with the consequences of the virus (i.e. dealing with the dead) and not preventing the virus taking hold as it was assumed this could not be controlled. He said that medicines for intensive care were 'within hours' of running out at the peak of the pandemic. He had to 'overrule' initial advice not to quarantine people coming in from China. He also said the inability to test people in large numbers was 'terrible' and that at the start of the pandemic, the Government didn't even know how many care home residents there were, that responsibility for Social Care fell to local authorities. 

Exercise Cygnus was a 3 day test run undertaken in Oct 2016 to find out how prepared the UK was for a flu pandemic. It concluded that the UK's plan was not sufficient to 'cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic'. There were 22 recommendations made and only 8 had been fully addressed at the start of the pandemic, with others still being worked on. Hancock said it was 'flawed in its central assumption' that a pandemic needed to be cleaned up, not contained, so we would still have had no plan for lockdown for example. 

I've been listening to an audiobook called the 'The Great Influenza' about the 1919 flu pandemic. If you think Covid was bad, the 30 mins I listened to this morning shows how much worse the flu pandemic was and how much better we dealt with Covid than we did with flu in 1919. Some well known countries had a death rate of 10% of the population - so for the UK in 2020 that would have equated to 6.7M people - to date there have been 227,871 cases of Covid on the death certificate. Whole villages were sometimes wiped out and some people, like native Americans, had virtually no immunity. One thing that struck me was that it was the people that largely decided to isolate themselves as they saw how quickly it spread and how quickly people died from it, with negligible help.