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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> Which governments specifically?

Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire.

We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin".

Every man and his dog could see the slow car-crash coming. First China, then Asia, then Western Europe... the statistics and TV coverage was all there for everyone to see. But the UK government was in constant and total denial until the hospitals started clogging up.

And even when the UK government finally admitted it, their handling was truly, truly dire. Constant failure to act, constant acting too late, constant u-turns, throwing 40-billion down the pan on dodgy contracts.

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> We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin".

In defense of Boris, UK scientific advisors Patrick Vallance and Roy M. Anderson advised to go for the "herd immunity" strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pand...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Then when the 16.3.2020 Imperial College report came out, Boris did announce he is changing the strategy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51915302

I wouldn’t give PM Boris Johnson too much credit here. He regularly skipped crucial meetings at the start of the pandemic, and as PM he is ultimately accountable for his choice of advisors.

Moreover, a year later his government had the gall to pretend that herd immunity through infection had never been the strategy. It's a post-truth government.

> I wouldn’t give PM Boris Johnson too much credit here. He regularly skipped crucial meetings at the start of the pandemic

He did more than skip them, he remained thousands of miles away on holiday on a Caribbean island. Didn't deem it important enough to return early.

You also forgot the Lockdown parties. ;-)

Even before the party revelations, his and his government's handling of the pandemic was already well understood to be dire (dither & delay, too little too late, billions on dodgy contracts).

Post-party revelations ? Whatever scraps of credibility that may have remained quickly took a long walk off a short pier.

He and his supporters try to cling to his credibility on the back of the vaccines. But even that was dire. The completely un-necessary and embarrassing EU fighting and unfounded British exceptionalism over the vaccines, the false claims about AZ being a British invention when it is well documented that (something like) 75% of the AZ vaccine team are EU and Other nationals ... the list goes on.

> We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and saying "Well, you'll have to just take it on the chin".

You remember wrongly. He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it.

I think Boris has done very badly in his handling of the pandemic; given how many bad decisions he made, it's strange that people seem fixated on this thing he didn't say.

> He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it.

Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.

By the time Boris started appearing on TV, COVID was already on the UK doorstep having marched through China, Asia and Europe.

By that time, even a five year old kid could have told you that "taking it on the chin" was not up for discussion.

That’s not actually lying though. Expressing an opinion is not lying.

Michael Jordan was a shitty basketball player. That's an opinion, am I lying?

Except you don't actually believe it, so it's a lie, not an opinion.

I didn't say it was my opinion, I said it was an opinion. The person may or may not believe it, you don't know. Is it a lie even if they believe it?

All people who are ______ are ______. Another opinion. Opinions can be intentionally or unintentionally deceiving, which makes them lies.

> Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.

Like I explain in my nearby comment, two of the most decorated UK epidemiologists, being also current and former UK chief scientific advisers, recommended that strategy. Boris did listen to science, it just turns out that some of the UK's very top level scientists were really bad, worse than the 5 year old kid your talked about.

> Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.

I think it's always worth examining your assumptions. Every time you consider a policy of government, you should consider what would happen if you didn't do it, even if only to compare against a baseline.

> By that time, even a five year old kid could have told you that "taking it on the chin" was not up for discussion.

It was not so obvious at the time. It seemed like a very bad idea to me, but lots of people, including on this forum, were vehement that it was the only option.

> Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.

Not really. Two years ago, when COVID started to spread outside China, the initial concern was the potential impact it would have on saturating national health services and there was no concern regarding it's death rate, which led to the "flatten the curve" political talking point.

Keep in mind that "flatten the curve" implies that everyone is expected to contract the disease sooner or later, but only in a way that doesn't overwhelm health services. Back then it was presumed that contracting COVID was not a cause for concern, and that after the first infection then everyone was finally immune and everything was back to normal.

Only after COVID was experienced first hand outside of china, and thus without being subjected to the CCP's censors, did the world learned about it's true fatality rate, transmission rate, reinfection rate, and lingering health problems. Afterwards there were subsequent variants which again became pandemics.

When the real impact of COVID started to become noticeable, the approach to the disease changed radically to one based on containment at all cost followed by mass vaccination campaigns once the first effective vaccines started to become available.

'I was at a hospital where there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody,' the prime minister said on 3 March 2020

He back visiting a hospital, howwever this time as a patient in the ICU within a month.

> Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire.

Strange how the idea the UK mishandled the crisis persists, but at least one report [1] suggests otherwise, maybe the UK could have done better but certainly didn't do much worse than it's peers:

United Kingdom excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 128 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 0.97) <- actually over reported deaths

France excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 124 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.28)

Spain excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 186 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.64)

Italy excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 227 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.89)

Poland excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 297 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 2.20)

1. https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821... (PDF)

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