September 2020

1st September

Boris Johnson told the Cabinet: “In the last few months we’ve been sailing into the teeth of a gale, no question ... it is necessary to tack here and there in response to the facts as they change, in response to the wind’s change, but we have been going steadily in the direction, in the course we set out, and we have not been blown off that course.”

• Dominic Cummings told a group of political aides and civil servants that the response to the crisis had too often been “a shitshow” – something he had been at the heart of, though he didn’t mention that – and that a new unit with Downing Street staff in the Cabinet Office would try to put an end to “any miscommunication between the political and administrative arms of government”.

• The Institute for Government [Appendix 2] said in a report into the first responses to the pandemic that the government’s failure to act in the absence of scientific certainty cost a significant number of lives. It concluded that ministers should have been prepared to act in the absence of such certainty and should have better understood the limits of scientific advice. The government lacked a wider sense of strategy at times, the report continued, stating that ministers’ repeated commitment to following the science was not enough to ensure that the right decisions were made at the right time.

 

4th September

The shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, wrote to the actual home secretary, Priti Patel, to request, among other things, the introduction of a robust testing regime in airports. He wrote: “The government’s handling of arrivals into the UK has lacked urgency, coherence and clarity from the outset, including being too slow to implement controls at the onset of the crisis.” It would be difficult to express it more clearly.

• It was reported, following research in the US with 1,000 children, that youngsters could exhibit the main symptoms of COVID-19 – fever, persistent dry cough, and loss of taste or smell – but could also experience vomiting, nausea and diarrhoea. As it has long been known that coronaviruses cause diarrhoea in calves, foals and other animals, including cats and dogs, as well as respiratory diseases, this was hardly a surprising revelation. [see entry for 11th February]

 

8th September

Boris Johnson said he feared people were becoming complacent and that was leading to a spike in infections. The following day he announced new restrictions with, among other things, only six people allowed to meet up. “We must act,” he said, and the government’s chief scientific adviser and chief medical officer were in full agreement.

 

9th September

It was reported that an 84-year-old man from Chatham in Kent, who died in hospital on 30th January, may have been the first fatality from COVID-19 in the UK and possibly the first outside China. It had previously been thought that the first fatality in the UK had been on 5th March. The man’s death had originally been attributed to heart failure and pneumonia but the Kent coroner said that the virus had been found in his lung tissue and listed his cause of death as COVID-19. The man had not been out of Britain. No explanation was forthcoming for the extraordinarily long time for the coroner’s findings to be published.

This death cast doubt on previous opinions of when the virus had first begun to affect people and also appeared to vindicate those in a number of countries, including the UK, who had reported suffering from a mild but lingering respiratory condition, not dissimilar in a number of respects to pneumonia or flu, during the latter part of 2019 and early 2020. It also cast further doubt on China’s actions during the latter part of 2019.

• In a televised address to the nation, Boris Johnson announced a plan to deliver up to 10 million tests a day – “Operation Moonshot”. By the following day sceptics were pointing out that such a scheme would cost in the region of £100 billion (see entry for 22nd August when “Operation Moonshot” was first announced). Mr Johnson said a mass testing programme was “our only hope for avoiding a second national lockdown before a vaccine”.

• This is probably a good day to stop compiling the diary. Operation Moonshot is the most absurd proposal yet put forward by the PM and his Health Secretary – but its name indicates that both men, along with some of the “expert” advisers, are inhabiting a different celestial body from we earth-bound mortals, so there is not much more can be said.

Photo courtesy of Chuck Lindsey of unsplash

 

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