New Zealand COVID

New Zealand is also self sufficient in food. I believe both countries are in the top 5 in the world for that. We are way way way down the list in negative sufficiency.

 

I once survived a month on happy shopper bread, pot noodles and jam and lemon curd tarts and council pop, so reckon we be ok

 

It would have been extremely easy to require lorry drivers to use a GPS tracker and monitor where they go, only allowing them to stop at approved places. Then link it into the app that should have been out a lot quicker than it was and test any contacts. It was possible, they just didn’t bother.

 

Our governments overall Covid strategy has been pretty lamentable, but you can't compare the 2 countries really, New Zealand is about the same size with 5 million people and probably not even a 20th of the international travel and traffic that we have, its pretty easy to stop a dozen flights from Oz and South Asia and declare a success, it would have been more of a surprise if one of the remotest places on the planet hadn't contained COVID tbh.

 

That's a different thing to closing the borders and not the same as what NZ or Australia did.
That would have been possible but would have created a lot of covid hotspots as drivers would have to stop at truck stops in a few key areas. One of them has it then what? Close the truck stop and quarantine everyone? It's possible but not as easy as is being made out and again comes back to a lack of planning long in advance of this pandemic. The plans for that should have been in place anyway (as should plans for pretty much all of it really)
The idea that Donny red had that we can just magic up drivers is impossible though, at least yours has a plan.

 

I agree “get more drivers” isn’t a plan, but is it any more stupid than your plan to “get more carers”? I’d argue getting drivers is far more feasible than that.

And I admit my plan isn’t perfect, nothing is, but it’s a hell of a lot better that what Bojo the clown came up with which appears to me to be “just let them come in to bring stuff. It’ll be fine”

 

What a complete load of utter ******** mate. We CAN compare and we should. We should examine different countries' responses as a way of examing different countries' responses. That's all. Some countries have handled this well and some countries havent. It's glaringly obvious (and I'm not comparing with an iceberg in Antarctica where there are few people to the UK). I will criticise Bozo, Johnson, Clown, Mr Dither, because it's patently obvious he has killed people. He has. So please dont try to minimalise things witn that extrapolation

 

You lot don't half like to argue with one another even though you all seemingly agree with the overall picture deep down.

Of course the UK cannot be directly compared to Australia and NZ. I cannot speak on behalf of the kiwi weirdos as I've never been but it has often been said that if you had to design a country perfect for isolating it would be Australia. Low population density sprawling cities located thousands of miles from one another on a remote island. We are indeed largely self sufficient in food. I can drink Australian coffee while eating a meal of Australian meat, fruit and veg, topped off by some grated Australian racist cheese.

However, it is also true that almost immediately there was a closure of borders. Flights grounded. Virgin Australia bit the dust almost immediately. Costly and not universally popular but necessary precautions to ensure the virus never got a foothold. I assumed at the time that the UK had done the same. Then I read in the news some five or six weeks later that Britain was considering such a closure. Incredible. It has already been pointed out in this thread that Britain is more dependent on imports and border closures aren't as practical. But it appeared to me as if it had been a free for all up to that point. Reading this forum backed up my impression. So yeah, from a distance it seems like the UK government dropped the ball big time. Which it seems you all agree with.

Now get back to discussing hoofball.

 

******** ya tory scumball rat infested slime wort thing....

 

Historically, there has and still is a shortage of class 1 drivers.
Couple of things on that though,
Firstly class 2 drivers could have been utilised and redistributed and there are many people out there who can drive upto a 7.5 tonne vehicle, they could have been fast tracked and utilised.
Secondly during the lockdown, there was quite a few class 1 drivers laid off because they were exporting non essential goods and were furloughed as a result. Not enough to make a difference granted, but it was the first time ever that I can recall where drivers were asking for work.

 

And there’s not a single trucker moving ‘non-essential’ items that could have been redeployed to shift food?
Because that’s how we’re fixing the stuff we succeeded at.
We redeployed thousands of civil servants from many departments to pay UC. We dropped loads of tax work to concentrate on furlough payments, we redeployed troops to help with the logistics to build field hospitals.

But somehow truck drivers are a specialist resource tied to exactly the way of working that they’re used to.

it’s a dead cat anyway; truckers are fairly easy to manage. The reason we didn’t close the borders or insist on quarantine is because it hurts Tory voters. By stopping foreigners flying in we also severely limit Brits travelling, and they weren’t prepared to do that.

 

Oh he’s still a nob, make no mistake

 

The bottom line is that, just like in America, Boris and his pals didn't want the economy to take a hit and therefore lose popularity so they hoped it would all go away.
It didn't.
At least the Tories eventually cottoned on and began to take some sort of measures if erratic and, at times, hopelessly thought out.
A lot of people died unnecessarily because of their initial lack of action though and that will always remain unforgivable

 

Like sending school kids back to school during the worst of the pandemic for one day to spread the virus even more then closing schools as an afterthought.

 

It's like they're making it up as they go along.... Oh, hang on a minute

 

This was wrote last March. Seems depressingly accurate.

 

Japan (40%), South Korea (44%) and Norway (50%) are among the countries that are least self-sufficient for food - and worse in that regards than the UK (61%). They are also countries that have coped considerably better with Covid than the UK.

 

Local and National Government has plans for all possible eventualities - I once (20+ years ago) saw the book containing the plans for Leeds which including everything from a plane crash on the city centre, through a dirty bomb to outbreak of a nasty contagious disease and lots of other stuff. IIRC Leicester tested one a few years ago for zombies.

The planning was in place (see for example, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pandemic-influenza-response-plan - page 13-14 if you are interested). The government, or more specifically Ministers and the Prime Minister, made decisions to override or veer from the plan. The Prime Minister also scrapped the Pandemic Response Committee in 2019 - six months before Covid - to concentrate on Brexit (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politic...rapped-cabinet-pandemic-committee-six-months/).

You could argue that the plan wasn't perfect - after all no plans survive an encounter with the enemy - and you could argue that the plan was ignored, but you cant argue that there was no plan.

 

The planning you refer to by local authorities are part of standard disaster planning and modelled on the requirements of the COMAH regulations. These regs were introduced to address environmental disasters like Flixborough and apply to high risk installations like nuclear power stations and petrochemical plants. The planning necessary to address a pandemic was identified in the 2019 National Security Risk Assessment (see my earlier post) and subsequently ignored by the government despite the RA was commissioned by the cabinet office.

 

This is bang on. If we had implemented the exact same measures as either New Zealand or Australia, we would have had a lower death total than we do now. We wouldn't have been anywhere near their levels, but we'd be lower than we are now. We're only now considering quaranting arrivals, I can't fathom why we haven't been doing this for the past 11 months.