Unpreparedness

Subject: Unpreparedness. 

I'm reminded as I watch the daily Corona virus News Conference in which the wise men and the less than wise politicians bat the questions away, of a quote in Alice in Wonderland,  "That's the reason they are called lessons" said the Gryphon "because they lesson from day to day".
The question of needing to carry the populous along with you in fighting the Covid19 pandemic is self evident,  there aren't enough policemen or even laws to convince a recalcitrant public into doing what the government deem necessary.  The  number of U turns and the governments haphazard directives have left most of us confused and frankly very skeptical.
Targets, which in the initial process of fighting the virus, assumed prime importance are not now needed.  Methodologies which were deemed wrong are now the only solution. Testing which was spoken of with barely disguised contempt not many weeks ago is now seen to be the answer to getting a grip on who has it and who hasn't and therefore who can resume work and who must remain in quarantine.
We have called it wrong from day one and now with a death toll pushing past 20.000, a number conveniently disguising the real number of people dying because the deaths in Old Age Homes and also people dying at home of the virus are not included.

Must we conclude that old people living in care homes are living on a different planet and don't count, or is the total picture too horrible to bring to the publics attention. The excuse is pitiable if it were not so sad, that the deaths in the Homes are counted fortnightly and therefore could not be introduced with the daily hospital death toll. A simple instructive email to the Care Homes for deaths occurring from the virus each night would bring the figures into line but perhaps the story it told was politically unacceptable.
Our historical friend and foe, the Germans cottoned on to the importance that testing had been in keeping the death toll in South Korea relatively low and they adopted testing as a main plank in the control and almost equally important an understanding of the  response required when you need to get people back to work. The Germans were testing 700.000 a week at their peak in that country, we meanwhile promised 100.000 a week by the end of April but have barely managed 20.000 in total.
The testing stations set up for Key Workers have been massively underused because we added another layer of bureaucracy to the process by insisting that people had to receive an email stating that 'someone' had decreed that they needed the test. People who worked each day in the hospital, such as maintenance workers and cleaners were not thought needy and so were left off the list, care home workers likewise were not thought eligible.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) has been a scandal from start to finish.
The Germans had spent a great deal equipping their hospitals, after the experience of combatting SARS (also a corona type virus) with ventilators and the attendant PPE whilst we, following our obsession with reducing the costs on the infrastructure to  run the country such as the NHS, the police, the fire service, nurse training, doctor training were all severely hit by George Osborne's austerity measures and our obsession with market forces, an obsession we caught from our cousins across the Atlantic when Margaret and Ronald had their famous economic love in in the 1980s.
We don't learn because we are taught we know better. 
It's the downside of Establishment interbreeding, a lack of new blood with new ideas and more modern perspectives. It's the protection of 'old money', and old school exclusivity that has seen us in decline for decades. Where the solution to poor investment in industry and young men and women leaving education untrained to fit in to a modern economy. Our solution was to print stimulus packages which fed the financial community but never seemed to filter down into business ventures. This money printed with scarce a reference to assets has swollen our indebtedness, way beyond our ability to pay 'the piper', who's own sovereign wealth which relied on oil production may be quickly drying up, causing the sheiks to call in their loans