Quote of the day for Maundy Thursday, 9th April 2020
Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria
Please note that the post below was published more than ten years ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by th...
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Unlike our government, by which I mean previous as well as the current administrations, who took it for granted that an approach to contol an outbreak of flu would be just fine for an outbreak of SARS.
BIG MISTAKE.
Can you imagine how he would feel trying to think of a new policy when the labour long term goals have already been realised. Every one is currently locked up and the economy is already in absolute tatters.
I mean come one, where can he go from here?
I gather from a senior local government source in Cumbria that the country actually had a big national stockpile of the PPE and other resources required to deal with a flu pandemic, but this Coronavirus outbreak didn't follow the same pattern as flu and there were some initial difficulties with the distribution arrangements which perhaps should have been more flexible.
I think the NHS actually was reasonably well prepared for a major flu epidemic, which is probably what was behind the thinking of whoever wrote the briefing note sent to me in mid to late February which I repeated in good faith at the time and which Paul Holdsworth challenged, to the effect that the NHS was well equipped.
With 20:20 hindsight I would now accept that was a bit like a general thinking he was well equipped to fight the previous war.
Indeed, one thing we need to recognise is that if we prepare for the next pandemic on the assumption that it will be like COVID-19 we might well be caught out again if spreads and attacks people in another set of entirely different ways. The Duke of Wellington had a few sayings on the subject of building flexibility into your planning, of which the best known is of course that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
I do not dispute that a lot of people give Helmuth Von Moltke credit for it, on the basis that in the mid-nineteenth century, he did indeed say
“No operation extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main body of the enemy.”
He is therefore often credited with being the first person definitely known to have made a comment very close to "no plan survives contact with the enemy." Though the saying has also been attributed to Napoleon, Eisenhower, and yes, Wellington.
The sort of comment I was thinking of, and which Wellington definitely did say of the difference between the way the French Marshalls planned their military campaigns and the way he planned his, were those like this:
“They planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harnesses. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on”
This was revisited in 2011 under the Cameron administration, and Influenza was deemed as the most likely threat. Thats why our NHS is geared up for a Flu outbreak, There is no readyness for mass testing as the signs and symptoms of flu are much more obvious, it speads slower, and can be controlled to a certain extent by antivirals (suce as tamiflu)
The big problem is, that once we had one plan it was deemed ok to use that as a general template for a pandemic, oooops.
the thinking of our current plan is laid out in Scientific Summary of Pandemic Influenza & its Mitigation
The 2011 strategy document is here
And the final draft (which is currently being used to fight a Sars Pandemic is from 2014 and is here
There will have to be an investigation following this, and there the main question will have to be "why was a flu plan deemed adequate for all potential outbreaks?" Whist we all can say hindsight is 20/20, it really should have been a glaring ommision for medical experts to see over the years.