英国官员的错误值得我们注意。
2020-04-24 09:08阅读：
今天FT妙文说，英国政府对待肺炎的错误：
（1）首相多次缺席讨论，
（2）现在官员们份份自保：写詳細的日记，留痕，记录自己当时曾经建议隔离、采购医疗设备、封城，等等，避免秋后算帐，
（3）官员们从头到尾都是“鸭子死了嘴硬”，坚决不承认半点失误，一分一毫不让步，用一个谎言覆盖另一个谎言。
妙文在此。想练习英文的诸君可以朗读！
... ministers persist with a never-give-an-inch communications
strategy more suited to election campaigns. Every mistake invites a
denial. Targets for testing and equipment are missed and promises
broken.
——————
全文如下：
How politics thwarted the UK’s Covid-19 response
Ministers failed to grasp the threat as Boris Johnson tried to
swerve a tough response.
April 23, 2020 10:38 am by Philip Stephens.
When the inevitable national inquiry reports into Britain’s
handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the first item on the charge
sheet will be a failure to act decisively at the outset to suppress
the pandemic.Some Whitehall insiders call this a stumble, a passing
hesitation. Some talk about reckless complacency. Others observe
laconically that Prime Minister Boris Johnson does not react well
to b
ad news.
Britain lagged behind most of Europe in the spread of the
infection. Yet, in spite of the lessons to be drawn from Italy and
elsewhere, it has one of the highest death rates outside of the US.
Management failures in procurement and distribution compounded
political mistakes in depriving it of critical resources such as
ventilators, testing capacity and personal safety equipment.
The postmortem, one old Whitehall hand says, will be “bloody”.
Ministers and political aides are already privately shuffling off
responsibility to institutions such as Public Health England and
the civil service, suggesting they have been slow to react to
fast-moving events. Prudent officials say they are keeping detailed
personal diaries to record the advice they offered to Mr Johnson
and his ministers.
Some mistakes were inevitable. Covid-19 is a new disease. There
were genuine uncertainties and differences among epidemiologists.
The UK is not alone in facing problems. Scientists often disagree
with each other. So do clinicians and public health experts. And
Britain is caught up in the worldwide scramble for essential
equipment to treat patients.
The crisis has also exposed longstanding structural weaknesses. The
top jobs in Whitehall go to talented policymakers rather than
managers schooled in complex logistics. Public Health England has
stuck rigidly to “peacetime” rules on equipment standards when the
nation is fighting what officials call a war. A decade-long
financial squeeze has left the National Health Service
ill-equipped.
Standing above all the tactical mis-steps, however, was the
strategic misjudgment made by Mr Johnson and his colleagues at the
outset. Until well into March ministers refused to grip the gravity
of the threat because Mr Johnson did not want to contemplate a
draconian response.
This failure was evident in February when Mr Johnson chose not to
attend several meetings of the emergency ministerial group Cobra.
It has haunted the UK’s effort ever since, helping to explain why,
even now, the pandemic is sweeping through care centres for the
elderly, why medics and care workers are scrabbling for safety
clothing when treating Covid-19 patients, and why Britain is behind
nations such as Germany in mapping the virus through testing and
contact tracing.
In the words of one top official: “Every road leads back to the
slow start.” Britain has been “behind every curve”, another insider
says. One consequence was a failure to build up testing capacity,
another that it came late to the global competition for ventilators
and protective clothing.
Mr Johnson’s breezy confidence was on display in early March when
he volunteered that he had been “shaking hands with everybody”
during a hospital visit. He said everything about Britain’s
response — its scientists, the NHS, its testing and surveillance —
was “fantastic”. Britain could busk its way through the
crisis.
The prime minister’s default response to bad news, say officials
who have worked closely with him, is a cheerful assertion that
things will sort themselves out. Even as the virus took hold in
early March, he was horrified, a ministerial colleague says, by the
idea of imposing shutdowns or quarantines.
For a time, the advice of two leading scientists unwittingly
conspired with this approach. While other nations followed Italy
into lockdown, chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance and
Christopher Whitty, the NHS’s chief scientist, backed a strategy of
“mitigation”.
Generalised testing was halted in favour of a policy of
self-isolation and efforts to shield the most vulnerable. The goal
was “herd immunity”. In Sir Patrick’s description: “Our aim is to
try to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it
completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild
illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are
immune”.
Other scientists argued the strategy was better suited to a
seasonal flu epidemic. With Covid-19, it would threaten hundreds of
thousands of potential deaths and overwhelm the NHS. By the time
this view prevailed, the virus had taken firm hold. The prime
minister was among the victims.
The U-turn might have led to a candid conversation with the nation
to rebuild public confidence. Instead ministers persist with a
never-give-an-inch communications strategy more suited to election
campaigns. Every mistake invites a denial. Targets for testing and
equipment are missed and promises broken.
After a period of recuperation, Mr Johnson is preparing to return
to his desk. His ministers have fallen to arguing about when to
relax the lockdown. The answer should be obvious. The government
should proceed with extreme caution. It should follow the example
of Germany in sharing the uncertainties with citizens. The choice
between beating the virus and economic recovery is a false one. The
government must start telling the full truth.
