A Letter to Jeremy Hunt MP Regarding the UK Government's Proposed Lockdown in November 2020

Below is a letter sent to Mr Jeremy Hunt MP on the 2nd November 2020 via the www.writetothem.com website. The UK government, the weekend before, announced plans to lockdown England from Thursday 5th November until the 2nd December. Fortunately,being a democracy, Parliament will have to debate and vote on the proposition on the 4th November, after this letter was sent.

Dear Mr Hunt,

In my email to you back on the 7th May 2020 I ended the note by saying “the writing is on the wall” for this government. That line has now been crossed and you cannot now count on the Daines family’s support at the next election.

We don’t know what the actual advice the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) & Chief Medical Officer are providing to the government; however, we can surmise from the media that it is version-2 of “Protect the NHS”; driven by fear of deaths as a result of the apparent rise in Covid infections.

Back in March it was the same; “Protect the NHS”, which everyone except, apparently the government, now knows from experience, is the wrong approach.

The government has spent £200+ Billion pounds ostensibly protecting the NHS, trying to save lives and actually failing! The actual cost is vastly higher than the £200 Billion spent, as we all know.

So, the plan is now to repeat the same approach and spend another £200 Billion, over the winter, for a better result?

As I described to you back in April, the most effective approach is to focus government resources on preventing the vulnerable from getting infected for the entire duration of the pandemic (not just the summer); thereby preventing a surge of patients swamping the NHS.

SAGE, in their unsubstantiated wisdom, say this cannot be achieved. Since when did a group of specialist scientists become policy experts? SAGE’s protect the vulnerable approach (which they call “Segmentation”) is not realistic and never would be; however, there are numerous easy ways to reduce the probability of infection for the vulnerable, which would not cost huge amounts of money.

I reiterate a message I made to you before: SAGE is not fit for purpose, neither is the CSO.

To illustrate how simple it is to grasp: Would you prefer to spend £200 to £300+ Billion supporting the economy during lockdowns of 60+ million people (not including the huge cost of excess deaths, decimated businesses, mental & physical health) or £50 Billion in order to prevent the approximately 500,000 vulnerable people (according to Imperial College, back in March) from getting infected?

Hopefully a GCSE in common sense helps point towards the obvious answer?

Both the scientific advice and policymaking has been woeful.

If such advice and policies had been implemented in the business world, the company would be bankrupt and the Directors barred from running any company in the future.

It would be interesting to know what the government actually did to prepare the NHS for the winter season. What estimated hospitalisation rates were used to put in-place the resources in order to cope with the winter?

Can you obtain all the details on what the NHS has done to expand capacity ahead of the winter?

From Ministers’ utterances it appears the NHS is predicted to be swamped by mid November so the inference is that the government hasn’t increased capacity during the summer or autumn?

Or if it has, it clearly wasn’t enough. So, either way another failure leading to yet another lockdown.

It shouldn’t be difficult to see why we have no confidence in the government’s ability to manage these issues. In the spring there were valid mitigations; but this winter, there are none.

Regards,

The Daines Family