It's been quite a turnaround. Dominic Cummings was loathed by pro-Remainers and 'centrists' for his role in 'getting Brexit done' but now he's being toasted as the 'insider' who spilled the beans in public on how incompetently PM Johnson and his health secretary handled Covid-19. All of a sudden 'Bad Boy Dom' is not so bad. He's a credible, reliable source we should all be listening to.
Yet, while we can all probably agree about his verdict on the awful Matt Hancock (the late comedian Tony Hancock would probably have made a better health secretary - and he's been dead for 53 years), Cummings' testimony on Wednesday to the House of Commons Health and Science Select Committees was highly contradictory. As Leo McKinstry pointed out in the Daily Express, he had a scattergun approach, but no smoking gun. The core thrust of his critique - that Boris Johnson didn't take the novel coronavirus seriously enough, was mistakenly pursuing a policy of 'herd immunity', and should have locked the country down earlier and harder - is itself based on false assumptions, or, more precisely, ludicrously over-the-top modelling, which was disproved by real-life events in countries that didn't lock down.
Cummings said it was clear in March 2020 that the NHS would soon be overrun. But was it? The question everyone should be asking is this: if Covid-19 were already in the UK in December 2019, as many experts allege and much anecdotal evidence suggests, then why wasn't the NHS overrun in January or February 2020, the usual peak months for admissions for flu and upper respiratory tract infections? In fact, deaths in the first 15 weeks of 2020 were lower than in the same period in 2018.
On the government's own website, it was posted that "as of 19 March 2020, Covid-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK". The statement noted that mortality rates were "low overall". ....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>>...
