Absolutely spot on. To say this isn't a political issue and it would have happened under any party is just nonsense. The NHS for the last decade haven't been properly funded and medical staff haven't been treated like the amazing super humans they are. It's a disgrace that they are expected to deal with a generation defining pandemic with inadequate PPE from 2015 when they've been at 90%+ capacity for months. I think it's unbelievable that Johnson is now thanking profusely those that him and his Tory peers have more of less stripped to the bonce since his party's been in power because you just know when this passes it'll be as normal.

And if you think any of the political parties would have been prepared for this, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.

After 10 years of lack of investment and atrocious management you may be right.

13 years prior to that weren't much better.

There's no government on the planet that plans for the consequences of a pandemic.

This must be the first time that so much PPE has been needed in the recent history of the world so it is understandable that governments & medical authorities have been wrong footed.

Every government has plans. There's a team in the Cabinet Office that plans for all sorts of things. There's a plan for what happens if the National Grid goes down (which involves urgent action as you have about 5 days before the cooling towers in nuclear power plants melt down and Sellafield becomes Chernobyl). There's a plan for what happens if terrorists detonate a nuclear "dirty bomb" in a city centre. There's a plan for foot-and-mouth style agricultural diseases that can wipe out livestock and food supply.

They've had pandemic plans for years. In the mid-2000s they were very concerned about avian flu developing into human-to-human transmission. I remember going to a talk a number of years ago about civil contingency planning where the speaker said pandemic of a new virus is the highest on the potential impact ranking in terms of potential deaths and economic impact. The other big threat like that is antimicrobial resistance because if superbugs develop that are resistant to our limited range of antibiotics it will knock medicine back centuries as we wouldn't be able to do most hospital treatments without risk of infection that couldn't be controlled.

Emergency planning gets undermined by being low down politicians' priorities, there aren't votes in it and it costs money, and also there's an attitude that anything that sounds really bad "could never really happen", they think "yeah they told us the millennium bug was going to knock planes out of the sky". We'd have been better prepared for this in the mid 2000s than now, because capacity has been degraded and the health system has become more fragmented after the Lansley reforms in the early 2010s.

In a crisis, the more centralised a system is the better for co-ordinating action at pace, and more fragmented health systems are more exposed in something like this (the US is especially vulnerable). Ours has got fragmented with multiple "reforms" which get brought in every few years that introduce more separations between different bodies, usually under the premise of driving efficiency, creating an internal market for competition between providers and so on - but when trying to work fast like now it means lots of different bodies, each with their own limited budgets and targets, are needing to work together but also have their own vested interests.

Also running down capacity over time means you haven't got spare capacity to respond at speed to crises.

There was a review of pandemic capacity a few years ago when Jeremy Hunt was Secretary of State for the NHS, it concluded that the NHS would be overwhelmed and identified a lot of things that needed to be fixed. The response then was the classic "defensive lines": NHS is the best in the world, world-class healthcare infrastructure well placed to deal with anything blah blah. Hunt is now doing a decent job of asking questions as chair of the health select committee, but the elephant in the room is that if he'd taken this seriously back then we would have been better equipped to deal with things now.

It would still be tough but the better prepared you are the more the NHS can cope with an increase and less severe lockdowns we'd have had to have.

The antimicrobial resistance is a real threat too - health professionals and scientists are very concerned, and the big risk factor comes from the overuse of antibiotics of which a large part comes from intensive farming practices adding antibiotics in to animal feed. They have been saying for a while now that this should be banned but the large agrifoods companies have strong lobbying power and so nothing gets done. If we are hit with a superbug down the road, no doubt we'll also have governments claiming "nobody could have forseen this, stop trying to make political capital out of it".

Especially one that has underinvested in the National Health and Care Service.
Though funding for the Department of Health and Social Care continues to grow, the rate of growth slowed during the period of imposed Tory austerity. Budgets rose by 1.4 per cent each year on average (adjusting for inflation) in the 10 years between 2009/10 to 2018/19, compared to the 3.7 per cent average rises since the NHS was established.
This meant, amongst other things screwing nursing staff wages, knowing how devoted they were to their chosen career.
Now they are applauded as heroes.

They always have been.

Aaaaaah, the NHS, the great British religion, that is now considered blasphemous to talk down...

Truth is, it's now simply a political football, that as far outgrown its initial purpose.

Hopefully, after this has ended, it might receive a total review of its purpose and how it's funded, because it's been desperately needed for years.

Germany are far ahead of us and even taking Covid 19 patients from other EU states;

I voted Labour, but this government has been in charge for 116 days.

I think you know what I mean Jack, i.e. where the responsibility lies.

The responsibility for the way the NHS uses its funds is down to the NHS Procurement teams, turning the NHS into Trusts was and still is a big issue the Trust leaders are only interested in making profit. There are departments within the NHS that are spending huge funds during Feb and Mar each year to prove their dept needs the funds and therefore receives the same level of funding the following year. Don't forget there are those in the NHS who use the 6 months full pay sick leave every year, which is a cost as they require agency to cover the positions.

Successive governments regardless of their flavour have treated the NHS with bursts of contempt. There have been increases in funds however the increase population and therefore to £'s per head is out of balance. There are many non UK nationals treated by the NHS whose respective governments should eventually pay, sadly there is a massive gap in the treatment and the cost recovery this also has an effect on the way the NHS works.

When you look at the none frontline staff, some of their salaries would make your eyes water when some on the frontline are on low salaries. Revising this area would massively help the funding issues.

The NHS is not something this or the next government can put right without returning it to a nationalised operation.

Again this Thursday we should all the frontline staff