Scotland Nhs

[Sprotyrover]

Folks on here have been critical of the NHS in England and it's lack of Ventillators yet our Friends up in Scotland have £11,200 per head spent on them compared to £9,500 spent on Peeps in England and yet they have only 300 Ventilators for Circa 5 million we have 5,000 for circa 55 million (11000 as of today).

[SydneyRover]

To make any sense of your comment you'd have to give us a breakdown and comparison of where all the money is spent in each system Sprot?

[Sprotyrover]

To make any sense of your comment you'd have to give us a breakdown and comparison of where all the money is spent in each system Sprot?

But that's the Point Sydders we could have been spending 100% more on our health system and still be in the same situation.

[rtid88]

To make any sense of your comment you'd have to give us a breakdown and comparison of where all the money is spent in each system Sprot?

But that's the Point Sydders we could have been spending 100% more on our health system and still be in the same situation.

Well that's clearly utter b@llocks!!!

[BillyStubbsTears]

Excellent tweet by someone yesterday.

We stockpile guns and bombs as an insurance policy against the day when we might have to face an enemy.

Did no-one think to do the same thing with ICU ventilators?

It appears no one did after the 2016 exercise flagged that up as a critical weakness in our ability to fight a pandemic, who took the decision to ignore that advice, and why?

[SydneyRover]

Only Sprot and bp know the answer to that 

[Glyn_Wigley]

To make any sense of your comment you'd have to give us a breakdown and comparison of where all the money is spent in each system Sprot?

But that's the Point Sydders we could have been spending 100% more on our health system and still be in the same situation.

You shouldn't believe everything you read on the side of a bus.

[Superspy]

Excellent tweet by someone yesterday.

We stockpile guns and bombs as an insurance policy against the day when we might have to face an enemy.

Did no-one think to do the same thing with ICU ventilators?

It appears no one did after the 2016 exercise flagged that up as a critical weakness in our ability to fight a pandemic, who took the decision to ignore that advice, and why?

That's essentially what Bill Gates was saying in his 2015 TED Talk.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Excellent tweet by someone yesterday.

We stockpile guns and bombs as an insurance policy against the day when we might have to face an enemy.

Did no-one think to do the same thing with ICU ventilators?

It appears no one did after the 2016 exercise flagged that up as a critical weakness in our ability to fight a pandemic, who took the decision to ignore that advice, and why?

That's essentially what Bill Gates was saying in his 2015 TED Talk.

I must dig that out.

The state we are currently in reminds me of the mid 1930s. The only thing the Govt was really concerned about was cutting spending after the hit of the Great Depression. We had cut defence spending to historically low levels, because the Govt was convinced that there was no imminent likelihood of a great war. The RAF still had bi-plane fighters from WWI.

We did see the threat coming thereafter, but we re-armed very slowly, and that was one of the features that meant that we were unable to contain Hitler over the Anschluss and the Sudetenland. Consequently, we lost our chance to nip him in the bud when we could. As a result, we had to entirely re-order society, wreck the economy and throw the kitchen sink at him to defeat him in a long, exhausting battle.

That seems like a very good analogy for now. We've had a generation of politicians who, despite the warnings from history, have not been doing the long-term planning to give us the resources to fight a pandemic. We've obsessed with trimming debt and we haven't had our defences (testing capability, PPE, over-supply of ventilators) prepared. Conseqently, we lost the chance to control and contain CV-19 when it was less of a threat 8 weeks ago. And now we are in for an exhausting and expensive battle.


People will say that we couldn't have afforded to stockpile 100,000 ventilator machines because...debt! Austerity! They cost about £20-40k each. It would have cost about £2-4bn to build enough to get us through this. Spread over ten years, that would have been 0.01% of GDP per year. We are currently looking at losing perhaps 20-30% of GDP this year because of CV-19 getting out of hand.

Look at it this way. No-one wanted to pay for 1000 Spitfires and Lancasters in 1936-37. We didn't need them. They were too expensive. Debt! Austerity! If we HAD had them, Chamberlain could have gone to Munich and told Hitler, "You invade the Sudetenland, you little bas**rd, and we will flatten Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne" But he couldn't. Because we weren't in a position to do that. As it happened, we had to spend many, many times more on the armed forces.

False economy and lack of foresight then. False economy and lack of foresight now.

[Superspy]

Here's the video BST.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI

[BillyStubbsTears]

Cheers