While the government’s daily Coronavirus briefings have continued, it appears that the gloss may have worn off ‘Hancock’s half-hour’ as the Health Secretary ended up with three of them this week.
BBC news coverage has changed. Their daily video is readily available if you’ve got the time to watch, but their written summaries have lost the ‘minister’s face above the yellow fronted podium’ image and are thus much harder to find.
Question-able time at Number 10
Hancock’s week opened on a wobble “Following significant demand, as well as questions from the media, we will take our first question from a member of the public”. The giveaway had come earlier in the day when the New European alleged that Downing Street had barred “Sunday Times journalists from posing questions during [the] coronavirus briefing”.
Perhaps the air time reduction for critical journalists asking difficult questions relieves the strain on weak ministers giving woeful answers?
But the Hancock-ups continued on Tuesday as the hapless one then predicted what would be happening on home testing numbers and “rolling out testing of asymptomatic residents and staff in care homes”, just after he’d told the nation that the actual numbers of tests the previous day were less than half of his own 100,000 target.
By Wednesday, it fell to Mr Raab to tell us that the government’s Covid fatality statistics were updated “so that deaths in all settings are included”, adding an extra 3,811 cases. This looked like a politically crafted number, high enough to seem credible, but low enough to not make the UK the sick man of Europe.
On Thursday a haggard looking PM made a welcome return to the yellow fronted podium saying “I can confirm today for the first time that we are past the peak of this disease”.
On Friday May 1st, the Health Secretary announced that the nation had met his target of 100,000 tests, although apparently 39,000 of the 122,347 tests he claimed were still in the post – according to a BBC report.
Following progress on the Domestic Abuse Bill in Parliament, Saturday saw Communities Minister Robert Jenrick announcing that “no victim of domestic violence has to make the unbearable choice between staying somewhere where they know is unsafe or becoming homeless”.
Sunday fell to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to say something. but the Beeb didn’t report much about what the ‘Gove-e-meant’ had said and the daily gov.uk transcripts had nowt either.
More source than sauce
If the national political briefings were all a bit skate and flounder, locally it looked more like steak on the plate.
Wokingham Borough’s Council Leader, Cllr John Halsall, has been posting his “Members’ Updates” more and more widely on various social media groups.
Appearing almost every weekday and aiming to be a trustworthy source, they tell us what our Council has been doing to help and guide the community through the pandemic.
Unashamedly long so as to be complete, the posts have a matter-of-fact style and the seventeen I’ve seen have had over 70 different topics. They’re the A to Z of WBC’s world, ranging from ‘Accurate Information’ through to ‘Workforce’ so far.
As you’d expect, topics like Adult Care, Business, Council activity, Education, and Finance get covered frequently. But there’s a smorgasbord of other things too, although subjects such as Art, Licensing or Visas etc. are mentioned a lot less frequently.
Borough ‘In Briefs’
Wokingham Borough Council’s social media channel has continued to publish information and guides on giving and receiving help during the pandemic. Here’s a quick look at what they said last week.
This week has seen the upping of some video postings and Helen, Emma and Jake have each talked about the Community Support Programme.
Sometimes, things don’t exactly go to plan, whether it’s your own organisation of someone else’s who you’ve been relying on. And while the message might not ‘quite’ be spot on, it’s appreciated that the Waste and Recycling team at WBC have put their hands up to let everyone know that there’s a problem – and they’re working to fix it.
From the traffic this announcement then generated, it’s not the only problem with garden waste, but this new spirit of open and honest dialogue with the public is far more likely to generate respect and get the real issues resolved than the old “deny, hide or scarper” tactics ever were.
Can you solve the puzzle?
In the country’s desire to bring life back to a new normal, one of the news items that struck home this week related to horse racing restarting – with a claim that they’d be the first sport to do so.
Back in March, the Cheltenham Festival started the day after Italy’s national lockdown began and attracted crowds of over 60,000 each day from March 10 to March 13.
On Wednesday March 18, a news report said that staff serving at the racecourse had allegedly had Covid-19 symptoms. As the days passed, more and more people were reporting that they’d been severely unwell after they or a friend had visited the event.
Each report was accompanied by counter-claims that Cheltenham Races weren’t necessarily responsible and so the process of ‘fogging’ responsibility and seeding doubt became more and more entrenched.
Less than a week later, the UK’s national lockdown commenced on Tuesday March 24th.
By Friday 27, a ‘Resumption of Racing Group’ had published a statement, followed on Monday, March 30, by a Covid-19 Operational Plan, outlining the process by which horse racing would become the first sport to resume after lockdown ended.
Two weeks passed with controversial news along with denials continuing to grow until on Monday April 13th, veteran jockey AP McCoy said on breakfast TV that “a lot of lives were lost because of it”. Later that day, he tried to clarify via Twitter that the “it” was Coronavirus, not the Cheltenham Festival.
Then on Monday 20th April, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden defended the decision to go ahead with the Cheltenham Festival, saying that “the risk … was no greater … than … in pubs or restaurants”.
This came eight days after a Cheltenham pub landlord had died in hospital after testing positive for Coronavirus. He’d been running the bar at The Beehive pub during the four-day event.
But he wasn’t the only one to perish in Cheltenham as the ONS map of Covid-19 fatalities reveals hotspots dotted round the racecourse area.
Then in the middle of last week, the Government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir David King said that the Cheltenham Festival may have fuelled the Coronavirus outbreak and “was the best possible way to accelerate the spread”.
However, those at the centre of the outbreak aren’t known to have been tested for Covid-19, so the claims and counter-claims can’t be verified or dismissed. It’s that uncertain.
But when Sunday’s news from The Racing Post broke – that “Racing in Britain is working towards a resumption on May 15 following positive meetings with government officials over the last seven days” it might start you wondering as to exactly how the racing industry and the government officials are going to prevent the pandemic starting up all over again.
All of this illuminates just one small corner of the huge problem facing the country as we work out how to behave post-lockdown – to take decisions that get the economy working again without killing lots more people in the process.
And whether the truth, like the virus, is out there – it’s still pretty much a case of “Who’s next“?
What the Neighbours said
Great news! The neighbours’ parrot is back. Apparently while the cat was being taken for a walk, the bedraggled bird shambled in from the garden, squawking mournfully as it hobbled over the carpet then flapped its way up into its cage, minus many of its tail feathers.
Excepting ‘co sousede rikali’, that was week seven of the lockdown – that was.
