[conspire] How to fail at COVID-19 planning, UK edition

[Rick Moen]

Mirror of an eyebrow-raising article from _The Times_ of London.
https://archive.is/20200418182037/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh

  Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster

  Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order
  protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears.
  Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives

  by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott, and Jonathan Leake


  On the third Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was
  creeping across the world. Passing from person to person and borne on
  ships and planes, the coronavirus was already leaving a trail of bodies.
  The virus had spread from China to six countries and was almost
  certainly in many others. Sensing the coming danger, the British
  government briefly went into wartime mode that day, holding a meeting of
  Cobra, its national crisis committee.

  But it took just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the
  coronavirus threat. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of
  Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the
  risk to the UK public was “low”.

  This was despite the publication that day of an alarming study by
  Chinese doctors in the medical journal, The Lancet. It assessed the
  lethal potential of the virus, for the first time suggesting it was
  comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50
  million people.

  Unusually, Boris Johnson had been absent from Cobra. The committee —
  which includes ministers, intelligence chiefs and military generals —
  gathers at moments of great peril such as terrorist attacks, natural
  disasters and other threats to the nation and is normally chaired by the
  prime minister.
  [...]

Article goes on to detail months of oblivious idiocy and deliberate 
ignoring of imminent disaster, the likes of which even the Toddler's 
administration arguably didn't match.