We have all been through the wringer in the last year. I’ve been lucky not to have lost any family members, but I know people who have. My heart goes out to everyone who has suffered. Let us at least learn from what has happened, because another pandemic will come, sooner or later.
County Council has responsibility for public health, but partly due to the centralising tendencies of national government, some public health efforts were not easy to access. For example, there is no covid testing centre in Ashbourne Division.
The UK took a centralised approach to tackling the virus, with huge sums of money handed to opaque companies and organisations to implement vaguely specified ideas. Vaccines are developed by big pharma companies, so striking big, centralised deals with them was likely a necessary and sensible thing to do, but some things would have been better handled at a more local level.
The UK suffered some of the world’s worst death rates in this pandemic partly because we relied on central government to make decisions, which were often slow and sometimes plain wrong. One example was the astonishing £37 billion test-and-trace fiasco.
Councils and NHS services working together in one part of Wales managed to create a contact tracing system of their own, as described in this article from early in the pandemic.
Ceredigion, along with Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire is covered by the Hywel Dda health board. At the time of writing (March 2021), the Hywel Dda area reports 280 cumulative coronavirus deaths out of a population of 385,615. This is a rate of 726 deaths per million people.
Derbyshire Dales reports a death rate of 2600 per million.
Derbyshire County Council took some good actions, such as assisting in the creation of ‘Nightingale homes’ for discharged covid patients, to prevent the spread of the disease to uninfected residents. Also, council employees of all types did great work and sometimes took personal risks on our behalf, which is not always appreciated.
However, it’s clear that overall, we did much worse than the Hywel Dda area and I believe in learning from mistakes. As councillor I would like to open a discussion with councillors in Hywel Dda to learn as much as possible, so that we could be ready to act as they did if we ever face a crisis like this again.
This BBC article looks at some of the things we could learn from the wider world.
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