In all the back and forth I'd missed that these were your key concerns. I don't share them so again I'll leave it in your hands. I just don't see responsibility for the care home massacre as turning on when SAGE advised about the importance of asymptomatic transmission. Or on the feasibility of such testing. The precautionary principle should have been applied in relation to both: no hindsight necessary.
As regards the need to rationalise tests, has the government ever provided an explanation for the shortage of tests that wasn't a lie (there was talk of a global shortage of a particular element that was quickly debunked)?
Clearly the care home scandal was complicated. But what I object to here is the reduction of complexity to this or that empirical fact, and the insistence that we suspend all judgement until a particular number of facts are established, ignoring the evidence that's piled up in front of our faces. The complexity here has to do with understanding the relationship between the terrible decisions that were made by a number of actors, the dysfunctional systems of expertise and governance that underlie them, and the decades-long scandal that is UK social care.
If you want to assign blame forensically to this or that individual, then sure, you need to establish who said what to whom when. But the bigger picture is pretty clear here if you have eyes to see it: the government f*cked up, and the magnitude of the f*ck up was down to an already completely f*cked up social care system. Why not point the finger?