A Plea for More Pessimism ..............
As a pessimist I have always felt very comfortable in the world of emergency management. I find it a useful starting point. I am all for looking for the positive but not at the expense of ignoring the negative. Against this background I was left worried by a series of conversations last week (did I say that I also don’t like Christmas? - I am sure that a picture is developing of what it must be like to work with me) I was talking to practitioners about the new National Risk Register (1) and the use of Reasonable Worst Case (RWC) methodology. Inevitably we moved on to talking about the response to the pandemic. Overall I got the impression that there is a common view that Covid-19 represents the very high point of challenge and that ‘if we can deal with this we can deal with anything’. On the basis of any risk assessment we could be called to face things that are on an even greater scale. We have seen over 80,000 deaths in the UK spread out over 10 months. In the case