Did UK introduce restrictions too early?

[Makeitgoaway]

Hear me out!

I don't think they planned to close schools when they did. I think the Welsh and Scotish governments forced their hand and they themselves were influenced by public opinion more than the science.

When I first heard "the plan" it sounded like there were terrible things to come but it made sense to me, as a way of controlling things as much as possible.

The public didn't like it and there was outrage that we didn't "lockdown" to protect ourselves, although "the public" also didn't behave in any sort of sensible manner to protect themselves as we saw last weekend.

So, measures were in force earlier than planned. The more restrictions there are and the earlier they are in place, the longer this thing will last. The restrictions don't protect "us", they protect the NHS. Most people will need to get it before this is over. Lockdown won't make it go away, just slow the rate of infection, meaning it takes longer to play out. While the NHS is coping, was there any need for the restrictions?

In Italy, it has taken 3 weeks for signs of social unrest to emerge. If that happens here we won't be even close to the peak at that stage. What happens then?

From the moment Wuhan started to report cases the UK should have acted and started testing all flights arriving in UK. They didn't, meaning that infected people were coming into the country way before they started to think about infection control.

Also, Wuhan are responsible for keeping it quiet before it got out of control. They state that patient zero is a woman that works in the wet market but she was only the first person to be tested for it and tested positive. If that doctor that that died of it tried to report it was before her then it was about for a while before the world found out.

So it must have been brewing in UK for a lot longer than then realised. I.e. quarnenteeing the people that come off the flight when there had probably been a lot lot more people entering UK with it before Wuhan shut itself down.... It wouldn't have got this much out of control if the first cases reported were actually the first cases.....

Allowing the virus to run rampant for herd immunity was a batshit plan but controlling the spread gives more of the population a chance to access decent healthcare with the eventual side effect of herd immunity to limit it to isolated outbreaks. This is all presuming that we actually retain any kind of immunity to it.

Lockdown will be lifted in stages not all at once.

So that 70% of healthy young people will get it when we do not have that amount of healthy and young people

Lol. That doesn't even make sense.

Tell us more about the million who have already died!

We are waiting for more effective treatments and a vaccine. It is a long term strategy. It’s hard to contemplate. It’s better than mass infection in a doomed attempt to get herd immunity.

I really don’t see people relishing lockdown. I have supported it but that doesn’t mean I find it easy or expect to find it easy in four weeks time. I find myself thinking I’d give anything for my kids to be back in school, to go for a swim, a coffee, to work, to the beach, on holiday. It’s hard being cooped up with squabbling kids and trying to manage everything.

But it turns out I won’t give anything. I won’t give my parents’ lives for a start. I won’t give the lives of doctors and nurses who will succumb to this virus and die if it rampages. I won’t give the lives of everyone over 60 denied a ventilator when hospitals can’t cope. I won’t give the lives of everyone who needs treatment for other health problems and can’t have it because the health system has collapsed under the surge.

Lockdown is better than that but it doesn’t mean I like it. What is our choice? We can’t just carry on as normal and think everything will be the same bar a few extra dead elderly people ‘who would have died anyway’. That’s not an option on the table.

MH111

The cost to society of letting huge numbers of people die of the virus and other illnesses that would normally be treatable through an overwheming the nhs, the resultant mental health crisis, the grief, social discord, the resultant uncontrolled supply chain disruptions , the failed businesses ( caused by earth of key staff for example ) would also trigger a major recession

As soon as this thing was released it became an exercise in damage limitation, in buying us time.

Thank you SabineSchmetterling - I've been trying to understand the argument about that course of action - you make perfect sense.

Also when you look at who is vulnerable it includes a lot of people. People with asthma for example. It would have meant I suspect more than half of households isolating anyway.
The assumption of only the elderly and vulnerable isolating assumes this is not many people and that is not the case.

Quite possibly doofus

Although I would expect that this will be the hardest and longest , I think future ones would start earlier once problems were detected , and may be very localised ..more like South Korea which only locks down people who have come near to confirmed cases

Yes Cornettoninja, I don't think trying to develop herd immunity is a way to control the current crisis but we do need to develop one to come out the other side

I think too late also.

My office did not close until last Monday (a week ago... it seems an age).

I took my Dcs out of school the Tuesday before.

My son's best friend has a microbiologist mother and she took their kids out a week before that.

I think the government acted too slow & that’s cost lives.
They have had to rely on volunteers & retirees to bail them out of ill conceived nhs cuts & no forward planning & a short supply of vital safeguarding equipment & ventilators
We’ve been drip fed information instead of having a proper government response ( until the last week). I think Boris & MPs ignoring guidelines re hygiene & closeness has sent a very damaging message to the public which has lead to a dangerous complacency
Thank God for the nhs & all those workers the conservatives have been slagging off as under skilled , they have been amazing

Funny how the UK's modelling was different from what WHO and every other government is doing then?

Singapore was one of the first countries to ban flights from China, China complained about this & at the time the WHO had said there was no need for travel & trade restrictions.

@AngelicaKauffman The figure was a typo.

Yes the 70% makes sense. Herd immunity assume that 70% of the UK population would get corona. That was to protect the 30% who are older and vulnerable.

But in the UK population we do not have 70% of our overall population who are young and healthy and can get this virus with minimal affect. In reality lots of older people and vulnerable people have to catch corona to reach 70% of the population. And that means a lot of deaths.

I have never really got WHOs stance on travel. Look where we are now borders closed with far lower effect.

Lockdown is giving us a chance to build up emergency resources.
It is allowing us to get more testing kits so we will know who has had the virus.
It is giving some time lag in the hope that at some point we will have a Covid-19 vaccination
It is allowing people to build up some personal immunity to Covid-19 through limited exposure (by going shopping, going for walks etc) in the same way that people have some immune response to normal flu. Evidence shows that viral load influences outcomes, hence why healthy medical staff are dying from it. If we were coming across lots of people per day, we're more likely to get sick.

And there really are some childlike responses to this lockdown. People are not saying stay in because they want to spoil people's fun or because they're stick in the muds. I wanted to go to my theatre trips, comedy nights, pub nights, football matches and massage that I'd had booked. I'm disappointed, yes. But I also didn't want my actions to lead to someone dying. And I'm making the most of things at home because where does sulking or stamping your feet ever get you?

Before the restrictions were put in place everyone on here was screaming that they were too late, now it's too early. Whatever the Government decided, and it wasn't really their decision, it was the experts', people would find something else to complain about.

Am I the only person cringing at some of the ludicrous rubbish being spouted on this thread?

If we are talking purely in health terms then we locked down too late.

However, what the Government have to balance is far more unpalatable.

They have to balance health and the economy.

There has to be a country to open up again after lockdown.

The economic measures introduced need to be repaid eventually, at a time when the UK is already sick of the previous decade of austerity.

So as awful as it sounds, they have to choose whether to sacrifice people to COVID-19 or to the less obvious effects of further NHS and social care cuts once this is over.

People die when they wait too long for treatment, they die when there is not adequate social care.

The government can not afford to prop up the economy for very long.

China were fortunate that the cases were contained in one province, the rest of China was able to continue some level of production to keep the country afloat.

Thanks to the cover up in China when this originally surfaced, people left Wuhan and travelled across the globe, infecting people indiscriminately.

That is why the government is desperate for a working antibody test.

I suspect that 4 weeks is the maximum amount of time the government can enforce a total lockdown without economic disaster.

They need to get the immune back to work ASAP, followed by anyone fit and healthy

@doofusmoof Wrong call, but early days.
The UK government had lots and lots of warning and the benefit of scientists being able to analyse what was happening elsewhere. It was all ignored in favour of nudge theory and pretty basic modelling.

Lily which things in particular?

@sunnie1992 I think Boris is choosing the option that he thinks will make him the most popular and that stop rich people losing too much money.

You can get an idea of how well the government thinks it’s strategy is working by looking at the fact that they are now leaking stories to the Daily Mail blaming China for not giving us enough information and Gove has today said that the reason we have been testing too slowly is because China didn’t make it clear enough that this was serious. They’ve moved into blame-shifting mode. That doesn’t fill me with confidence. On the one hand they are saying that they took all measures at the right time, but on the other they are saying they would have acted sooner if China had made it clearer that this was serious.

I agree with sunnie92

So they might as well of stayed in school ,as they are mixing just as much out of school.

There's 1500 kids in my dcs school, so no kids mixing with their mates in the park is not the same as going to school and passing hundreds of other kids in the corridor in between every lesson. And no my kids aren't going to the park, they've stopped school a week before the schools closed.

I'm still gob smacked that Boris announced at 5pm on a Friday that pubs would be closing that night, is the government that far removed from normal society that they didn't realise that the world and his wife would go for that last pint 🙄 they should have announced in the morning that pubs should shut immediately.

Isn't herd immunity still the plan though, we just want the herd to get it a bit slower? Otherwise how do we ever come out of this?

Herd immunity requires 60% of population to be infected.... That’s 40 million people! Based on an infected person infecting an average of 2.5 people over a 5 day period, it would take 3 months for us to get to that point if we just let it rip through. On the basis that infection rates would necessarily fall as we approached the critical herd limit, it would be reasonable take until autumn for this to occur, with 500,000 dead and literally millions requiring ventilation (how would that work!). If we are going for a “slow” approach, it could take years.