WHY do people keep saying we all need to get it...

[nellodee]

When Matt Hancock is clearly saying that we need to get cases right down, so we can move into the next stage, which is contact tracing?

From Guardian updates:

Easing lockdown depends on fall in number of new infections, says Hancock
Easing the lockdown depends on the speed at which the number of new cases of Covid-19 falls and that is as yet “unknown”, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, has said.

The number of new cases is being tracked through hospital admissions, through a new testing study in the community announced on Wednesday, and data that will be gathered from people coming forward for tests under an expansion of the programme.

However, he added that there was no prospect of easing the lockdown yet, and that cases needed to drop substantially before the next phase of isolating infected people and their contacts could be truly effective.

@GabriellaMontez - What other choice do we have? Resign ourselves to hundreds of thousands of deaths without even trying?

Do you follow Devi Sridhar on Twitter? She's been advocating for test, trace and isolate for a long time and she's written a few articles for the Guardian amongst others. This is the crucial question - whether we are aiming for managed spread as in flu, or containment as in SARS and MERS, driving down case numbers in hope of a vaccine. Problem is the government was aiming for the former (statements like up to 80% will get it) but chickened out when they saw what other European countries did with lockdowns and realised the death toll/NHS impact. Now they seem to be edging towards the latter, but bizarrely drip feeding it out and not explaining that here has been a change of strategy (if indeed there has). Hence massive confusion.

Because they don’t like lockdown (same), or are experiencing real hardship in lockdown. We probably all will get it at some point but it’s not like right now is the time for it.

Call me cynical / a conspiracy theorist / whatever

But it seems to me like all these policies are largely being guided by popular public opinion.

"We're going for herd immunity"
=People outrage
so we went with
"SI if you have symptoms, wash hands, WFH"
=People saying not enough
"We don't need to close schools because children aren't carriers"
=People screaming for schools to close
"Okay we will close schools but no need to lockdown"
=People screaming for lockdown
"Okay we will lockdown"

And throughout all this we've been told they're being guided by the science. I find it strange that science always seems to be just a few days behind popular opinion.

You saw it with the exercise rules too, to a degree.

We weren't supposed to travel for exercise and it seemed like those voices were winning but then public opinion seemed to turn and suddenly we can drive for exercise as long as we don't spend longer in the car than we do exercising.

So now it would seem people are getting bored and looking for some restrictions to be lifted. But you still have a considerable amount of people calling for lockdown.

So the government are now assuring us that it's not going be to left to spread unchecked, it will all be controlled through contact tracing.

I'll be interested to see if what this actually means is we will go back to herd immunity - by proxy - because testing and tracing is just unmanageable for us. 18,000 people hired to trace, so it doesn't sound like this is automatic. Like a pp said it's so contagious and the incubation period is so long it sounds like a logistical nightmare to me... and almost impossible when you think of how children mix.

BUT... it does seem to keep both sides kinda happy?

The ones who don't want it to spread, and are content to wait for a vaccine will be somewhat pacified because we're not letting it run rife. We're contact tracing.

And the ones who see no other way out than everyone getting it will be happy because they'll be able to see that this is actually happening. It's spreading too fast for contact tracing to work and we will get herd immunity eventually.

It's kinda clever. I think. I dunno, it's a complex issue of course.

@Fabuleuse I completely agree. I don’t think you can blame people for being confused.

The communication of strategy has been woeful. We were initially told that 60% of people would need to get it before next flu season and that actions would flatten the curve to achieve this. However the strategy seems to have changed because about 3% of people have had it and that has required more or less the full capacity of the NHS for a month to deal with and many deaths including a lot of HCP, so there's no way of getting to 60% by the autumn. But politicians are unwilling to outright say that the strategy has changed because that would be tantamount to admitting the original approach was wrong and politicians don't like to do that.

However ready for track and trace we were a few weeks ago, it is fairly obvious that an early lockdown makes a huge difference to the scale of track and trace required when it is actually implemented. If you lockdown with 10,000 cases and get R below 1 then you are tracking and tracing far fewer cases than if you postpone the lockdown until there are 100,000 cases out there. And once track and trace is implemented you are going to have to quarantine far more people if you let the virus spread a lot before starting, so it will be much more disruptive. It really doesn't seem like track and trace was part of the original plan for the next few months.

I dont believe our government are up to the task @PowerslidePanda

Especially not this far down the line.

Hundreds of thousands? Is that from the imperial study? I take that with a pinch of salt.

Why don't you believe lots of people will die if everyone gets it?
We have a government that won't do the work needed to tackle this. It was always clear they were not going to do anything until many more people had died in Britain in comparison to other countries.

However the strategy seems to have changed because about 3% of people have had it and that has required more or less the full capacity of the NHS for a month to deal with and many deaths including a lot of HCP, so there's no way of getting to 60% by the autumn.

Where did you get your 3% figure?

@Bluewavescrashing
No its not too late. Testing testing testing and contact tracing is the only way we will manage coming out of lockdown

I agree with Gabriella.
The gov isnt trustworthy and very incompetent too.
They need to outsource the tracing and testing.
Volunteers too.
You could easily preload an app with your school/workplace and family contacts.
I would suggest limiting it to the same family member going shopping etc.
Maybe reduce congestion charge and london parking so people drive in instead of public transport?

If they make antibody tests available that would cut down the contacts as 5% of contacts may be immune.
But testing for infection needs to be immediate not taking days to come back.
What would be the trigger though 1 day of fever and all your contacts get locked diwn?
Your whole school or class? But that would then take out all their parents too as kids are asymptomatic.

I think masks are key.
But other countries also have temp checks going into buildings and schools.

@cantory
Stop with the compared to other countries rubbis

The government has said 2-4% of the population has caught covid 19, so I assume that is where the 3% has come from.
Why are we not supposed to compare our levels of deaths to other countries?

But other countries also have temp checks going into buildings and schools.

The latest CDC report on NY says that 70% of those admitted to the hospital did not have a fever.

The plan is for us to get down to about 500 cases a day, I think. Now at this point, if we were all to get it, it would take 364 years at 500 a day. Longer than that - because more than 500 people are being born every day!

This is where you lose me and I go back to thinking they will let it run rife through the community.

They are not going to contact trace for 364 years, are they?

If a vaccine looks like it will actually be viable (and they don't know that it will be), and that it will last, then fair enough. That is our end date.

But if a vaccine becomes impossible then I think this will be another thing we just live with. Like flu every year. Like tuberculosis used to be here. Like pneumonia. Like cancer. It's another thing that can kill us with X risk and we live our lives and hope we don't catch it.

But all that said... I would be interested in where that 500 figure comes from. Considering only a small percentage of people who catch the virus require hospitalisation, and an even smaller number of those people die... how can they justify so few people catching it? 500 people in a population of 66 million is such a minuscule amount. And if the vaccine is really the exit strategy then it will just slow it down. We'd need 65.5 million doses as opposed to say, 40million if it was allowed to spread at safe levels.

The government has said 2-4% of the population has caught covid 19, so I assume that is where the 3% has come from.

Who said this?

There have been quarantines in the past in Britain including closing schools. It must have been much harder to do this in the past, and yet it happened. So why do so many posters think we should ignore what people used to do to tackle infectious diseases at a time when these were more common?
So many of the comments on this thread seem to be a version of, this is too hard to tackle, so just let people die and we can get back to normal. Can you not see why so many would be against that strategy?

I must be honest, I haven't got a clue where the 500 a day came from. I seem to recall hearing it somewhere governmenty, but at this point, I may as well have made it up.

But the precise number isn't important. There is a point below which contact tracing is useful and feasible and a point above which it is just pissing in the wind. This number obviously depends on testing capacity and the amount of tracers employed, and on what technology we have to assist us. Whatever number it is, is probably only an estimate anyway, and we're going to fine tune it by trial and error.

I imagine it's a simpler matter to wait until you are below the perfect number that makes it work than to try to attempt contact tracing when you are just the other side of that cut off, fail, lock down again, reduce further and try again.

@GabriellaMontez - I don't have a lot of faith in their ability to pull this off either, to be honest - but as I said, what's the alternative?

Hundreds of thousands of deaths is based on 60% of the population becoming infected (40 million people) and a mortality rate of 0.5%. 200,000 deaths. More, if it turns out that 60% of the population isn't enough to achieve herd immunity - or if immunity isn't sufficient once you've had it.

@MarginalGain It was reported on the TV news.
I do know they keep using different figures but this percentage was supposedly from some random testing. I have no idea how reliable it is, but there are no other figures that are more reliable available.

I think 500 cases a day was the figure used by the proposal (of sorts) produced by Tony Blair’s think tank.

Cantory, when did British schools close ? I'm old and I can't recall them closing. Do you mean during the flu pandemic in 1918?
I'm not being ' goady ' at all just curious.

So many of the comments on this thread seem to be a version of, this is too hard to tackle, so just let people die and we can get back to normal.

That's exactly it!

@LastTrainEast
It was obvious in January to anyone paying attention that this wasn't flu. The Chinese published the genome in early Jan & the WHO made clear it needed to be pushed back and shouldn't be allowed to become endemic within the population. So yes, some friction at airports & ports would have been HUGE help early on & we wouldn't now be in this mess and facing economic ruin.

Changery, I agree with you. I read today that some places are re opening and Matt Hancock thinks this is a good idea! Is it the mail being provocative? Will people read it and just think ' oh well, let's carry on' !
This contact tracing thing sounds a bit complex and down to be people being honest etc.
All very strange