I read the Tesco email as meaning "Please don't all expect to be able to crowd into our stores on 23/24 Dec, you won't be allowed in!"
Yep thats how i read it. Buy your Christmas dinner and mince pies early to avoid problems and ridiculous queues later. If everyone tries to do home delivery or click and collect later there will be more of a problem than a supply shock. The supermarkets probably have got the stock to enable more buying atm and actually want to encourage people to do it NOW because they may be more worried about supply shock and panic buying in December due to no deal Brexit. So if people do stockpile a bit now, it might offset some of the demand in January if they anticipate possible problems then.
As for people shopping. Theres not much else to do if you cant have friends over.
Re my ongoing thoughts on long term issues with regards to current numbers and hospitalisations and in the context of if the vaccine is only as effective as flu in context with the BMJ article....
... Then that poses something of a long term problem to stop hospitals being overwhelmed.
If the working assumption of a worst case scenario is the vaccine will only be as effective as the flu one then we have to factor this in to our strategy now.
My calculation:
The number of people under 50 who won't get a vaccine who haven't had covid (as we think only a small % of the population have even now) +
The number of people who have the vaccine but for whom it doesn't work for could still prove an issue in 12 months time +
New restrictions next autumn realistically being politically and economically unfeasible meaning our ability to control the R rate artificially next year could be much more difficult
+
Trust and effectiveness of track and trace is not sufficient and there is a realisation that it probably will never achieve the rates sufficient to control spread of the virus alone.
Versus
Our ongoing low bed capacity.
Therefore:
In that sense, having higher numbers of cases in the uk this year may not be the worst thing and may be the only option to stop problems further down the line.
It explains the switch in government strategy to a second line of defence for mass testing. But as previously discussed there are cost barriers to this and logistical issues to solve which we don't fully know will be successful. (I wondered about this cos it always struck me as a long term strategy even though it seems to be being pitched as a short term one. Its not. Its the first admission of just how long this is going to go on due to the maths)
Why have they done this despite it quite frankly looking like its little more than wishful thinking?
Because, of our NHS capacity and unless we go on a massive recruitment drive, we cant expand that significantly in a year to match what demand for beds there could still be in 12 months time.
I wonder how many people the penny has dropped for on this and how people will react if that does turn out to be the case and this enters the public consciousness.
The UK could realistically face exactly the same problem as this year, next year. Can you imagine? It wont be tolerated.
It also leaves us with a possible scenario of even if you get the vaccine, if you are in an older vulnerable group then you may still be facing shielding 12 months from now anyway. As its the only feasible option left on the table. Tough shit if you are of working age and vulnerable, you will just have to ride the odds that the vaccine works for you.
The numbers on this don't add up well for a scenario where next Christmas can be 'back to normal' for that reason.
(God the people who accuse people of doommongering are going to love this post!)
This does point to us having to keep schools open as much as possible now even if schools are transmitters, because we need the population to have perhaps a higher level of natural immunity to assist vaccine immunity than countries with a high bed capacity to prevent a delayed secondary covid crisis.
If you work out the numbers of this, i'm pretty sure we have to gamble on having more cases per 100,000 (and deaths) than Germany now because of our long term NHS capacity issues and the working assumption that a covid vaccine may only be as effective as the flu one and the logistical problems of expansion of mass testing. That means we have to run high on numbers whilst not being overwhelmed, if we are to avoid restrictions or a subsequent hospital overwhelming in 12 months time.
Hopefully a vaccine will be more effective than the flu one, but at this point in planning i think we have to go off the worst case predictions for how much of a difference it will make as our base scenario for 12 months time.
I don't really see much of alternative way around this for the uk because of our chronic bed shortage.
Obviously we hope that the vaccine performs better than the baseline strategy. Or that we can get around the very real cost and logistic barriers of mass testing before next winter.
But we can't guarantee either so we have to plan now taking that into consideration.
Perhaps someone can poke some ruddy great holes in my logic here for me, cos my baseline long term thinking on this isn't terribly great otherwise and we certainly won't be out of the woods next summer even with a vaccine.
But i think thats essentially where we are and why government strategy is where its at and where its headed. Its no longer merely about this winter. Its also next.