@PicsInRed - no, we did not follow WHO guidance. They advised us to find, test, isolate and care for every case, trace and quarantine every contact. From mid-February our government could not wait to stop contact tracing. From SAGE minutes:
11 February - PHE to work with SPI-M to develop criteria for when contact tracing is no longer worthwhile.
www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-11-february-2020
18 February - PHE to present a paper at the next SAGE meeting, informed by SPI-M, proposing trigger points for when the current approach to monitoring and contact tracing should be reviewed, revised or stopped.
www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-18-february-2020
There's nothing in the early SAGE minutes about building up contact tracing capacity, just 'when can we stop doing it?'
In March, Jenny Harries was asked in a press conference why we were not following WHO advice on testing and she basically said we didn't need to because we had a well developed public health system and WHO advice was mostly for poor countries.
(from around 32:40)
We didn't care for every case, instead people were left to struggle at home with no medical care until their lips turned blue, by which time it was far too late for many of them to benefit from treatment.
We still haven't put things in place to enable people to properly isolate or quarantine. Instead we got 'Stay at home with the rest of your household, you'll probably all catch it anyway.'
WHO also advised us to organise our response at the lowest administrative level possible. Instead we've had an extremely centralised response, with the government dictating to local authorities what they must do, ignoring the wealth of knowledge and experience in local public health departments and threatening court action on LAs that step out of line.
Closing borders is a matter of international law. Back in 2003, when SARS threatened to become a pandemic, the then DG of WHO - Gro Harlem Brundtland - issued travel advisories against the worst affected countries. Everyone threw an absolute shitfit and the World Health Assembly (WHO's governing body, made up of representatives of all member states) rewrote the International Health Regulations (a legally binding document on all member states) to set an incredibly high bar for the introduction of any measures that interfere with international trade or travel:
www.who.int/ihr/publications/9789241580496/en/
It's not the place of the DG of WHO to just tear up that legislation and advise countries to close borders. If he had done so then countries would be far, far less likely to report any outbreaks of any diseases in the future, because closing borders is a huge deal.
WHO didn't demand flights continue and borders remain open. This was the most recent guidance for international travel before NZ closed its borders:
www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-recommendations-for-international-traffic-in-relation-to-covid-19-outbreak/
Countries are reminded of the purpose of the International Health Regulations to prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade. Countries implementing additional health measures which significantly interfere with international traffic are required to provide to WHO, within 48 hours of implementation, the public health rationale and relevant scientific information for the measures implemented.
There's no reason to think that NZ did not comply with this. They had a strong public health rationale because they had no signs of community transmission and all confirmed cases were related to international travel.
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200319052523/www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12318284" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20200319052523/www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12318284
We couldn't have made a similar argument because by the time we started taking it remotely seriously we already had widespread community transmission.
Remember that laughable moment the fool head of WHO further delayed declaring a pandemic by claiming "we no longer use the word pandemic" ... shortly thereafter declaring it a pandemic? Honestly.
I remember it a bit differently from you. They said the word pandemic had no official or technical meaning, which it doesn't. They said they had declared a public health emergency of international concern - i.e. the highest possible level of threat requiring the highest level of response - at the end of January. They said they didn't want to use the word pandemic because it was just a rhetorical word and they were concerned that if they 'declared a pandemic' it would lead some countries to just give up.
They changed their mind because of the alarming level of inaction from some countries ('you know who you are') They hoped that if they 'declared a pandemic', even though it made no practical difference to their advice or response, it would instil the necessary sense of urgency.
Pretty much the next day our PM told us they were going to stop contact tracing and that many of our loved ones would sadly die. So WHO were right the first time.