Is the government preparing is for a New Zealand scenario?

[lockdownbreakdown]

Does anyone else think we are going to be locked down until the majority are vaccinated and then the borders are going to be closed indefinitely to prevent new strains? I definitely get this vibe from all the stuff leaked in the press. It seems to be the only way we can stop new variant from ruining the vaccination programme as we cant vaccinate the kids if we let in new strains from abroad we will be going back into lockdown indefinitely. Thoughts?

On the 1st LD, it wasn't that strict, def a lite lockdown, its why it took us so long to get infections under control, longer than europe's average by 2/3 weeks.

You could go shopping all you like, lots of shops shut did click and collect, exercise, travel exercise, use public transport, hell it was even legal to drive 100s of miles with covid symptoms and then drive to local beauty spots, on wife's birthday to check eye sight before driving back home again.... all defended by govt as "reasonable"

Lots of places shut but then reopened once they realised they could, so tyre garages, builders, gardener, our local hardware store.

lockdowns 2 and 3 are lite. I don’t think people are breaking the rules in huge numbers but there are a lot of exceptions and grey areas that mean people can still have lots of different contacts.

The problem with lockdown 1, apart from our numbers falling slower than elsewhere was what we did when we came out of it. The cases levelled off and started to rise slowly which would have been ok if we’d got the cases a bit lower. Rather than heed that warning and urge the public to be cautious because Covid was still about, our idiot government encouraged everyone to eat out, and get back into the office and hoped for a more normal Christmas. And then continued opening stuff up, first more leisure and hospitality in August and then schools with no effective mitigation and some bullshit idea about bubbles in September. All before we’d even got our test & trace system working properly.

If you are going to go with a protect health services strategy rather than an elimination one you need to not make those kinds of errors and really be on top of what you are doing.

...its why it took us so long to get infections under control, longer than europe's average by 2/3 weeks...

It has not. By the second half of May COVID prevalence has dropped to a low level - 0.1%:

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/5june2020

In hindsight, UK should have probably opened sooner but, firstly, the public health officials were still scarred by the death toll in the first wave and therefore advocated a cautious approach, and, secondly, UK did not want to remove its key lockdown restrictions until the full roll out of test and trace.

You do not need a superstrict lockdown to get infections under control. Very few transmissions actually happen in "non essential" places like garages or takeaways. People going for walks at beauty spots are not going to spread covid to anyone around them. The main (and arguably only) purpose of a "lockdown" is to emphasise the seriousness of the situation and halt transmissions across different households. If the government could wave a magic wand and prevent people from socialising, arguably it would not have needed anything else. However it may be hard to justify why you cannot see your parents or grandparents when the rest of the economy is open.

The cases levelled off and started to rise slowly which would have been ok if we’d got the cases a bit lower.

In fact, cases only started rising in the second half of August (around August 24). Actual prevalence stayed flat (and low) throughout summer and the increase in official reported cases was indeed driven by expanded testing:

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/englandandwales4september2020

The problem is some scientists and public health officials cried "wolf" and "second wave is coming" between May and August so many times that people developed fatigue and started ignoring the government / scientific messages. When the test positivity did start increasing, the true warning signal got lost in the rest of the "noise".

I’ll see if I can find the graph of the first peak, but the UK’s curve was definitely wider than the French/Spanish and Italian ones.

@wintertravel1980

The cases levelled off and started to rise slowly which would have been ok if we’d got the cases a bit lower.

In fact, cases only started rising in the second half of August (around August 24). Actual prevalence stayed flat (and low) throughout summer and the increase in official reported cases was indeed driven by expanded testing:

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/englandandwales4september2020

The problem is some scientists and public health officials cried "wolf" and "second wave is coming" between May and August so many times that people developed fatigue and started ignoring the government / scientific messages. When the test positivity did start increasing, the true warning signal got lost in the rest of the "noise".

Good posts

But also a lot of our current situation is due to new variant.

I’ll see if I can find the graph of the first peak, but the UK’s curve was definitely wider than the French/Spanish and Italian ones.

It was but the official case numbers from the first wave are completely useless. We started with very little testing and expanded our capacity above any other European country (with the possible exception of Germany). As a result, the shape of the UK curve will look different to anyone else.

ONS data generally shows the most accurate and impartial view.

But also a lot of our current situation is due to new variant.

Yes, I fully agree with this.

I think the multiple experiments with various tier restrictions showed that we could keep things under control if we put some restrictions on hospitality and keep schools and most of the economy open. Liverpool cases in October started to drop under tier 3.

However, the new variant has completely changed the picture and we ended up in a pretty dire situation. However, in my opinion, there is one thing we seem to have got right and it is the vaccine roll out. I know it is not a panacea but I am quite impressed with what has been achieved so far. Fingers crossed it will continue.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53612390

It started rising before August, it started rising faster in August because of eat out to help out and then faster again in September. Here is CW at the end of July saying we’d probably reached the limit of what we could open because we were now dealing with rising cases.

I think the graph I’m trying to find was from May/June, so before we’d sorted out testing. Not that I’d believe Boris’s bluster about testing capacity anyway. I suspect stopped counting the number of people tested in July for a reason.

RafaIsTheKingOfClay

The BBC link would be precisely one of the examples of scientists crying "wolf" (or - if you prefer - managing expectations / being ultra careful / expressing caution etc). It provides the graph of reported cases rather than (i) test positivity (reflecting the impact of expanded testing) or (ii) ONS survey results that I previously referenced.

If you do not trust ONS (which is truly impartial and independent), you can always have a look at the government dashboard and check out the dynamics of test positivity:

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing?areaType=nation&areaName=England

It stayed at 0.9% up until August 27. It started climbing up on August 28 and it pretty much never stopped.

FWIW, Chris Whitty has now shifted to using ONS slides at government briefings.

PHE case count data is useful but it is ONS that provides the most objective view.

You are right about the positivity, although you need to go a bit further back to get the full picture. The positivity rate was falling until we opened up on 5th July. At which point it bottoms out at about 0.9/1%. So the slow rise in the number of cases starting just after 5th July is partly explained by the increase in testing. Part of it is to do with opening up though. There is nothing to suggest that the positivity rate and number of cases wouldn’t have continued to fall as it had in the previous month.

I don’t think Whitty was entirely wrong. If cases and positivity are falling with increased testing until you open stuff up and then they consistently level off for a month. It’s a reasonable conclusion to draw that opening anything else might cause them to rise. Especially if you have your eye on school opening. I think the fact that 2 weeks after everything else reopened on 15th August the positivity rate started climbing and didn’t stop sort of proves his point.

@eaglejulesk

What we are saying is that we couldn’t have emulated your strategy of Zero COVID here for all of the reasons stated time and time again. I’m not saying our government has handled it well.

No-one is saying you could have had zero numbers, but you could have done so much better than what you have. What I am tired of is people trying to say your lockdown was the same as what we had in Australia/NZ - it wasn't, it was very much lockdown-light. People here were being asked to isolate on returning from overseas even before we locked down.

You all sound a bit smug and ‘I’m alright Jack’.

How charming you are! I haven't seen any sign of that. What I have seen is the same old excuses as to why the UK couldn't have done this, that or the other, and the constant whining about "rights".

@eaglejulesk I think its a good job you live in the arse end of nowhere with an attitude like that.

Hope so we should be stopping travel in and out.
If we can't see our parents and our kids education is suffering then holidays cannot be justified at the moment .

If travelling for work then 2 week hotel quarantine on return , if its important work then they can do the quarantine as well. Or they can consider options of zoom meetings etc
Exceptions for medical/ aid people only.
I am staying in and doing the right thing but if I continue to see people travelling unnecessarily why should I bother , if we are all in this together then thats what it should mean .

Having a different size population (how lovely to be on an island with 5 million in a global pandemic). Isn’t an ‘excuse’ it’s a bloody fact.

And the timeline isn’t an ‘excuse’ it’s also a fact. COVID was here Jan latest. So we would have needed to shut down then. How nice to have the luxury of time to react.

I do not defend our government one bit. But we are not and never could be like New Zealand.

The strict lockdown worked so well for Spain didn’t it?

Whilst NZ are now in an enviable situation I am slightly surprised by the narrow criteria of key worker mentioned by some posters. Hospital workers and food production? Did you all go without running water, flushing toilets or electricity for 7 weeks? no internet? no rubbish collections? Were the police or fire brigade wfh? My BIL works at a power station, funnily enough they can't wfh!
A lot of MN seem to think that everyone should stop going to work (or can wfh) unless they are the emergency services or teachers!

@Delatron

Having a different size population (how lovely to be on an island with 5 million in a global pandemic). Isn’t an ‘excuse’ it’s a bloody fact.

And the timeline isn’t an ‘excuse’ it’s also a fact. COVID was here Jan latest. So we would have needed to shut down then. How nice to have the luxury of time to react.

I do not defend our government one bit. But we are not and never could be like New Zealand.

^ Agree while a lot of MN knew at the time we should close borders in January, but sadly don't seem to be in any influential positions to affect government policy actually covid was here and circulating (without neccessarily being identified as such) in January, or before, well before a pandemic was declared. NZ obviously were very proactive and strict with there approach, and it has paid off but they had a certain degree of good fortune that it wasn't circulating in the same numbers as here, and smaller numbers are easier to control or supress. That said I have been pretty appalled at the lax (voluntary) quarantine that was imposed here. A relative returned from NZ in March or April. They were collected at the airport by a family member and were not required to quarantine at all! Fair enough they would have been at very low risk in NZ but would have travelled through several airports to get here!

To all those in new Zealand saying you did the 7 weeks of absolutely nothing, so did we in Ireland. Everything absolutely closed except essential, majority of our pubs have been closed since last March . We couldn't leave our house except once for air/shopping/dr for 7 weeks. Our failure was that flights were still allowed in without enforcement of quarantine and we have Northern Ireland attached to us with totally different rules which new Zealand very fortunately hasn't got to deal with. We are a tiny island so the latter makes it extremely difficult to control the virus. We had very high cases near the boarder for obvious reasons and nothing the Irish government could do to control what restrictions were lifted in the North of the island.
We a strict six week lockdown before Christmas too but opening has been a disaster as the new variant got in and now its spreading massively.
I think the blame on people is awful tbh. So many people had made huge sacrifices, I'm freelance and gave lost thousands in income
All schools are closed in Ireland, absolutely none are open not even to vulnerable students, key workers dc or children with sn (the latter is a disgrace). Its a virus , its gotten in , taken control and is now mutating which is what viruses do. Yes the new Zealand government has been fantastic and decisive but don't equate that with people in less fortunate countries not doing as much or sacrificing as much as it simply isn't true.

Yep I’m utterly appalled that we didn’t quarantine all the skiers returning after half term. And allowed large events to continue well in to March. The Spanish Liverpool match? Many Spanish flew over to watch.

It was in Europe much earlier than China declared their first case to the WHO.

I admire New Zealand’s policy and quick, decisive leadership. But lots of luck there too. And to deride us over here when we had a different set of circumstances is completely unfair (and smug too).

Are you criticising the whole of Europe too? Funny how despite all the different strategies the whole of Europe has suffered badly.

@Delatron

The strict lockdown worked so well for Spain didn’t it?

UK per capita death rate over last rolling 7 days 108.

Spain = 36.

Overall deaths per million - UK 1412 per million, Spain 1169.

@winetomorrow amd @MarshaBradyo, and others, thanks for info re NZ. Three questions, if you don't mind.....Did you allow people to go around shops or public transport or high streets with no mask, saying they were exempt?.....What was the story with an outbreak (imported meat??) soon after your lockdown? And with something on breaking news over here, about some incoming traveller to NZ who correctly observed quarantine for the full period, then was free to go around, but was later found to have Covid19, much past the theoretical incubation period? (It was reported on BBC she had travelled around North island while infectious, so they are currently trying to see if she passed it on)

Yes, so the overall rate isn't that different

Well it seems that Israel ARE pulling a Bew Zealand to protect their vaccine programme. From today they are hermetically sealongs themselves off from the world. All flights in and out are now banned. I really think, as we are right behind them, we will do the same.