@AIMummy
What I really wanted to hear more about was what influenced the thinking behind herd immunity as the original plan. There wasn't concrete evidence at that point that it was achievable (i.e. there were reports of people getting covid more than once), also what made them think the resulting high death toll would be acceptable? The general consensus was that children were not affected and that elderly and those with comorbidities were dying, i.e. not the healthy, working population. Long covid wasn't widely known about then.
Some of the (quite horrifying if true) morbid ideas being rumoured at the time were that:
-hospital beds would be freed
-Housing crisis would be solved with the formerly elderly occupied homes now on the market
-pension pot would be healthy as less people about to pay pensions to.
-Hospital waiting lists would be shortened.
There were others but I can't remember all of them.
I wonder if the Government actually thought there would be a net benefit to the economy if the virus was allowed to run rampant through society. Some ministers were certainly quick to line up their cronies to benefit financially.
Cummings covered it.
The UK has had a plan in place for years, decades even, for dealing with an epidemic. It's updated every so often. The trouble is, it was completely based on flu - a disease that nearly everyone has SOME immunity to with a far lower fatality rate (one variant excepted). As part of the evidence backing the latest edition of this strategy, Ferguson at IC had done some number crunching on the impact of interventions like closing schools or restricting foreign travel. In each case, the epidemic was only slowed down slightly. The conclusion from this was that such interventions were pointless. What went into the government strategy documents was the (false) conclusion that once a virus was IN the UK, it was unstoppable, and the best you could hope for was to limit the damage.
A second part of this strategy was that once you have assessed some basic parameters regarding the virus, testing was pointless and should be limited to hospitals. No need to know where the virus is, if it's going to spread everywhere anyway. This was implemented in early March if you recall. I remember the day with total horror - it was the first inkling I had that our scientific advisors were hopeless.
SAGE concentrated on mitigating the impact - decisions were taken to protect the vulnerable, i.e. care homes, but unfortunately not communicated to the right people, so it never got implemented.
I'm fairly certain that NOBODY went into this thinking, great, let's USE this virus to kill off the elderly. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if once learning that the virus was going to spread and kill a lot of people, SOME in government quietly cheered about the money saved....
As we all know, it was Ferguson who first alerted the government to the true cost of the strategy they were undertaking. If the SAGE minutes from mid-Feb had been published at the time, MANY more voices would have been in there earlier, but as it was, nobody outside government knew the scale of the balls up taking place - it just dawned on us all slowly as March unfolded that the UK was slowly crawling over the edge of a very high cliff.