Independent sage: circuit breaker lockdown needed now

[XmasGoose]

I see Independent Sage have said that an immediate circuit breaker lockdown is needed to protect the NHS.

This would involve a total ban on household mixing, all bars, restaurants and indoor venues closing and schools shutting early for Christmas.

Is this needed now to protect the NHS and save lives? Personally I wouldn’t comply with another lockdown.

twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1471160024005324804?s=21

If it's that contagious, lockdown seems pointless anyway. People have to shop/ so many people can't work from home etc. so controlling where people go surely won't make that much difference. Also, a huge amount of vaccinated people , including triple vaccinated, and those with previous infection plus those who are not susceptible to serious disease anyway...

Agree with you on that Chessie678. Either it’s not going to be as big a problem as we fear, or it is but there’s very little we can do about it. Even slowing down infections with something growing that fast won’t make much if a difference to NHS demand, if it only means you get infected on Wednesday rather than Tuesday.

Pouring everything into the booster programme looks like the only substantial thing we can do in the timeframe we’ve got that might help, because it’s not realkyvtrying to

…really trying to reduce infections but reduce the knock-on consequences of severe illness.

@Chessie678 Completely agree with your post. If Omicron is as transmissible as suspected then even with a full lockdown we are pissing into the wind. Or we open up in, say, February and it just lets rip then instead, just as the elderly/vulnerable groups’ boosters are starting to wane.

I really don’t see what we’re trying to do here.

I wonder how many people commenting on this thread have lived in or experienced a country with a completely inadequate healthcare system. Eg. Your child has a seizure or gets hit by a car or your mum has a heart attack or sister goes into early labour. You ring an ambulance and you’re told there isn’t one. Sorry. No one can come and help you. So you drive them to the hospital and they say sorry, we’re full. There’s nowhere to put them. All our doctors are busy, we don’t have any more. People are literally queuing out in the street to access medical care for hours and hours. That is how people die.

If it's this bad, then we may have to start triaging people by vaccine status and other factors as an emergency measure. Long term, the NHS needs to be able to cope each winter without falling over. I already have a thread going on here about the fact that beds have halved since 1997. Something needs to be done about that. The NHS may have to move towards a different model (such as social insurance based, or billing people for part of some kinds of care) to ensure that it gets paid for, if necessary. But what we can't have is lockdowns every winter.

If we keep on with the lockdowns and travel bans, birthrates will continue to fall and NHS workers from overseas will start becoming wary of working in the UK (because people are afraid of being stranded and unable to see extended family), so if you keep locking down each winter then long-term the NHS will be screwed anyway--who would staff it, and how would it all be paid for?

The issue with surpressing it now is that it's winter. Everything is always worse in winter.
So letting go in warmer days months seems to work better for us.
I think .

Probably need more hospitals or different models it hospitals.

Who even are they? They’re not even the proper Sage they’re fake Sage 🤣

@BarmyBrunhilde

I'm sorry but no. If they're going to shut down public businesses, that must come with furlough and plenty of economic support. Household mixing and schools should be the last things to be banned - human connection, and children's education and wellbeing are fundamental rights, not a nice-to-have.

Totally agree with you.

@Cornettoninja

human connection, and children's education and wellbeing are fundamental rights, not a nice-to-have

I don’t disagree but so’s access to basic functioning healthcare provision.

And with a competent Government the two wouldn't be potentially mutually exclusive, even in the current circumstances.

@Mickarooni

Independent Sage (and others) don’t seem to be able to fully appreciate the risk that lockdowns bring to the physical, emotional and financial health of the population. I’m aware letting covid run wild will also have an impact. However, it needs to be weighed and balanced. We have to choose the ‘least worst’ option. I know it’s unpalatable.

Exactly. And the escalation of all kinds of abuse and misery during lockdown is factored nowhere jnto their analyses, as far as I can see. Cold as it may sound, the impact of a child being abused will persist far longer than an 80+ year old with co-morbities dying from Covid. NICE makes decisions on whether to fund treatments based on cost/ healthy life year. Yet since Covid this is NOT how money has been spent: many times the amount per expected healthy life year resulting from treatment spent on Covid patients while other patients are denied services or treatment that costs far less/ healthy life year and has been proven to do so. The question is why one of our key public bodies is allowed to do this unilaterrally. The answer I think is because of orders from the Government and policy based on optics rather than evidence. No wonder it is all such a disaster.

@Mickarooni

Independent Sage (and others) don’t seem to be able to fully appreciate the risk that lockdowns bring to the physical, emotional and financial health of the population. I’m aware letting covid run wild will also have an impact. However, it needs to be weighed and balanced. We have to choose the ‘least worst’ option. I know it’s unpalatable.

Independent Sage know that lockdown is coming very soon now.

It's not their choice. They wanted Plan B earlier, stronger protections for children in schools, and stronger action once omicron was here.

But In their "we are where we are now" plan we all get Christmas.

Unlike last year.

And we face the omicron wave with millions more boosted and vaxxed.

Last year''s November lockdown was designed to save Christmas shopping not our Christmases.

And it worked.

We all bought presents and ordered food as if Christmas was going ahead as normal.

Then the Prime Minister cancelled it for millions of us a few days before.

Once Parliament had risen, and they'd tried to white knuckle it until Boxing Day but numbers were rising too fast.

Parliament rises tomorrow I think.

I don't know how long Boris Johnson will white knuckle it after that because he doesn't want to make Desmond Swayne et al angry because they might send letters of no confidence to the 1922 Committee.

But he can't play politics with a pandemic for long.

Not with this variant.

[quote Trixiefirecracker]@Waxonwaxoff0 unfortunately, if you have children you will inevitably find yourself at A snd E at some point.[/quote]
I never went to A&E as a child. DS has never been to A&E. Not inevitable at all.

It's not their choice. They wanted Plan B earlier

Well, we can test whether that would have worked by looking at neighbouring countries who never stopped Plan B. How’s it going, Scotland? Oh dear. Not well.

Plan B isn’t enough to stop omicron. Full lockdown might not be enough, it’s spreading that fast.

But In their "we are where we are now" plan we all get Christmas.

We get “limited mixing from the 25th to 28th”, in their words. Whether that fits your ideas for Christmas… who knows?

@Chessie678

There seems to be an assumption that lockdown would be an effective tool to control omicron. I can't see the basis for that and think lockdown advocates would need to be very clear on what they were hoping it might achieve.

Very harsh long lockdowns earlier this year and last year struggled to keep the R value below 1. It frequently hovered around 0.8-0.9. It took weeks for cases to begin to fall. This was in the context of significantly less transmissible variants. In April 2020 the lockdown included shutting dentists, shutting opticians and vets except to emergencies and shutting nurseries, restaurants couldn't even allow takeaway customers, there were no bubbles, social workers and health visitors did very few in person visitors. Many of these measures were outright dangerous and I just can't see us going back to that level of lockdown. Other measures used in March 2020 like closing building sites and estate agents have massive economic impact by restricting long-term housing supply.

So I don't think we could go back to a March 2020 lockdown. So how, with a variant which is between 3 and 8 times more transmissible than Delta, could a lighter lockdown than March 2020 be expected to reduce case numbers. Omicron is meant to be doubling every 1.8 days and currently be at 200k cases per day. That is a phenomenal growth rate and I don't think we can expect measures we have used previously to work in the same way. Even if lockdown halved transmission (seems quite optimistic) cases would be doubling every 4 days. I think there is a real question as to whether lockdown could take us out of exponential growth.

Now of course cases might naturally peak at some point and that doesn't really seem to be factored into the graphs showing never-ending exponential growth. But I think lockdown would be huge cost to everyone to buy days at best and to get to the same point anyway after those few days. We just say omicron cases go from a handful to probably hundreds of thousands in a couple of weeks. It seems a reasonable guess that that is exactly what would happen at the end of a lockdown if the lockdown did manage to suppress cases at all.

Masks, vaccine passports etc. seem even more of a drop in the ocean.

This is a good post and agree with Golden Plan B isn’t going to do much - esp passes which have been a hot potato. After all that they’ll seem very slight.

@GoldenOmber

It's not their choice. They wanted Plan B earlier

Well, we can test whether that would have worked by looking at neighbouring countries who never stopped Plan B. How’s it going, Scotland? Oh dear. Not well.

Plan B isn’t enough to stop omicron. Full lockdown might not be enough, it’s spreading that fast.

But In their "we are where we are now" plan we all get Christmas.

We get “limited mixing from the 25th to 28th”, in their words. Whether that fits your ideas for Christmas… who knows?

Do you think other countries numbers would be better without their covid measures?

Plan B isn’t going to do much

No it isn't.

Do you think other countries numbers would be better without their covid measures?

I think if Scotland does X and England does not-X, and omicron is rising at the same speed in Scotland and England, that probably means X isn’t helping against omicron.

The difference now will be magnified by the exponential growth which rewards early action and punishes too little too late.

Red dot. 🔴

It only ‘rewards early action’ if that early action is enough to slow or stop omicron. Which Plan B isn’t.

It wasn’t making any obvious difference for delta so it is beyond me why anybody thought it would be a gamechanger for omicron, but I suppose we’re just very very attached to the idea that we can control the virus using ‘simple, easy’ measures.

@GoldenOmber

It only ‘rewards early action’ if that early action is enough to slow or stop omicron. Which Plan B isn’t.

It wasn’t making any obvious difference for delta so it is beyond me why anybody thought it would be a gamechanger for omicron, but I suppose we’re just very very attached to the idea that we can control the virus using ‘simple, easy’ measures.

Plan B + months ago would have taken some of the heat out of the Delta wave.

Some of the 20,000 deaths since Freedom Day would have been prevented.

Some of the 100,000 hospital admissions would have been prevented.

And the waiting lists wouldn't have had a million people added to them.

Plan B is not an appropriate or useful tool against omicron.

Every two days that the Prime Minister does nothing to reduce the spread of omicron to appease the Tory rebels our future hospitalisations based on our current infections will double.

He's definitely waiting until after the by election and MPs go home to their constituencies.

And I expect he intends to wait until Bpxing Day.

But omicron doesn't care that our weak Prime Minister hates to be unpopular.

Plan B + months ago would have taken some of the heat out of the Delta wave.

We did Plan B and more in Scotland months ago, and it didn’t take any heat out of the delta wave. In fact our delta wave got considerably hotter than England’s. So I doubt it.

Independent SAGE have resisted every single lockdown relaxation, have never bothered to acknowledge when their predictions of disaster didn’t come to pass, and are now pretending they’ll save Christmas by permitting ‘limited household mixing’ from the 25th to 28th, which fairly obviously would not save it for a lot of people. Not sure they’re going to help us much here.

So what should we do @GoldenOmber?

@IWannaWishYouANutNutsChristmas

So what should we do *@GoldenOmber*?

So mitigate against. Throw everything available into the booster rollout. Rebuild flagging public trust by empowering and informing people, not ordering them around (or if you’re independent sage, complaining that the government won’t order people around). Short-term optional shielding support for the CEV. Short-term support for businesses whose trade has been hugely impacted by current situation. Better sick pay and support to isolate. Start investing in longer-term improvement of factors that we know lead to increased risk (poverty, poor housing stock where people are cramped and cold, poor employment protections in gig economy, accumulation of chronic health conditions) and investing in better NHS capacity and improvement so that it’s not considered ‘efficient’ if it’s running with no spare beds in a standard summer. Massive boost to the care sector. Do whatever we safely can to approve vaccines for more CV under-12s while waiting on more widespread 5-12 approval. And acknowledging that people have a right to full and fulfilling lives and need resources, not restrictions. For a start.