Brilliant header. Even if one doesn't agree with the conclusion, it is a well put together argument and one we should have had as a country before the lockdown.
It's good to set out the argument as it's what lots of people are thinking. But it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death.
Kudos to Dominic Cummings who seems to be calling the shots on this for the government for changing his mind on lockdown when he saw the numbers, rather than carry on with policy that was going to fail.
There's also the small matter of their being no actual plan in his letter.
If you bothered to read it, you'd more likely come back and say the government is already doing these things or planning to do them, or to do something close enough as to make no real difference. Corbyn is calling for more testing and more PPE, for instance, not the invasion of Mars.
Looking at the state of his letter perhaps Corbyn should have bothered to read it first.
Perhaps, and perhaps on a more serious matter Boris should have checked the screenshot before he posted the Zoom meeting number and some reasonable clues to Ministers' online identities, or do we think Michael Gove uses a different number for each service he uses?
It's far more likely that some assistant or other remote'd in and set the usernames/call up and Boris et al were just called to sit in front of the laptop.
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
Another suggestion worth considering is scheduled lockdowns for the autumn and winter. Have one Oct 1-20 and a Xmas one Dec 17-Jan5 but have few restrictions beyond that.
People and businesses can then easily plan for those.
Given the NHS is apparently in crisis every winter I'm surprised lockdown then has never been suggested before
The NHS is in crisis most winters but rather than address this problem, HMG's response is to have its astroturfers accuse Labour of crying wolf and the BMA of shroud-waving. If capacity had been expanded to handle winter peaks then we'd not be in the state we are now.
I wonder why most other countries are facing similar problems?
But politicians are in charge, and they will do what the people shout loudest for. this will mean the lever (almost) all the way.
People dying on our screens vs generic hard to quantify economic hardship can only go one way, the fact that there is a good logical argument against it notwithstanding.
Alive but a bit poorer vs dead. That is how is will be portrayed.
Mr. L, it'd be easier if, generally speaking, political journalists weren't a combination of dire and incompetent. Alas that we have Pestons galore and just the one Andrew Neil.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
I think as we see a sharp increase in deaths over the coming weeks , including seemingly fit, healthy young people, then the majority of the public will pipe down about the hardship of dossing around the house in their jamas for a few more weeks.
Maybe, but public opinion is a strange thing. I could see the argument "lockdown isn't working so why bother?" gaining some traction. I expect fear to win out over that though.
I think the message it will get worse before it gets better has been sufficiently made to counter that particular argument. But not for too long.
The personal experience of people will vary a lot, but many will struggle with not going out beyond medicine/food, and seeing savings whittled away.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have a disease to which no-one is immune and the severity of which varies from no symptoms at all to death. But we don't get to pick our pandemics.
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?
You think there was no dislocation of normal life in World War 2?
My parents generation would disagree quite strongly
American betting news, as states move towards all mail elections they are still keeping in restrictions on getting a mail in ballot. The scope for disenfranchisement is huge.
That's crazy. How would they justify not providing postal votes to all in that situation?
The same way they purport to justify denying votes to prisoners even after they are released from prison, purging voter rolls in opposition areas but not their heartlands, redrawing seat boundaries without even pretending the aim isn't partisan benefit, and many more measures besides.
But politicians are in charge, and they will do what the people shout loudest for. this will mean the lever (almost) all the way.
People dying on our screens vs generic hard to quantify economic hardship can only go one way, the fact that there is a good logical argument against it notwithstanding.
Alive but a bit poorer vs dead. That is how is will be portrayed.
Accurately portrayed, I think.
It depends.
Those who commit suicide from this (and there's already some evidence suicide rates are going up) will be dead.
Austerity was meant to be over but this could mean another decade of austerity will be necessary - how many will die due to the consequences of that?
There are many ways to look at this. The problem is the direct deaths linked to COVID are quantifiable, the indirect deaths due to social distancing are not.
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
WW2 was many things but it was not a five year lockdown. Very few of the freedoms that we are currently without were lost. After the end of the Blitz and the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR life returned to something approaching normal on the Home Front albeit with a lot less food. Serious consideration was given to restarting league football at one point, and there was nothing to stop you playing it or nearly any other sport, regional competitions proliferated. In June 1940 40,000 saw West Ham win the Football League War Cup at Wembley the very day the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions crossed the Seine. By 1943 the South League Cup Final between Arsenal and Charlton saw 75,000 people there. Pubs, churches, cinemas, theatres, concert halls also remained open. You could go out on dates, get pissed, and most young people did and enjoyed it. This is a completely different challenge, WW2 comparisons are bollocks, moaning about “young people” does them a disservice.
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
Repay the money to whom? It will end up "selling" the debt to the Bank of England. The government could choose to pay back the Bank of England - owned by the government - if it likes. Or write it off.
There's also the small matter of their being no actual plan in his letter.
If you bothered to read it, you'd more likely come back and say the government is already doing these things or planning to do them, or to do something close enough as to make no real difference. Corbyn is calling for more testing and more PPE, for instance, not the invasion of Mars.
Looking at the state of his letter perhaps Corbyn should have bothered to read it first.
Perhaps, and perhaps on a more serious matter Boris should have checked the screenshot before he posted the Zoom meeting number and some reasonable clues to Ministers' online identities, or do we think Michael Gove uses a different number for each service he uses?
It's far more likely that some assistant or other remote'd in and set the usernames/call up and Boris et al were just called to sit in front of the laptop.
No, it is far more likely that an assistant set up the call with a password, and then emailed the password to Ministers who then just connected to the call. Look at the screenshot again and see how inconsistently ministers are identified -- some use their name, others their post, a few both, and then there are a few that look as if they are reused identities from elsewhere. Those identities were not set up by one person.
If I were an official Russian hacker, or a Chinese or North Korean one, then I'd be searching for all those identities in my extensive collection of leaked password databases. And I expect half a dozen tech journalists will try it too. The CIA are probably already listening to Cabinet calls because, as per the start of the thread, Zoom is an American company without end-to-end encryption.
An absolutely essential thread header, Stocky, and one I completely agree with. Well done for writing it and for PB to publish it, given that these are febrile times.
Without going too far into the details, my work gives me access to some absolutely terrifying economic data that makes me believe the economic damage of the lockdown will be an order of magnitude greater than the damage caused by death to the virus.
What is interesting is that the government must surely have their hands on a much broader dataset and be fully aware of the storm that is coming. Despite this, they have chosen to "pull the lever" as you say. I think this largely down to human psychology. The instinct to preserve life, whether our own or of others, is strong and overrides economic analysis.
In addition to the economic cost there is also the cost in terms of loss of freedom (I fear we are normalising many aspects of the police state) as well as the psychological cost borne largely by the most vulnerable in society - those in poor accomodation, those trapped with abusive partners, those with mental conditions made worse by this, the suicides that will be caused etc.
My personal plan would be to end the lockdown by May at the latest and to make that clear now. To continue enforcing social distancing, banning large gatherings (sorry football fans) and keeping pubs closed. To make masks by the million and make wearing them in public a social norm. To recommend the quarantining of the elderly and the vulnerable and to offer them the necessary support.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I fear our government has taken the emotional rather than rational choice because to do otherwise is to be labelled a "career psychopath" at best, a butcher at worse.
Thank you. I did gird my loins before emailing it to Mike I must admit. I`ve been awake in the night concerned that I would be up for slaughter by you guys this morning.
Part of my reasoning for writing it was that I sense larger dissent to the lockdown policy than is initially apparent - especially on this site. People are scared to voice it.
My personal plan would be to end the lockdown by May at the latest and to make that clear now. To continue enforcing social distancing, banning large gatherings (sorry football fans) and keeping pubs closed. To make masks by the million and make wearing them in public a social norm. To recommend the quarantining of the elderly and the vulnerable and to offer them the necessary support.
I think that's the kind of thing that will happen. It'll help that since a lot of other countries are experiencing this before the UK does, there will be a lot more data from other countries (both success cases and failure cases) about how to open things up gradually without taking your foot off Coro-chan's throat.
However, since it takes a week or two for a policy to turn into results, *early* May is probably too soon to have much information.
The other thing about this is that the government needs to avoid doing what Japan did a couple of weeks ago and seeing things get better, lifting some of its restrictions, and having that interpreted by people as, "cool, crisis over, we can go back to normal". Here they said they'd reopen schools in April, which in itself was quite a way off and might have been safe to do if the same trajectory had held, but it ended up being self-defeating, because people started going out again, a week later the case numbers started going back up, and now they're talking about shutting them again.
One thing I think they might need to do is to pair relaxing moves with tightening moves, so for example you might say, "it's OK to reopen these additional shops", but at the same time, announce that pubs will be closed for at least 6 months, and here's how we'll compensate the owners etc etc.
The personal experience of people will vary a lot, but many will struggle with not going out beyond medicine/food, and seeing savings whittled away.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have a disease to which no-one is immune and the severity of which varies from no symptoms at all to death. But we don't get to pick our pandemics.
Absolutely. That's why we have lockdown. We have no alternative in practice. If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost. We're already doing a more onerous and costly lockdown than we need to because we have made that mistake once already. Why make the same mistake a second time?
Really good thread header. I agree that we cannot keep this up very long. This is a rich country but we are basically living on our savings and they are unequally distributed. There comes a point, as Trump of all people pointed out, when the cure is worse than the disease.
The trouble that the government had and still has in getting its incredibly simplistic messages across is a major challenge for the next step. If the great British public can't quite get their heads around, Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives" how do we explain anything more complicated?
But the reality is increasingly that if coffee shops, pubs and restaurants don't open in less than 12 weeks the vast majority will never open again despite open handed government support. We have to start earning money.
The worldmeter figures are extremely crude but according to them we have all of 135 people recovered, the worst ratio to deaths in the world. This is plainly rubbish. Tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, have now had this virus and are immune. We urgently need to find out which thousands so they and their compatriots who get infected and recover can go back to work. In short we need antigen tests and we need them now. This is the key to the next stage. Remember when people poured scorn on herd immunity? Short of a vaccine it is the only way out of this.
This is a country of 67 million people.
What use is tens of thousands getting back to work when tens of millions are stuck at home?
We're talking 0.1% - 1% of the population having antigens it appears.
Mr. 43, you don't need to convince me, but I think many people, egged on mostly by incompetent and self-aggrandising 'journalists', will struggle with the lockdown more and be keen for it to end ASAP.
Excellent article; but there is a big but. Ignore ethics for a moment. Governments wish to survive and be re-elected. Its choices take that fully into account. There is zero chance (they may think) of being re-elected if it takes steps which allows the NHS to be completely overwhelmed with people of all ages dying on trolleys and hospital car parks when they would have survived if facilities existed.
This entire exercise is based round that fear.
The possibility of economic collapse is of course true. There are no good options, only bad and worse ones. IMHO Boris and co are more likely to survive recession/depression than mass chaotic deaths.
Also, if the UK ran a 'just let it happen' approach we may well then have both the disasters: death on the streets and our share in the world depression.
Boris and co have chosen rationally. As with all UK governments all the time the big thing that can still kill them stone dead is incompetence in implementation.
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
An absolutely essential thread header, Stocky, and one I completely agree with. Well done for writing it and for PB to publish it, given that these are febrile times.
Without going too far into the details, my work gives me access to some absolutely terrifying economic data that makes me believe the economic damage of the lockdown will be an order of magnitude greater than the damage caused by death to the virus.
What is interesting is that the government must surely have their hands on a much broader dataset and be fully aware of the storm that is coming. Despite this, they have chosen to "pull the lever" as you say. I think this largely down to human psychology. The instinct to preserve life, whether our own or of others, is strong and overrides economic analysis.
In addition to the economic cost there is also the cost in terms of loss of freedom (I fear we are normalising many aspects of the police state) as well as the psychological cost borne largely by the most vulnerable in society - those in poor accomodation, those trapped with abusive partners, those with mental conditions made worse by this, the suicides that will be caused etc.
My personal plan would be to end the lockdown by May at the latest and to make that clear now. To continue enforcing social distancing, banning large gatherings (sorry football fans) and keeping pubs closed. To make masks by the million and make wearing them in public a social norm. To recommend the quarantining of the elderly and the vulnerable and to offer them the necessary support.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I fear our government has taken the emotional rather than rational choice because to do otherwise is to be labelled a "career psychopath" at best, a butcher at worse.
Thank you. I did gird my loins before emailing it to Mike I must admit. I`ve been awake in the night concerned that I would be up for slaughter by you guys this morning.
Part of my reasoning for writing it was that I sense larger dissent to the lockdown policy than is initially apparent - especially on this site. People are scared to voice it.
Its always brave to be a contrarian voice. Well done.
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?
You think there was no dislocation of normal life in World War 2?
My parents generation would disagree quite strongly
Where did I say that?
I’m merely reporting the facts. Whinging on about how “young people” are “soft” or just need to “get over themselves” will just make this whole situation worse, and build even more resentment,
There's also the small matter of their being no actual plan in his letter.
If you bothered to read it, you'd more likely come back and say the government is already doing these things or planning to do them, or to do something close enough as to make no real difference. Corbyn is calling for more testing and more PPE, for instance, not the invasion of Mars.
It is a list of objectives. Test more , have more kit. A plan would identify how to achieve these. It's a wish list without details of how that are achievable and realistic.
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?
You think there was no dislocation of normal life in World War 2?
My parents generation would disagree quite strongly
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?
You think there was no dislocation of normal life in World War 2?
My parents generation would disagree quite strongly
Well child evacuees were just one example of social distancing taken during the war.
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
WW2 was many things but it was not a five year lockdown. Very few of the freedoms that we are currently without were lost. After the end of the Blitz and the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR life returned to something approaching normal on the Home Front albeit with a lot less food. Serious consideration was given to restarting league football at one point, and there was nothing to stop you playing it or nearly any other sport, regional competitions proliferated. In June 1940 40,000 saw West Ham win the Football League War Cup at Wembley the very day the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions crossed the Seine. By 1943 the South League Cup Final between Arsenal and Charlton saw 75,000 people there. Pubs, churches, cinemas, theatres, concert halls also remained open. You could go out on dates, get pissed, and most young people did and enjoyed it. This is a completely different challenge, WW2 comparisons are bollocks, moaning about “young people” does them a disservice.
And I'd add "because WWII" is simply not a policy argument.
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
Perhaps they could cancel debt owned by China ?
Call it a deposit on future reparations.
A debt default? An interesting way to get the economy going...
Brilliant header. Even if one doesn't agree with the conclusion, it is a well put together argument and one we should have had as a country before the lockdown.
It's good to set out the argument as it's what lots of people are thinking. But it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death.
Kudos to Dominic Cummings who seems to be calling the shots on this for the government for changing his mind on lockdown when he saw the numbers, rather than carry on with policy that was going to fail.
You say "it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death". Well, a key premise of my argument is that mass death cannot be prevented.
Unless a vaccine. But if a vaccine: when, cost, how on earth can it be supplied to all humans on the planet, who gets it first etc etc?
Replacing Kay Burley with someone, anyone else, would be a good start.
Do the KB haterz know that watching her much botoxed coupon isn't compulsory?
Of course it's not compulsory to watch her silly mug on TV.
The problem is that millions of people are - and the media's attitude is quickly going to turn people from being stoic and compliant, into being resentful and angry. There's a building risk of civil disorder if the media continues down this route and doesn't change the tone of their output.
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
Perhaps they could cancel debt owned by China ?
Call it a deposit on future reparations.
A debt default? An interesting way to get the economy going...
The personal experience of people will vary a lot, but many will struggle with not going out beyond medicine/food, and seeing savings whittled away.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have a disease to which no-one is immune and the severity of which varies from no symptoms at all to death. But we don't get to pick our pandemics.
Absolutely. That's why we have lockdown. We have no alternative in practice. If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost. We're already doing a more onerous and costly lockdown than we need to because we have made that mistake once already. Why make the same mistake a second time?
You say "If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost."
There's also the small matter of their being no actual plan in his letter.
If you bothered to read it, you'd more likely come back and say the government is already doing these things or planning to do them, or to do something close enough as to make no real difference. Corbyn is calling for more testing and more PPE, for instance, not the invasion of Mars.
Looking at the state of his letter perhaps Corbyn should have bothered to read it first.
Perhaps, and perhaps on a more serious matter Boris should have checked the screenshot before he posted the Zoom meeting number and some reasonable clues to Ministers' online identities, or do we think Michael Gove uses a different number for each service he uses?
It's far more likely that some assistant or other remote'd in and set the usernames/call up and Boris et al were just called to sit in front of the laptop.
No, it is far more likely that an assistant set up the call with a password, and then emailed the password to Ministers who then just connected to the call. Look at the screenshot again and see how inconsistently ministers are identified -- some use their name, others their post, a few both, and then there are a few that look as if they are reused identities from elsewhere. Those identities were not set up by one person.
If I were an official Russian hacker, or a Chinese or North Korean one, then I'd be searching for all those identities in my extensive collection of leaked password databases. And I expect half a dozen tech journalists will try it too. The CIA are probably already listening to Cabinet calls because, as per the start of the thread, Zoom is an American company without end-to-end encryption.
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?
You think there was no dislocation of normal life in World War 2?
My parents generation would disagree quite strongly
Where did I say that?
I’m merely reporting the facts. Whinging on about how “young people” are “soft” or just need to “get over themselves” will just make this whole situation worse, and build even more resentment,
Which "facts" are included in your post?
"Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?"
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?
You think there was no dislocation of normal life in World War 2?
My parents generation would disagree quite strongly
Where did I say that?
I’m merely reporting the facts. Whinging on about how “young people” are “soft” or just need to “get over themselves” will just make this whole situation worse, and build even more resentment,
Which "facts" are included in your post?
"Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?"
If you read back through the thread, that was a response to the ridiculous statement: “young people should get over it cos world war 2”.
The personal experience of people will vary a lot, but many will struggle with not going out beyond medicine/food, and seeing savings whittled away.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have a disease to which no-one is immune and the severity of which varies from no symptoms at all to death. But we don't get to pick our pandemics.
Absolutely. That's why we have lockdown. We have no alternative in practice. If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost. We're already doing a more onerous and costly lockdown than we need to because we have made that mistake once already. Why make the same mistake a second time?
You say "If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost."
I disagree. Many will be immune.
At least on the conventional numbers it seems like you need rampant death, hospital meltdowns and a lot of permanent lung damage before you make a dent in the proportion immune.
That said the estimates from non-bonkers people about how many people have got the thing seem to vary quite wildly and ultimately testing should resolve it, so it's not implausible that this may look like a terrible idea on current data, but turn out to be a great idea on the data we have in a few weeks.
As @algakirk points out - a key question the Government will have in mind is the reaction from people if the worst happens.
I mean, the loudest voices calling for a release to the restrictions will often be the most unforgiving if their Mum or Dad end up dead avoidably thanks to this.
If there are 20,000 deaths across the UK, that means most people won't know many of the dead. They'll usually know someone who knows someone who is dead.
If there are 240,000 deaths across the UK, most people will lose someone they know. Going one further step will mean that virtually everyone they know will have lost someone they know as well.
And if they make the call on restrictions lifting, they may be going blind as to the outcome.
I'd suggest they say that they will give a date when they know more and they will know more by, say, the week of the 15th of April. That gives a structure and a pathway towards a release.
(And when they do release the restrictions, right now the likeliest route is that limited restrictions will be maintained and that they will expect to reapply full restrictions in a few weeks, but for a significantly shorter time.
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
Perhaps they could cancel debt owned by China ?
Call it a deposit on future reparations.
A debt default? An interesting way to get the economy going...
Not a default if we are due the money..
I couldn't disagree more.
One of the UK's rarely mentioned economic strengths and reason we are a head of world commerce is we are one of the only major nations in the world to have never defaulted on any debt.
Under no circumstances should we seek to lose that record.
The personal experience of people will vary a lot, but many will struggle with not going out beyond medicine/food, and seeing savings whittled away.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have a disease to which no-one is immune and the severity of which varies from no symptoms at all to death. But we don't get to pick our pandemics.
Absolutely. That's why we have lockdown. We have no alternative in practice. If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost. We're already doing a more onerous and costly lockdown than we need to because we have made that mistake once already. Why make the same mistake a second time?
You say "If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost."
I disagree. Many will be immune.
But unless we know who is immune (and we don't know if anyone is or can be when you look at the most common coronavirus which we call the common cold) how do you let anyone out.
There are currently just too many unknowns here for anyone to predict the future.
The personal experience of people will vary a lot, but many will struggle with not going out beyond medicine/food, and seeing savings whittled away.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have a disease to which no-one is immune and the severity of which varies from no symptoms at all to death. But we don't get to pick our pandemics.
Absolutely. That's why we have lockdown. We have no alternative in practice. If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost. We're already doing a more onerous and costly lockdown than we need to because we have made that mistake once already. Why make the same mistake a second time?
That is quite probably true (and I'd agree with it). But Stocky is quite right to raise the question; most people - including the government, probably - have only begun to grasp the full economic consequences.
American betting news, as states move towards all mail elections they are still keeping in restrictions on getting a mail in ballot. The scope for disenfranchisement is huge.
Good header. I agree 12 weeks is going to be a push. In fact, I think Easter will be interesting. The country will be four weeks in, the novelty will have worn off a bit - faced with the prospect of a four day weekend cooped up indoors with the family (add in some good weather maybe) - could we see many people shrugging their shoulders and breaking curfew?
I agree with Rochdale that fear (as well as wanting to do the right thing) is keeping people in line for now, but will it last? The government doesn't have the resources, or political capital, to enforce this by force, a la China.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
The options was never business as usual, vs lockdown. It is absurd to expect people to continue going to pubs, restaurants and the Grand National while people drop like flies around them.
I expect restrictions will be loosened soon, with "non-essential" business resuming work, but for the foreseable future social distancing will be near universal.
We're British. Stand-offishness is in our DNA. How hard should social distancing be?
London is a global city...
And its extended lockdown, for weeks beyond the rest of the country, may well be the price it has to pay for that.
This is very commonly voiced here in the Midlands: "Why didn`t they just lock down London?". I don`t agree - just saying.
Another suggestion worth considering is scheduled lockdowns for the autumn and winter. Have one Oct 1-20 and a Xmas one Dec 17-Jan5 but have few restrictions beyond that.
People and businesses can then easily plan for those.
Given the NHS is apparently in crisis every winter I'm surprised lockdown then has never been suggested before
The NHS is in crisis most winters but rather than address this problem, HMG's response is to have its astroturfers accuse Labour of crying wolf and the BMA of shroud-waving. If capacity had been expanded to handle winter peaks then we'd not be in the state we are now.
Wrong - since virtually all the other countries used as sticks with which to beat the UK governments are now overrun or worse - it simply demonstrates that this sort of pandemic is not preparable for in the way you suggest. look at Itlay, Spain , Belgium, Netherlands, France.... and many more.
Really good thread header. I agree that we cannot keep this up very long. This is a rich country but we are basically living on our savings and they are unequally distributed. There comes a point, as Trump of all people pointed out, when the cure is worse than the disease.
The trouble that the government had and still has in getting its incredibly simplistic messages across is a major challenge for the next step. If the great British public can't quite get their heads around, Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives" how do we explain anything more complicated?
But the reality is increasingly that if coffee shops, pubs and restaurants don't open in less than 12 weeks the vast majority will never open again despite open handed government support. We have to start earning money.
The worldmeter figures are extremely crude but according to them we have all of 135 people recovered, the worst ratio to deaths in the world. This is plainly rubbish. Tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, have now had this virus and are immune. We urgently need to find out which thousands so they and their compatriots who get infected and recover can go back to work. In short we need antigen tests and we need them now. This is the key to the next stage. Remember when people poured scorn on herd immunity? Short of a vaccine it is the only way out of this.
This is a country of 67 million people.
What use is tens of thousands getting back to work when tens of millions are stuck at home?
We're talking 0.1% - 1% of the population having antigens it appears.
We don't know, it could be millions given the asymptomatic infections that some people have. It seems likely to me that a measurable part of the London population in particular will have had it.
Elsewhere in the British Isles, while the vast majority of islanders are behaving responsibly, those who don't could face stiff fines - also ALL arrivals on the handful of flights that now arrive per day have to go into mandatory self quarantine for 14 days after arrival - and are subject to checks - why the UK isn't doing this, I don't know:
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
Perhaps they could cancel debt owned by China ?
Call it a deposit on future reparations.
A debt default? An interesting way to get the economy going...
Not a default if we are due the money..
I couldn't disagree more.
One of the UK's rarely mentioned economic strengths and reason we are a head of world commerce is we are one of the only major nations in the world to have never defaulted on any debt.
Under no circumstances should we seek to lose that record.
I'm not really being serious.
But just as the Covid curve is a parabolic, so is the damage to the economy - it is not a straight line of damage. Beyond a few weeks there will be an inflextion point where lots of good businesses will go down forever - even with furlough.
The country cannot stand still for long - deaths are happening anyway.
You say "it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death". Well, a key premise of my argument is that mass death cannot be prevented.
Unless a vaccine. But if a vaccine: when, cost, how on earth can it be supplied to all humans on the planet, who gets it first etc etc?
It's also too early to be certain but I think the current evidence is that mass death can absolutely be prevented, without a vaccine and without destroying your economy (albeit with some lifestyle changes). Stop the highest-risk things, move a load of stuff online, control entry from places with serious contagion, test and quarantine fast, get the average transmission rate below 1 and you win.
China seems to have done it using dictatorship, South Korea also seems to have done it with some privacy-invasion but no dictatorship, Japan may have pulled it off (we'll see) without even getting the "test and quarantine fast" part or the "control entry from places with serious contagion" part right. And this will all get easier as everybody learns from each other's mistakes.
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
Repay the money to whom? It will end up "selling" the debt to the Bank of England. The government could choose to pay back the Bank of England - owned by the government - if it likes. Or write it off.
I don't think that's true. We're selling bonds on the open market, which I think is having the benefit of providing a safe haven for sterling cash that might otherwise be converted to dollars (and crash the value of the currency).
Brilliant header. Even if one doesn't agree with the conclusion, it is a well put together argument and one we should have had as a country before the lockdown.
What we urgently need now, with a view to lifting the lockdown, is more investigation into what works and what is unnecessary so that we can transition to a modified, intelligent lockdown. How is the virus actually spread?
Was there a Cheltenham spike? Are we seeing new cases in fast food kitchens, where people are still working close to each other? Are there any clusters that are not due to religious services or 10 Downing Street?
If we knew that, and I'd hope it is being actively researched despite its not being mentioned, then we'd know which parts of the economy and society can be reopened. It should not be the all-or-nothing affair of the header.
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?
You think there was no dislocation of normal life in World War 2?
My parents generation would disagree quite strongly
Where did I say that?
I’m merely reporting the facts. Whinging on about how “young people” are “soft” or just need to “get over themselves” will just make this whole situation worse, and build even more resentment,
Stop giving them a free ride. It is the biggest challenge of their lives and currently, far too many of them are flunking it.
Yes, things carried on during WW2. People still went out to clubs and pubs and dances. But it was hardly without risk. The Cafe de Paris for example was bombed soon after the start of a performance and at least 34 people were killed and around 80 injured. Not a risk you face when staying at home in front of the Playstation for a few weeks.
The uncertainties they face are as to nothing compared to those faced by the wartime generation.
Another suggestion worth considering is scheduled lockdowns for the autumn and winter. Have one Oct 1-20 and a Xmas one Dec 17-Jan5 but have few restrictions beyond that.
People and businesses can then easily plan for those.
Given the NHS is apparently in crisis every winter I'm surprised lockdown then has never been suggested before
The NHS is in crisis most winters but rather than address this problem, HMG's response is to have its astroturfers accuse Labour of crying wolf and the BMA of shroud-waving. If capacity had been expanded to handle winter peaks then we'd not be in the state we are now.
Wrong - since virtually all the other countries used as sticks with which to beat the UK governments are now overrun or worse - it simply demonstrates that this sort of pandemic is not preparable for in the way you suggest. look at Itlay, Spain , Belgium, Netherlands, France.... and many more.
Yeah and Germany is probably lying about having more ICU beds and ventilators than you can shake a mask at.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
I thought the big benefit of the NHS was it was a value for money service that kept costs down. Therefore it should be cheaper than Germany.
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
WW2 was many things but it was not a five year lockdown. Very few of the freedoms that we are currently without were lost. After the end of the Blitz and the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR life returned to something approaching normal on the Home Front albeit with a lot less food. Serious consideration was given to restarting league football at one point, and there was nothing to stop you playing it or nearly any other sport, regional competitions proliferated. In June 1940 40,000 saw West Ham win the Football League War Cup at Wembley the very day the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions crossed the Seine. By 1943 the South League Cup Final between Arsenal and Charlton saw 75,000 people there. Pubs, churches, cinemas, theatres, concert halls also remained open. You could go out on dates, get pissed, and most young people did and enjoyed it. This is a completely different challenge, WW2 comparisons are bollocks, moaning about “young people” does them a disservice.
Er - this isn't much more than a 5 day lockdown so far either. Get a grip.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
Such levels of expenditure are the rewards of a highly productive and efficient economy that pays its way in the world and then some. You cannot wish the result without having the means and we don't have them.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
The Germans do indeed spend more, but not massively so.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
I thought the big benefit of the NHS was it was a value for money service that kept costs down. Therefore it should be cheaper than Germany.
Remember though that in health spending - or no of tests - the quantum is all.
Health spending cannot ever waste a penny ever - because NHS.
I agree choice one all the way if the NHS had the capacity which it didn't & doesn't. I so understand the mistake of choice two, the cost of which is too high.
Humanity has gotten too squeamish of late. One reason why a manned mission to mars won't happen anytime soon, they don't want anyone to die on the mission.
I agree with the government’s current policy, as a “safety first” approach, but I absolutely agree the public need more confidence about what is happening next.
I really now fear the economic impact because - and this is just anecdote - I think a lot of companies are looking to permanently restructure as a result of this crisis. That’s now unavoidable (and perhaps, in the long run even desirable) but a grim recession now feels baked in.
If the govt wants to avoid a depression it must provide a high level narrative around our “exit strategy”. I thought the ideas shared upthread around planned mini-lockdowns closer to Xmas were smart and could form part of this picture.
Also, and I know people don’t want to hear this, HMG comms *are* compromised by this government’s track record on truth telling vis a vis Brexit. Maybe Hancock aside, I personally don’t trust any of them to communicate honestly on what is right for me and my family. And they are still playing games - this China story for example looks an obvious attempt to deflect blame for earlier lack of preparedness.
I don’t “mind” that we are testing less than we though we would. I don’t expect everything to be perfect. I do mind a lack of truth-telling.
Another suggestion worth considering is scheduled lockdowns for the autumn and winter. Have one Oct 1-20 and a Xmas one Dec 17-Jan5 but have few restrictions beyond that.
People and businesses can then easily plan for those.
Given the NHS is apparently in crisis every winter I'm surprised lockdown then has never been suggested before
The NHS is in crisis most winters but rather than address this problem, HMG's response is to have its astroturfers accuse Labour of crying wolf and the BMA of shroud-waving. If capacity had been expanded to handle winter peaks then we'd not be in the state we are now.
Wrong - since virtually all the other countries used as sticks with which to beat the UK governments are now overrun or worse - it simply demonstrates that this sort of pandemic is not preparable for in the way you suggest. look at Itlay, Spain , Belgium, Netherlands, France.... and many more.
Yeah and Germany is probably lying about having more ICU beds and ventilators than you can shake a mask at.
The fact is that Germany is recalling retired medical staff, setting up temporary hospitals, emergency sourcing material and equipment....
At peak, this is a tidal wave. If your sea wall is 10 feet high or 20 vs a 200 foot wave.
There is another force to come into play soon, as well as unemployment and financial stress, which is the growing number of people who have had, or believe they have had the virus and therefore aren't worried about infecting or being infected. Also as their stories "it's not that bad - what's all the fuss?" spread round it will change the dynamic in the puic debate.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Birx is one the two people who have got Trump stopping talking about it just being the flue and it all going away by wishing hard and actually talking about death and realistic outcomes.
The price is Trump ego stroking which involves pointless verbal attacks on other countries like this.
I know she's got an impossible boss and has so far handled his loony toon questions adroitly (largely by ignoring them) but this was a rare mis-step - one Dr Fauci has so far avoided. Once this is all over I doubt she'll enjoy being asked about relative death rates.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
Maybe we could - just list the kind of tax level you want ordinary people to shell out to pay for it. Then stand up and argue your case in a GE. See. Easy.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
The UK spent £45bn on foreign holidays in 2019.
How many people are prepared to give theirs up to fund increased health spending ?
US perspective on test kit availability. Although these are a few days old and things have improved, I don't suppose the fundamentals have changed in terms of what the production limiting steps are.
Brilliant header. Even if one doesn't agree with the conclusion, it is a well put together argument and one we should have had as a country before the lockdown.
It's good to set out the argument as it's what lots of people are thinking. But it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death.
Kudos to Dominic Cummings who seems to be calling the shots on this for the government for changing his mind on lockdown when he saw the numbers, rather than carry on with policy that was going to fail.
You say "it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death". Well, a key premise of my argument is that mass death cannot be prevented.
Unless a vaccine. But if a vaccine: when, cost, how on earth can it be supplied to all humans on the planet, who gets it first etc etc?
Got to bear in mind, though, the different death rates when the health service is overwhelmed to when it isn't.
If 5% need intensive care to stay alive, and they can't get it, the death rate will be 5%. If 75-90% of those who need intensive care survive when they get it, that makes a staggering difference in the death toll.
The personal experience of people will vary a lot, but many will struggle with not going out beyond medicine/food, and seeing savings whittled away.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have a disease to which no-one is immune and the severity of which varies from no symptoms at all to death. But we don't get to pick our pandemics.
Absolutely. That's why we have lockdown. We have no alternative in practice. If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost. We're already doing a more onerous and costly lockdown than we need to because we have made that mistake once already. Why make the same mistake a second time?
You say "If we don't impose it now we will have to do it later, deeper, longer, with more death and economic cost."
I disagree. Many will be immune.
Nonsense... you do not know what you are talking about...which is why you are putting your ridiculous ideas out there....plain ignorance.....
Carreggi hospital in Florence has done a full study test on its staff....and estimates that 5% possibly have had the virus.....
This is a virus that is NOT spreading wildly through the population with many developing asymptomatic issues....
Where it spreads uncontained it reaps carnage...your views have been irresponsible from the outset, and continue to be grossly irresponsible....
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
WW2 was many things but it was not a five year lockdown. Very few of the freedoms that we are currently without were lost. After the end of the Blitz and the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR life returned to something approaching normal on the Home Front albeit with a lot less food. Serious consideration was given to restarting league football at one point, and there was nothing to stop you playing it or nearly any other sport, regional competitions proliferated. In June 1940 40,000 saw West Ham win the Football League War Cup at Wembley the very day the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions crossed the Seine. By 1943 the South League Cup Final between Arsenal and Charlton saw 75,000 people there. Pubs, churches, cinemas, theatres, concert halls also remained open. You could go out on dates, get pissed, and most young people did and enjoyed it. This is a completely different challenge, WW2 comparisons are bollocks, moaning about “young people” does them a disservice.
Er - this isn't much more than a 5 day lockdown so far either. Get a grip.
MM was impliedly suggesting there had been a five year lockdown. That’s the point.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
Such levels of expenditure are the rewards of a highly productive and efficient economy that pays its way in the world and then some. You cannot wish the result without having the means and we don't have them.
Germany spends more %-of-GDP per head. It spends more as a ratio not just in absolute terms.
This ludicrous conversation of "adopt the healthcare system of country X" without discussing how much they spend has to stop.
Brave argument. It’s going to be unmakeable while the bodycount keeps rising fast.
The most important part of the thread header is where @Stocky talks about the economic impact. Okay, people itching to get out and about is a problem, but I think the more pressing thing will be if the economy starts to breakdown in either of the two ways outlined by David Herdson.
Personally I'm fine and happy to stay like this for how ever long the experts think we need to be doing this. But I know that it is not sustainable. Eventually people will stop lending to the government so they'll have to start printing money. Perhaps if all government start to do this then it won't be too bad, but I think the risks David outlined are real and they scary. Perhaps not as scary as the virus, but they will affect more people directly and that will be when the really difficult decisions have to be made.
Brilliant header. Even if one doesn't agree with the conclusion, it is a well put together argument and one we should have had as a country before the lockdown.
It's good to set out the argument as it's what lots of people are thinking. But it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death.
Kudos to Dominic Cummings who seems to be calling the shots on this for the government for changing his mind on lockdown when he saw the numbers, rather than carry on with policy that was going to fail.
You say "it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death". Well, a key premise of my argument is that mass death cannot be prevented.
Unless a vaccine. But if a vaccine: when, cost, how on earth can it be supplied to all humans on the planet, who gets it first etc etc?
Fair enough. Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist who has a significant input into government thinking was originally sceptical that lockdown would have a significant effect on transmission rates. He's changed his mind in light of experience in Italy and elsewhere. In fact he thinks the effect is very big and has dramatically reduced the predicted death toll provided lockdown measures are in place.
Unless you wish to challenge Ferguson on the epidemiology (I'm not being passive-aggressive on this - there is a lot uncertainty) then I think your argument is in the context of rejecting a measure that will save many, many lives and a functioning healthcare system and not coming up with an alternative.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
The UK spent £45bn on foreign holidays in 2019.
How many people are prepared to give theirs up to fund increased health spending ?
Yes ! Ban holidays, alcohol and any food with fat and sugar.
Let us live on puritan gruel and never leave the house to reduce accidents.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
Maybe we could - just list the kind of tax level you want ordinary people to shell out to pay for it. Then stand up and argue your case in a GE. See. Easy.
Mate, I'm not the one suggesting we adopt another countries healthcare system without paying for it.
Stocky....the fact that you have posted here (with some others) against the lockdown speaks volumes...
I'll give you a number 66 doctors so far have died in Italy.....
If we haven't lockdown the economic cost would have been much worse....that is discounting the terrible human cost...
I cannot understand how anyone is still posting this view...just makes me realise that people really are quite ignorant....
I bet if you had children working in the front line you wouldn't be quite so frivolous with your opinions....
You may me right, Tyson. As I said, there are no good options. Philosophy doesn`t, and shouldn`t, flinch.
I`m a liberal, I value freedom above anything else, which is why I tend to load the dice in the way I do. If you are a collectivist you will load the dice in favour of health. If you are a conservative you may choose the economy. We hold different ideologies, and that is why we see things through very different lenses.
Thank you for your feedback, I always look out for your posts in particular and I appreciate them very highly, you are one of the best posters on here. .
The options was never business as usual, vs lockdown. It is absurd to expect people to continue going to pubs, restaurants and the Grand National while people drop like flies around them.
I expect restrictions will be loosened soon, with "non-essential" business resuming work, but for the foreseable future social distancing will be near universal.
We're British. Stand-offishness is in our DNA. How hard should social distancing be?
London is a global city...
And its extended lockdown, for weeks beyond the rest of the country, may well be the price it has to pay for that.
This is very commonly voiced here in the Midlands: "Why didn`t they just lock down London?". I don`t agree - just saying.
The lockdown had to be across the board. But when areas come out of lockdown can vary, depending upon what the data is showing. If you REALLY want antagonism towards London, that will come if everywhere bar London is effectively clear, but they have to wait x weeks more indoors for the London fire to burn out too.
It would be quite possible to enforce a travel ban in and out of London. Virtually no public transport, it is a matter of policing the main roads. Give the cops something worthwhile to do....
Replacing Kay Burley with someone, anyone else, would be a good start.
Do the KB haterz know that watching her much botoxed coupon isn't compulsory?
Of course it's not compulsory to watch her silly mug on TV.
The problem is that millions of people are - and the media's attitude is quickly going to turn people from being stoic and compliant, into being resentful and angry. There's a building risk of civil disorder if the media continues down this route and doesn't change the tone of their output.
Compliance isn't an obligation. The government has to make it's case and convince people. Unfortunately the only thing sane people would trust Johnson to do is pump random women full of Cambodian toothpaste so it's an uphill struggle.
Another suggestion worth considering is scheduled lockdowns for the autumn and winter. Have one Oct 1-20 and a Xmas one Dec 17-Jan5 but have few restrictions beyond that.
People and businesses can then easily plan for those.
Given the NHS is apparently in crisis every winter I'm surprised lockdown then has never been suggested before
The NHS is in crisis most winters but rather than address this problem, HMG's response is to have its astroturfers accuse Labour of crying wolf and the BMA of shroud-waving. If capacity had been expanded to handle winter peaks then we'd not be in the state we are now.
Wrong - since virtually all the other countries used as sticks with which to beat the UK governments are now overrun or worse - it simply demonstrates that this sort of pandemic is not preparable for in the way you suggest. look at Itlay, Spain , Belgium, Netherlands, France.... and many more.
Yeah and Germany is probably lying about having more ICU beds and ventilators than you can shake a mask at.
No - not at all - Germany is doing well ..so far but they too are by no means sanguine about what is going to happe. They seem to be the only example you can quote in Europe and yet many other countries spend way more on health than the UK. Of course if your only obect is to wail and whinge because you don't like the government be my guest.
I agree choice one all the way if the NHS had the capacity which it didn't & doesn't. I so understand the mistake of choice two, the cost of which is too high.
Humanity has gotten too squeamish of late. One reason why a manned mission to mars won't happen anytime soon, they don't want anyone to die on the mission.
That is good news. Deaths will lag, but at least a hint the ICUs may be coping. Suggests the next 6 days here (and especially this weekend) will be the hardest
Stocky....the fact that you have posted here (with some others) against the lockdown speaks volumes...
I'll give you a number 66 doctors so far have died in Italy.....
If we haven't lockdown the economic cost would have been much worse....that is discounting the terrible human cost...
I cannot understand how anyone is still posting this view...just makes me realise that people really are quite ignorant....
I bet if you had children working in the front line you wouldn't be quite so frivolous with your opinions....
The lockdown (which I support) is killing people. Different people than would have died from not having a lockdown. Suicides have already occurred.
At the moment the effect seems to have been a *dip* in overall deaths in the UK - part of why I support the lockdown.
It is a legitimate question to ask as to what the excess deaths from continuing a lock down past a certain point vs stopping it.
It would be interesting to see some stats on causes of death, against a baseline of 'normal' times.
There are probably fewer deaths due to transport and industrial accidents as people are not travelling and working, but possibly an increase in suicide and murder as people suffer mental illness from the change in lifestyle.
Categorisation of deaths among the already sick could skew statistics in a whole number of ways, with COVID deaths being recorded against people who were already seriously ill with something else (and vice versa), and possibly some excess death from non-COVID causes due to lack of hospital care available.
Sadly, at a time of crisis such as this, accurate record-keeping is one thing that gets dropped - so we may never know.
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Isn't that a function of how expensive and inefficient the US system is compared to ours which is built around efficiency?
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
Yes, an almost totally public system (as in the UK) will work out cheaper in general, and is easier to organise centrally in a time of crisis - but has little in the way of excess capacity to cope with a pandemic.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
Germany spend massive amounts more on their health care per head than us.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
Such levels of expenditure are the rewards of a highly productive and efficient economy that pays its way in the world and then some. You cannot wish the result without having the means and we don't have them.
Germany spends more %-of-GDP per head. It spends more as a ratio not just in absolute terms.
This ludicrous conversation of "adopt the healthcare system of country X" without discussing how much they spend has to stop.
So what are you willing to reduce spending on so that you can increase spending on healthcare ?
The lockdown isn't so bad once you get used to it. It is like a long summer holiday. The government is paying for it with borrowed money, much of it from China. Could Sunak please announce how this money is going to be paid back? This question based on the premise that the lockdown is not completely lifted so that the economy does not return to normal soon. When will the government start repaying the money?
Perhaps they could cancel debt owned by China ?
Call it a deposit on future reparations.
A debt default? An interesting way to get the economy going...
Not a default if we are due the money..
I couldn't disagree more.
One of the UK's rarely mentioned economic strengths and reason we are a head of world commerce is we are one of the only major nations in the world to have never defaulted on any debt.
Under no circumstances should we seek to lose that record.
Well, not as the UK.
However, Edward III of England defaulted on 1.5 million florins' worth of debt in 1345;
And so did several Scottish kings, including David II in 1363.
Brilliant header. Even if one doesn't agree with the conclusion, it is a well put together argument and one we should have had as a country before the lockdown.
It's good to set out the argument as it's what lots of people are thinking. But it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death.
Kudos to Dominic Cummings who seems to be calling the shots on this for the government for changing his mind on lockdown when he saw the numbers, rather than carry on with policy that was going to fail.
You say "it is an abstract argument that doesn't consider how to prevent mass death". Well, a key premise of my argument is that mass death cannot be prevented.
Unless a vaccine. But if a vaccine: when, cost, how on earth can it be supplied to all humans on the planet, who gets it first etc etc?
Fair enough. Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist who has a significant input into government thinking was originally sceptical that lockdown would have a significant effect on transmission rates. He's changed his mind in light of experience in Italy and elsewhere. In fact he thinks the effect is very big and has dramatically reduced the predicted death toll provided lockdown measures are in place.
Unless you wish to challenge Ferguson on the epidemiology (I'm not being passive-aggressive on this - there is a lot uncertainty) then I think your argument is in the context of rejecting a measure that will save many, many lives and a functioning healthcare system and not coming up with an alternative.
"Now a rival academic has claimed Prof Ferguson has a patchy record of modelling epidemics, which could have led to hasty Ministerial decisions.
Professor Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University said Prof Ferguson was previously instrumental in modelling that led to the cull of more than 6 million animals during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, which left rural Britain economically devastated.
Then, Prof Ferguson and his Imperial colleagues concluded: ‘Extensive culling is sadly the only option for controlling the current British epidemic.’
But Prof Thrusfield, an expert in animal diseases, claimed the model made incorrect assumptions about how foot and mouth disease was transmitted and, in a 2006 review, he claimed Imperial’s foot and mouth model was ‘not fit for purpose’, while in 2011 he said it was ‘severely flawed’."
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
WW2 was many things but it was not a five year lockdown. Very few of the freedoms that we are currently without were lost. After the end of the Blitz and the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR life returned to something approaching normal on the Home Front albeit with a lot less food. Serious consideration was given to restarting league football at one point, and there was nothing to stop you playing it or nearly any other sport, regional competitions proliferated. In June 1940 40,000 saw West Ham win the Football League War Cup at Wembley the very day the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions crossed the Seine. By 1943 the South League Cup Final between Arsenal and Charlton saw 75,000 people there. Pubs, churches, cinemas, theatres, concert halls also remained open. You could go out on dates, get pissed, and most young people did and enjoyed it. This is a completely different challenge, WW2 comparisons are bollocks, moaning about “young people” does them a disservice.
Er - this isn't much more than a 5 day lockdown so far either. Get a grip.
MM was impliedly suggesting there had been a five year lockdown. That’s the point.
The point is that the UK has been on a lockdown less severe than in Spain or Italy for a little over a week. One that is very heavily supported in opinion polling despite all the efforts of the press to cavil and undermine on a daily basis. It's not going to last for ever but it is the right strategy for the next few weeks.
Replacing Kay Burley with someone, anyone else, would be a good start.
Do the KB haterz know that watching her much botoxed coupon isn't compulsory?
Of course it's not compulsory to watch her silly mug on TV.
The problem is that millions of people are - and the media's attitude is quickly going to turn people from being stoic and compliant, into being resentful and angry. There's a building risk of civil disorder if the media continues down this route and doesn't change the tone of their output.
Compliance isn't an obligation. The government has to make it's case and convince people. Unfortunately the only thing sane people would trust Johnson to do is pump random women full of Cambodian toothpaste so it's an uphill struggle.
The government are desperately trying to make their case, and certain sections of the media are desperately trying to undermine them. That's the problem.
Stocky....the fact that you have posted here (with some others) against the lockdown speaks volumes...
I'll give you a number 66 doctors so far have died in Italy.....
If we haven't lockdown the economic cost would have been much worse....that is discounting the terrible human cost...
I cannot understand how anyone is still posting this view...just makes me realise that people really are quite ignorant....
I bet if you had children working in the front line you wouldn't be quite so frivolous with your opinions....
The lockdown (which I support) is killing people. Different people than would have died from not having a lockdown. Suicides have already occurred.
At the moment the effect seems to have been a *dip* in overall deaths in the UK - part of why I support the lockdown.
It is a legitimate question to ask as to what the excess deaths from continuing a lock down past a certain point vs stopping it.
Honestly...I cannot believe that people are projecting this view the the lockdown is killing people....
The cost of not doing it are so much higher.....and until we have a vaccine, or a gamechanger (anti virals, monitoring technology) that enables people to return safely to normal life...we will remain in lockdown, or under some level of serious containment....
People are already irate with the lockdown, especially younger people. The novelty is beginning to wear out.
Well, the young people are going to have to learn that the freedoms they take for granted have been hard won in the past - and will need to be hard won again. God knows how their tiny attention spans would have coped with the five year lockdown of WW2 that several of my nearest neighbours endured. The same neighbours that would most likely have fifty, sixty year marriages destroyed as one or other of them was taken if the virus ran riot.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
WW2 was many things but it was not a five year lockdown. Very few of the freedoms that we are currently without were lost. After the end of the Blitz and the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR life returned to something approaching normal on the Home Front albeit with a lot less food. Serious consideration was given to restarting league football at one point, and there was nothing to stop you playing it or nearly any other sport, regional competitions proliferated. In June 1940 40,000 saw West Ham win the Football League War Cup at Wembley the very day the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions crossed the Seine. By 1943 the South League Cup Final between Arsenal and Charlton saw 75,000 people there. Pubs, churches, cinemas, theatres, concert halls also remained open. You could go out on dates, get pissed, and most young people did and enjoyed it. This is a completely different challenge, WW2 comparisons are bollocks, moaning about “young people” does them a disservice.
Er - this isn't much more than a 5 day lockdown so far either. Get a grip.
MM was impliedly suggesting there had been a five year lockdown. That’s the point.
The point is that the UK has been on a lockdown less severe than in Spain or Italy for a little over a week. One that is very heavily supported in opinion polling despite all the efforts of the press to cavil and undermine on a daily basis. It's not going to last for ever but it is the right strategy for the next few weeks.
To be fair, our lockdown has been similar to Spain and Italy over the first two weeks of their lockdown I think, and that must be driving the current data from Spain that is linked below. But otherwise, I agree with you.
Comments
Kudos to Dominic Cummings who seems to be calling the shots on this for the government for changing his mind on lockdown when he saw the numbers, rather than carry on with policy that was going to fail.
A mostly private system (as in the US) will be the opposite, having excess capacity but being more difficult to organise centrally and more expensive in normal times.
Both of these systems are sub-optimal, in normal times and in crisis times.
The 'ideal' system lies somewhere in between the two. Germany seems to be doing well at the moment, as was Singapore earlier.
The personal experience of people will vary a lot, but many will struggle with not going out beyond medicine/food, and seeing savings whittled away.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if we didn't have a disease to which no-one is immune and the severity of which varies from no symptoms at all to death. But we don't get to pick our pandemics.
My parents generation would disagree quite strongly
Those who commit suicide from this (and there's already some evidence suicide rates are going up) will be dead.
Austerity was meant to be over but this could mean another decade of austerity will be necessary - how many will die due to the consequences of that?
There are many ways to look at this. The problem is the direct deaths linked to COVID are quantifiable, the indirect deaths due to social distancing are not.
If I were an official Russian hacker, or a Chinese or North Korean one, then I'd be searching for all those identities in my extensive collection of leaked password databases. And I expect half a dozen tech journalists will try it too. The CIA are probably already listening to Cabinet calls because, as per the start of the thread, Zoom is an American company without end-to-end encryption.
ETA link to Cabinet call screenshot:
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1244985949534199808/photo/1
Part of my reasoning for writing it was that I sense larger dissent to the lockdown policy than is initially apparent - especially on this site. People are scared to voice it.
However, since it takes a week or two for a policy to turn into results, *early* May is probably too soon to have much information.
The other thing about this is that the government needs to avoid doing what Japan did a couple of weeks ago and seeing things get better, lifting some of its restrictions, and having that interpreted by people as, "cool, crisis over, we can go back to normal". Here they said they'd reopen schools in April, which in itself was quite a way off and might have been safe to do if the same trajectory had held, but it ended up being self-defeating, because people started going out again, a week later the case numbers started going back up, and now they're talking about shutting them again.
One thing I think they might need to do is to pair relaxing moves with tightening moves, so for example you might say, "it's OK to reopen these additional shops", but at the same time, announce that pubs will be closed for at least 6 months, and here's how we'll compensate the owners etc etc.
What use is tens of thousands getting back to work when tens of millions are stuck at home?
We're talking 0.1% - 1% of the population having antigens it appears.
This entire exercise is based round that fear.
The possibility of economic collapse is of course true. There are no good options, only bad and worse ones. IMHO Boris and co are more likely to survive recession/depression than mass chaotic deaths.
Also, if the UK ran a 'just let it happen' approach we may well then have both the disasters: death on the streets and our share in the world depression.
Boris and co have chosen rationally. As with all UK governments all the time the big thing that can still kill them stone dead is incompetence in implementation.
Call it a deposit on future reparations.
I’m merely reporting the facts. Whinging on about how “young people” are “soft” or just need to “get over themselves” will just make this whole situation worse, and build even more resentment,
Unless a vaccine. But if a vaccine: when, cost, how on earth can it be supplied to all humans on the planet, who gets it first etc etc?
The problem is that millions of people are - and the media's attitude is quickly going to turn people from being stoic and compliant, into being resentful and angry. There's a building risk of civil disorder if the media continues down this route and doesn't change the tone of their output.
I disagree. Many will be immune.
#StayHomeSaveLivesFnckTheEconomy
"Tell me more about this “social distancing” that happened during ww2?"
That said the estimates from non-bonkers people about how many people have got the thing seem to vary quite wildly and ultimately testing should resolve it, so it's not implausible that this may look like a terrible idea on current data, but turn out to be a great idea on the data we have in a few weeks.
the more things change, ...
I mean, the loudest voices calling for a release to the restrictions will often be the most unforgiving if their Mum or Dad end up dead avoidably thanks to this.
If there are 20,000 deaths across the UK, that means most people won't know many of the dead. They'll usually know someone who knows someone who is dead.
If there are 240,000 deaths across the UK, most people will lose someone they know. Going one further step will mean that virtually everyone they know will have lost someone they know as well.
And if they make the call on restrictions lifting, they may be going blind as to the outcome.
I'd suggest they say that they will give a date when they know more and they will know more by, say, the week of the 15th of April. That gives a structure and a pathway towards a release.
(And when they do release the restrictions, right now the likeliest route is that limited restrictions will be maintained and that they will expect to reapply full restrictions in a few weeks, but for a significantly shorter time.
One of the UK's rarely mentioned economic strengths and reason we are a head of world commerce is we are one of the only major nations in the world to have never defaulted on any debt.
Under no circumstances should we seek to lose that record.
There are currently just too many unknowns here for anyone to predict the future.
But Stocky is quite right to raise the question; most people - including the government, probably - have only begun to grasp the full economic consequences.
https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/01/turf-war-undermines-covid-19-fight-indonesia-government-jokowi-anies.html
I agree with Rochdale that fear (as well as wanting to do the right thing) is keeping people in line for now, but will it last? The government doesn't have the resources, or political capital, to enforce this by force, a la China.
The problem is that most of us - and the media in particular - are mollycoddled into believing that we do not have to make these sorts of decisions.
Maybe we could spend as much as the Germans?
https://guernseypress.com/news/2020/04/01/party-organisers-could-face-lockdown-fine-up-to-10000/
But just as the Covid curve is a parabolic, so is the damage to the economy - it is not a straight line of damage. Beyond a few weeks there will be an inflextion point where lots of good businesses will go down forever - even with furlough.
The country cannot stand still for long - deaths are happening anyway.
China seems to have done it using dictatorship, South Korea also seems to have done it with some privacy-invasion but no dictatorship, Japan may have pulled it off (we'll see) without even getting the "test and quarantine fast" part or the "control entry from places with serious contagion" part right. And this will all get easier as everybody learns from each other's mistakes.
Yes, things carried on during WW2. People still went out to clubs and pubs and dances. But it was hardly without risk. The Cafe de Paris for example was bombed soon after the start of a performance and at least 34 people were killed and around 80 injured. Not a risk you face when staying at home in front of the Playstation for a few weeks.
The uncertainties they face are as to nothing compared to those faced by the wartime generation.
I'll give you a number 66 doctors so far have died in Italy.....
If we haven't lockdown the economic cost would have been much worse....that is discounting the terrible human cost...
I cannot understand how anyone is still posting this view...just makes me realise that people really are quite ignorant....
I bet if you had children working in the front line you wouldn't be quite so frivolous with your opinions....
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthcaresystem/articles/howdoesukhealthcarespendingcompareinternationally/2016-11-01
The difference is made up mostly of private health insurance, I would agree that an expansion of this in the UK would be for the better.
The one thing guaranteed not to work, is throwing ever more public money at an unreformed NHS.
Health spending cannot ever waste a penny ever - because NHS.
Humanity has gotten too squeamish of late. One reason why a manned mission to mars won't happen anytime soon, they don't want anyone to die on the mission.
I agree with the government’s current policy, as a “safety first” approach, but I absolutely agree the public need more confidence about what is happening next.
I really now fear the economic impact because - and this is just anecdote - I think a lot of companies are looking to permanently restructure as a result of this crisis. That’s now unavoidable (and perhaps, in the long run even desirable) but a grim recession now feels baked in.
If the govt wants to avoid a depression it must provide a high level narrative around our “exit strategy”. I thought the ideas shared upthread around planned mini-lockdowns closer to Xmas were smart and could form part of this picture.
Also, and I know people don’t want to hear this, HMG comms *are* compromised by this government’s track record on truth telling vis a vis Brexit. Maybe Hancock aside, I personally don’t trust any of them to communicate honestly on what is right for me and my family. And they are still playing games - this China story for example looks an obvious attempt to deflect blame for earlier lack of preparedness.
I don’t “mind” that we are testing less than we though we would. I don’t expect everything to be perfect. I do mind a lack of truth-telling.
At peak, this is a tidal wave. If your sea wall is 10 feet high or 20 vs a 200 foot wave.
How many people are prepared to give theirs up to fund increased health spending ?
https://qz.com/1822596/all-the-coronavirus-test-materials-in-short-supply-in-the-us
https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/diagnostics/Shortage-RNA-extraction-kits-hampers/98/web/2020/03
If 5% need intensive care to stay alive, and they can't get it, the death rate will be 5%. If 75-90% of those who need intensive care survive when they get it, that makes a staggering difference in the death toll.
Carreggi hospital in Florence has done a full study test on its staff....and estimates that 5% possibly have had the virus.....
This is a virus that is NOT spreading wildly through the population with many developing asymptomatic issues....
Where it spreads uncontained it reaps carnage...your views have been irresponsible from the outset, and continue to be grossly irresponsible....
At the moment the effect seems to have been a *dip* in overall deaths in the UK - part of why I support the lockdown.
It is a legitimate question to ask as to what the excess deaths from continuing a lock down past a certain point vs stopping it.
https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-04-01/drop-in-intensive-care-patients-brings-hope-to-spanish-hospitals.html?ssm=FB_CM_EN&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0x55gPwVuMjsFPPfd9w06R5mqSVrnlNVfpl5icVmtR3BqHzo7RCn_MEto#Echobox=1585728925
It spends more as a ratio not just in absolute terms.
This ludicrous conversation of "adopt the healthcare system of country X" without discussing how much they spend has to stop.
Personally I'm fine and happy to stay like this for how ever long the experts think we need to be doing this. But I know that it is not sustainable. Eventually people will stop lending to the government so they'll have to start printing money. Perhaps if all government start to do this then it won't be too bad, but I think the risks David outlined are real and they scary. Perhaps not as scary as the virus, but they will affect more people directly and that will be when the really difficult decisions have to be made.
Unless you wish to challenge Ferguson on the epidemiology (I'm not being passive-aggressive on this - there is a lot uncertainty) then I think your argument is in the context of rejecting a measure that will save many, many lives and a functioning healthcare system and not coming up with an alternative.
Let us live on puritan gruel and never leave the house to reduce accidents.
I`m a liberal, I value freedom above anything else, which is why I tend to load the dice in the way I do. If you are a collectivist you will load the dice in favour of health. If you are a conservative you may choose the economy. We hold different ideologies, and that is why we see things through very different lenses.
Thank you for your feedback, I always look out for your posts in particular and I appreciate them very highly, you are one of the best posters on here. .
It would be quite possible to enforce a travel ban in and out of London. Virtually no public transport, it is a matter of policing the main roads. Give the cops something worthwhile to do....
And dead people can't buy stuff.
There are probably fewer deaths due to transport and industrial accidents as people are not travelling and working, but possibly an increase in suicide and murder as people suffer mental illness from the change in lifestyle.
Categorisation of deaths among the already sick could skew statistics in a whole number of ways, with COVID deaths being recorded against people who were already seriously ill with something else (and vice versa), and possibly some excess death from non-COVID causes due to lack of hospital care available.
Sadly, at a time of crisis such as this, accurate record-keeping is one thing that gets dropped - so we may never know.
However, Edward III of England defaulted on 1.5 million florins' worth of debt in 1345;
And so did several Scottish kings, including David II in 1363.
Admittedly, those were a fair time ago.
"Now a rival academic has claimed Prof Ferguson has a patchy record of modelling epidemics, which could have led to hasty Ministerial decisions.
Professor Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University said Prof Ferguson was previously instrumental in modelling that led to the cull of more than 6 million animals during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, which left rural Britain economically devastated.
Then, Prof Ferguson and his Imperial colleagues concluded: ‘Extensive culling is sadly the only option for controlling the current British epidemic.’
But Prof Thrusfield, an expert in animal diseases, claimed the model made incorrect assumptions about how foot and mouth disease was transmitted and, in a 2006 review, he claimed Imperial’s foot and mouth model was ‘not fit for purpose’, while in 2011 he said it was ‘severely flawed’."
The cost of not doing it are so much higher.....and until we have a vaccine, or a gamechanger (anti virals, monitoring technology) that enables people to return safely to normal life...we will remain in lockdown, or under some level of serious containment....
"You don't make the timeline. The virus makes the timeline".
There are features of democracy (rule of law, property rights etc) that are worth preserving but a corrupt voting system - possibly not.