Eugene Wrayburn wrote:My experience of China is a decade old (I went there on honeymoon) but in order to travel internally you needed permission. Car ownership is pretty low as is the need to travel out of your general area. Combine with phone surveillance and I absolutely believe they shut down the spread.
The medium term here is problematic. We're finally more or less where we should have been over a month ago, though testing is still a problem. My real concern is what to do about children. Many people like me rely on grandparents to do childcare when school isn't/can't. There's no way that there will be enough childcare around to cover this, even for people like me who could probably afford it.
I think it was SoM who suggested that my view that at some point we just have to get back to normal was the worst case scenario. I'm afraid it really isn't. Worst case scenario is mutation to something much more lethal or infectious. I understand that there is some variety in both in the various mutated strains knocking about the world.
However I don't agree that getting back to "normal" means a couple of hundred thousand excess deaths (in the UK) every year. We know have the tools to deal with an outbreak much better. We should have some track and trace infrastructure by then. We should know more about treatment. We'll have a test and know how to ramp it up. In extremis we could have a fairly short sharp lockdown to give us time to track and trace and then release again.
Donny asked how long before we say no more. I would say that before giving up we would need to have a couple of vaccine failures and probably a minimum of 2 years of rolling lockdowns and releases. Anything more is probably not affordable. Anything less is unnecessarily callous.
Nah, worst case is that Covid-19 was sent by aliens to soften us up before they invade next year.
Look, we can always think of a worse "worst" case. I guess it was shorthand for: scientists would think we were pretty unlucky if, in 2 years' time, we have no vaccine, no effective treatment and no prospect of herd immunity in the future.
I agree that, if we have strong testing and tracing in place we will perhaps be able to deal with a new strain without the most draconian measures, but
only if the level of infections is very low. The "emerging from lockdown" position is nothing like that - it's unclear from UK stats, but there must be 50-100k current cases (ie those who tested positive), and several times that who are untested or asymptomatic. I wouldn't be surprised if there were 500k or more cases out there, most of them mild. I hope these numbers are falling (but who actually knows?). And the government is facing pressure to reduce the lockdown. But test and trace is not going to be enough to deal with infections at that level. (It worked in South Korea because they have had less than 11k confirmed cases in total.) This is why we need to make big changes to business as usual if we want to get out of lockdown.
In the long term, as you say, if in 2 years we have that no vaccine/treatment/herd immunity situation we will have to make tough choices - lives or livelihoods? Personally, I'd say we can make quite a lot of changes and still have a largely functioning economy (like a massive move to work-from-home ... which would also be great for the environment), but that is a decision to be made by this Conservative government. I hope fears for their election chances, and humanity (I'm not really thinking of Priti Patel here) will keep them from the most callous choices.
