RugbyRebels

Digby wrote:Of course if we're going to play If we could equally say the people roused by the urgency of the early lockdown would have committed still stronger to the process and even the morons carrying on with listing friends and family would have bought into it, and we'd actually have reduced deaths by 90%. It being a game of IF different things to the different thing being proposed could have happened

Donny osmond wrote:

Digby wrote:Of course if we're going to play If we could equally say the people roused by the urgency of the early lockdown would have committed still stronger to the process and even the morons carrying on with listing friends and family would have bought into it, and we'd actually have reduced deaths by 90%. It being a game of IF different things to the different thing being proposed could have happened

... which would be exactly his point?

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Coronavirus: Lockdown delay cost lives, says Sage member

Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor
Friday May 22 2020, 12.00pm, The Times
Locking Britain down a week or two earlier would have made a “big difference” to the coronavirus death rate, one of the government’s leading scientific advisers has said.

Professor Sir Ian Boyd, who sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said that politicians and scientific advisers could both be blamed but suggested that fear that public opinion was not yet ready for draconian restrictions in early March was a decisive factor.

It came as the government’s testing chief hit back in the Whitehall blame game, saying key decisions on stopping contact tracing were made by ministers not officials, and one of the country’s leading scientists attacked the government for a lack of leadership during the crisis.

Sir Ian, professor of biology at the St Andrews University, urged ministers to stop saying they were led by science as it was “slightly misleading”.

He told the BBC’s Coronavirus Newscast: “What we in the scientific community do is give the best advice we can based on the evidence that’s available to us. We then pass it to government ministers and the policy parts of government who can then take that and do with it what they like.”


Sir Ian said that Britain was “a bit slower off the mark” in the crisis than Asian countries that had been hit by Sars in the early 2000s and erred in wrongly assuming this coronavirus would be no more infectious.

“Acting very early was really important and I would have loved to have seen us acting a week or two weeks earlier and it would have made quite a big difference to the steepness of the curve of infection and therefore the death rate,” he said.

“And I think that’s really the number one issue — could we have acted earlier? Were the signs there earlier on?”

Although Sir Ian was not part of Sage discussions in March, he said: “You could point the finger at scientists for not actually being explicit enough. But at the end of the day all these interact with public opinion as well. And I think some politicians would have loved to have reacted earlier but in their political opinion it probably wasn’t feasible because people wouldn’t have perhaps responded in the way they eventually did.”

In March some epidemiologists privately expressed frustration that behavioural scientists advising government urged ministers to lockdown later over fears that people would tire of restrictions imposed earlier.

Sir Paul Nurse, head of the Francis Crick Institute, said “everybody” had made mistakes in the crisis and concluded: “I get a sense the UK has been rather too much on the back foot, increasingly playing catch-up, firefighting through successive crises.”

He urged government to set out “a much clearer publicly presented strategy as to what we’re actually trying to do, and the evidence upon which it is based”.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “Maybe there’s a strategy there, I don’t see it. I’m not completely convinced that we are actually being quite clear in having good leadership.”

Asking who is in charge of strategy and decision-making, he questioned: “Is it ministers? Is it Public Health England? The National Health Service? The Office for Life Sciences? I don’t know, but more importantly, do they know?”

While some in Downing Street have vented frustration at Public Health England, the agency hit back this morning through Professor John Newton, who is also the government’s testing co-ordinator.

He told MPs that strategy for testing was the Department of Health’s responsibility and insisted: “PHE’s role is important but it is one of a number of roles. Strategic co-ordination is undertaken by government departments.”

Pressed on a key decision in mid-March to stop contact tracing, Professor Newton said this had not been taken by PHE, telling the Commons science and technology committee: “Decisions throughout the pandemic have been made by government, advised by scientific advisers . . . The decision on March 16 to stand down the contact tracing and testing was a government decision.”

However he added that modelling at the time suggested that in March the UK was heading for a million cases and “if you have a million cases there is no way, however much contact tracing or testing capacity you have, you could pursue the South Korean model. And at that point it was government’s very significant decision to move to lockdown.”

South Korea, which has had only 264 coronavirus deaths, has become the model for many in government after controlling its outbreak through rigorous contact tracing. But Professor Newton argued that its job was much easier because at one point 55 per cent of cases were linked to a single religious group, insisting: “If we had had that epidemiology we would have done the same.”

Stom wrote:Our lockdown is over, so we went to buy a car. The county we visited has had 17...

Cases.

Yes, 17 cases in total.

Early lockdown, low levels of international transport, Budapest apart, what else?

Digby wrote:

Stom wrote:Our lockdown is over, so we went to buy a car. The county we visited has had 17...

Cases.

Yes, 17 cases in total.

Early lockdown, low levels of international transport, Budapest apart, what else?

No testing?

Donny osmond wrote:This is Tom Chivers, who writes on sciences stuff for UnHerd, and who's motto is "... it might be more complicated than that ..." which is frankly exactly the sort of motto you want any journo to have, but particularly a science writer... his thoughts on the 'More or Less' article mentioned previously.


https://unherd.com/thepost/how-much-dif ... have-made/

How much difference would an earlier shutdown have made?

The Telegraph reports that if Britain had locked down one week earlier, 75% of British Covid-19 deaths would have been prevented. It’s attracted the attention of the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, and George Monbiot in The Guardian.

It’s based on a model by James Annan, a climate scientist, published on his blog, which was mentioned briefly by the BBC’s always fantastic More or Less programme on Tuesday.

I’m not here to debunk the model, exactly, and I would never dare contradict the More or Less team. I just wanted to flag a reason to be concerned with it.

The word ‘model’ can describe many things, from an all-singing, all-dancing climate model which simulates the action of the entire atmosphere and ocean system down to cubic-kilometre units, to a simple statistical curve which says ‘if X goes up by 1, Y will go up by 2’. The Annan model is very much at the latter end.

[https://l35h2znmhf1scosj14ztuxt1-wpengine]Hindcast/forecast for daily deaths in the UK. Credit: James Annan

Its model is amazingly simple: Covid-19 infections were doubling about every 3.5 days in March; that means you get two doublings in a week. So, if lockdown had happened a week earlier, it would have prevented two doublings, so you’d have got a quarter as many infections and therefore a quarter as many deaths.

.....

None of this is to say that an earlier lockdown would not have saved lives. It almost certainly would. But the stark claim that it would have prevented 75% of deaths — 30,000, so far — is wildly overconfident and I think should be reported with far more uncertainty; the true figure could be much lower.

All-cause mortality has come down at the same time as the Covid deaths have come down and it is now at roughly the rate it is at in an average winter. So we are essentially having a winter … in terms of mortality, but in late spring and early summer.

Sandydragon wrote:I wonder who tipped the media off about that?

fivepointer wrote:So you travel 250 odd miles while infected to stay with your parents and get your sister to do shopping for you. And there was no one close by where you normally lived who could have done that?