1 edit
-Removed-The forecasts may have been overegged, but the actual data pointed clearly to a real risk that the NHS would be swamped with cases. Twitty forecasted 200 deaths a day by mid November and was accused of scaremongering. We are closer to 400 now.
So is your view that the NHS would not have been overrun? If so, what is your evidence for this, as everything I see in terms of actual data suggests the opposite. A dodgy forecast or two does not change this reality.
-Removed-I agree the Government's communication has been appalling.
But I think it is odd to claim that their actions are an overreaction when you can't say whether or not the NHS would have been overrun. How much more scared would we and the elderly feel if we knew that the NHS was not there to treat us?
If you look at the data, cases have been rising at an average of 4% a day since early September, staggeringly consistently. If we had done nothing about this, there is simply no reason to believe that they wouldn't be at 75,000 cases a day by end of November. Just look at France.
So, given these facts, are you really saying you would have run the risk of not locking down?
My view is that the reality is not that we have locked down too much and too soon, but that we locked down too late and too little.
-Removed-Apparently Greater Manchester health board are closing to non covid cases because of a lack of capacity. What exactly do we think ‘overrun’ looks like?
The only hysteria I can detect is coming from the the anti lockdown campaign. This pandemic cannot be wished away it has to be beaten to death, if you leave it twitching in the dust it will rise again.
We should lock down until there is an effective vaccine or people start getting serious about face masks and social distancing.
-Removed-I suppose it depends what you are saying. If your point was that we shouldn't be basing decisions of this magnitude on dodgy data then I absolutely agree. I thought you were challenging the actual decision.
My point was that the decision to lockdown was not only the correct one, but inevitable given where we are. There is simply no choice.
1 edit
-Removed-If we had put Tier 2, and Tier 3, in place much sooner and much more widespread, we might have squeaked by without a full national lockdown.
The question I would ask is, why didn't we? I think it is because Boris's innate tendency is to listen to those people who argue against wider lockdowns on the grounds of economics, civil liberties etc.
So ironically, they have caused the very thing they rail against.
Lockdown didn’t need this dodgy dossier
The government’s advisers are slipshod but some of their critics are deluded
Dominic Lawson
Sunday November 08 2020, 12.10pm, The Sunday Times
So, was last weekend’s Downing Street briefing on the need for a second lockdown Boris Johnson’s equivalent of Tony Blair’s Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Are the government’s medical advisers the white-coat equivalent of the intelligence services 18 years ago: providing “evidence” for something that didn’t exist, but fitted in very conveniently with the prime minister’s objectives?
I don’t think so, and not just because this was the last thing Johnson wanted to do: indeed, he had all but guaranteed he wouldn’t. And while the “worst case” forecast on Sir Patrick Vallance’s graph projecting deaths from Covid rising to 4,000 a day by December was known not to be feasible at the time it was presented — which is certainly scandalous — the government’s chief scientific adviser retains some credit in the bank of public trust.
In September, at an earlier briefing, Vallance had displayed “projections” suggesting Covid infections might be about 50,000 a day by mid-October, and deaths about 200 a day by mid-November. For this he was widely derided, accused by such luminaries of my trade as Piers Morgan and Julia Hartley-Brewer of “scaremongering”. Yes, his scenario for reported cases was an overshoot — they reached around 20,000 per day in mid-October — although the Office for National Statistics estimated that the true figure for daily infections reached almost 52,000 in the week ending October 24; and, if anything, Vallance’s projection of fatalities was an undershoot.
While the public seems, by a very wide margin, to support the measures taken to check the second wave of the virus, the bulk of the pundit-ocracy has been on the “What’s all the fuss about?” side of the argument. Johnson certainly would have been, were he still a Daily Telegraph columnist. It’s all much easier when you aren’t responsible for anything, let alone answerable to the electorate for not taking sufficiently seriously the worst-case scenario provided by your medical advisers and the head of the NHS.
It’s true that there are also medical figures who have been consistently against stringent attempts to suppress the virus, notably the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, Sunetra Gupta. In May she declared: “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on the way out in this country.” This was based on her theory that “herd immunity” might already have been reached in the UK: “So I think the [infection fatality rate, or IFR] would be definitely less than one in 1,000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000. That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.” As Sam Bowman, of the free-market Adam Smith Institute — and therefore far from an illiberal interventionist — observed: “By this point, 36,000 had died of Covid in the UK. If 100% of the UK’s population had had Covid by then, the UK would have had to have a population of 360 million people for her low-end IFR to be right.”
And then there is the media-friendly oncologist Professor Karol Sikora, who in August insisted: “The gloom and doomsters are predicting another wave of it. Where’s that going to come from? I just don’t believe it.” Doubtless it was also with confidence in the wisdom of Gupta that Toby Young, the energetic creator of the Lockdown Sceptics website, asserted in June that “there will be no second spike — not now, and not in the autumn either. The virus has melted into thin air.”
Even though such predictions have been shown to be little more than wishful thinking elevated to a dogma, that doesn’t mean the government is necessarily right to take the action it has (especially as the eye-watering cost of the furlough extension is yet another burden on future taxpayers).
Those who take a contrary view have consistently held up Sweden as a model: its chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, has become an unwilling hero for a certain brand of libertarian, the sort who thinks it is proper in the midst of a pandemic characterised by a high level of asymptomatic infection for each individual to decide how he or she behaves, regardless of the consequences to others.
Sweden is a deeply conformist society, which is perhaps why it has been able to operate what amounts to a form of lockdown imposed with “advice” rather than state regulation. And the fact that, extraordinarily, 40% of Swedish households are people living by themselves, is an obvious advantage if you want to limit infection non-coercively. Even so, when you compare Sweden with its more densely populated neighbour Denmark, which did have a formal lockdown, the outcome was no advertisement for the former.
Tegnell, an admirably frank communicator, has admitted that there was “quite obviously a potential for improvement in what we have done” and recently observed that chasing herd immunity without a vaccine (as Gupta advises) is “both futile and immoral”. In the first wave of the virus, the Danes recorded 109 Covid deaths per million citizens, a fifth of the Swedish death rate, while Sweden’s gross domestic product in the second quarter fell by 8.6%, against a drop of 7.4% in Denmark.
This illustrates a point I tried to get across here six months ago: that whatever policy is used by governments, the virus itself has dire economic consequences resulting from the autonomous public response. So I was interested to see Gertjan Vlieghe, of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, telling MPs last month that most of the damage to the economy arises from restrictions that people impose on themselves: “Government restrictions ... have had a much smaller additional direct impact on aggregate economic performance ... once we account for the prevalence of the virus.”
In other words, the fear effect would have still devastated the hospitality industry if the government had adopted a laissez-faire approach and Covid hospitalisation rates soared to levels much higher than likely under its current policy. That is without considering the medical effects on those suffering from other conditions if our hospitals became nothing more than Covid firefighting units. In Belgium overrun hospitals are already showing what that might look like: they are using air ambulances to fly severely ill Covid patients, many on ventilators, to Germany.
Last week The Times quoted an unnamed minister fulminating about Johnson’s sudden switch to a second lockdown: “He’s been overrun by the virus and by his advisers ... they are ... totally, totally shit ... I think we’ve lost the next election.” The political future of the Conservatives is the least of the nation’s worries, but if I were a Tory MP, it would be the thought of what a Belgian-style meltdown in the NHS would do for my party’s reputation that would make me use four-letter words, not a prime ministerial U-turn.
dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk