kwlf wrote:
That’s not quite so, though the difference is that previously I believe such public health measures have been undertaken on much more limited scales.
Can you point to the laws that you believe gave them these powers pre-covid?
Of course there are various discretionary powers in existence (e.g. prevention of terrorism for the police, or environmental health shutting down a restaurant etc.) but the principles of such discretionary powers in English law has generally been that they are (1) extremely limited in scope (i.e. for a particular narrow purpose), (2) extremely limited in duration of effect without review by a judicial process, and (3) subject to appeal by those affected.
I am not aware of anything that, pre-Covid, allowed anyone to declare you must stay at home because there’s a bug going round. Even the Prime Minister’s “you must stay at home” speech on the eve of lockdown 1 carried no legal weight until supporting legislation had been passed.
Regarding foreign travel, there’s another Ebola outbreak in the Congo. The only reason this and previous incidents have had no effect on our lifestyles is that these parts of Africa are not frequently visited from our areas, and the outbreaks were localised – from our viewpoint.
( One nurse brought Ebola back to Scotland, but monitoring stopped any spread, without any public measures.)
Yes; it is down to how much people move around. In the Middle Ages they rarely travelled outside their village, or the next village. But they also knew back then that if you are ill, you should stay at home, and all the primitive societies employ this tactic. So this is nothing new 
Travel is just a big thing nowadays.
The numbers from this site for my local big hospital or two paint quite a picture of what this virus is doing:
Hospitalisations are falling rapidly now
Bed occupancy is falling but a lot slower
but the really sick ones are staying put for a very long time
and when they come out, after weeks, they are either really weak and often barely able to walk, or dead. So, looking at this in terms of the public health crisis (which is what drives political decisions) things have some more time to run.
Note also that the last category are not going to be “old and weak” people who, as some would say, were going to die soon anyway. Those are not being offered ventilation because their survival rate would be poor.
Graham wrote:
Wow, that’s surprising stuff to learn.Whether this power lies locally or with central government is not so much my issue, more the fact that it exists at all.
IMO it’s your angling that is “wow” The law (in Norway) is from 1860, but has been modernized since then. It’s law, a whole series of them. Mostly it is about general stuff, like who is responsible for pandemic protection and how it is organized. It’s about giving information to the citizens, about the individual right to get protection. What to do if you know you are infected (and what not to do). About vaccination and other medical stuff. It is also specific about what the local administration can do in terms interfering with life in general. They can:
I thought every country had such laws. Leave this to the government for them to decide and act on the spot, and you have no idea what is going to happen, or when, or how. The list above is pretty much what has been happening through the entire pandemic.
At no point have we had curfew, impossible legally to do it. It’s all decided locally on county level. The problem now is mutant viruses popping up, and where it happens, it is the number 2 that gets stricter. In addition the national borders are getting stricter.
Graham wrote:
Can you point to the laws that you believe gave them these powers pre-covid?Of course there are various discretionary powers in existence (e.g. prevention of terrorism for the police, or environmental health shutting down a restaurant etc.) but the principles of such discretionary powers in English law has generally been that they are (1) extremely limited in scope (i.e. for a particular narrow purpose), (2) extremely limited in duration of effect without review by a judicial process, and (3) subject to appeal by those affected.
I am not aware of anything that, pre-Covid, allowed anyone to declare you must stay at home because there’s a bug going round. Even the Prime Minister’s “you must stay at home” speech on the eve of lockdown 1 carried no legal weight until supporting legislation had been passed.
That’s changing the goalposts a bit. Your original statement was that:
Prior to Covid-19 no politician or civil servant, whether part of local or central structures, had the power to order to me to remain at home, close my business, etc. for any reason at all.
Exceptions to your original statement would include the prevention of chronic typhoid carriers from being involved in any work involving food for the public (i.e. exercising their trade or running their catering business). People who refuse to undergo or complete treatment for TB can be incarcerated and this might sometimes effectively mean house arrest rather than detention in a hospital. But it might mean that too. Schools might be shut down for an outbreak of meningitis. On a slightly different note, farmers lost all their animals during the Foot and Mouth and BSE outbreaks.
Going back a bit further, and you have leper colonies or the measures used to control the 1918 ’flu pandemic.
I’m not endorsing all these measures. As Silvaire points out, it is different matter to restrict people who might have a disease from incarcerating people who are known to have a disease. That said, had the pandemic turned out to be as bad as SARS-1 or Ebola I don’t think many people would be questioning the restrictions. The question is one of balance.
The other day, two aircraft landed at Gatwick EGKK – instead of one very few mins for parts of the day.
The vaccine is arriving in the nick of time.
kwlf wrote:
That’s changing the goalposts a bit. Your original statement was that:Prior to Covid-19 no politician or civil servant, whether part of local or central structures, had the power to order to me to remain at home, close my business, etc. for any reason at all.
Exceptions to your original statement would include the prevention of chronic typhoid carriers from being involved in any work involving food for the public (i.e. exercising their trade or running their catering business). People who refuse to undergo or complete treatment for TB can be incarcerated and this might sometimes effectively mean house arrest rather than detention in a hospital. But it might mean that too. Schools might be shut down for an outbreak of meningitis. On a slightly different note, farmers lost all their animals during the Foot and Mouth and BSE outbreaks.
Sure, my apologies – I did move them somewhat.
The powers aren’t widespread though. As you describe, they are limited to being for quite specific, pre-defined, purposes – usually related to known existing diseases, and are quite narrow in scope. None of that stuff really amounts to the power to lock down society in new and unknown scenarios.
Perhaps my original statement was a little strong. What I’m getting at is that (pre-covid) no-one in this country had the discretionary power to knock on my door and inform me that due to a new pandemic I must stay at home and cannot go to work or to the pub. That required legislation.
Peter wrote:
So, looking at this in terms of the public health crisis (which is what drives political decisions) things have some more time to run.
Yep, the time lag is considerable. The rate at which they are admitted is slowing rapidly, but the rate of discharge (either alive or dead) will remain relatively constant in relation to the hospitalised population. I don’t know where we can see any data on the rate of discharge (alive) and you can perhaps extrapolate something from the death rate but it will be of limited accuracy.
LeSving wrote:
I thought every country had such laws. Leave this to the government for them to decide and act on the spot, and you have no idea what is going to happen, or when, or how.
Most do. Most had comprehensive pandemic plans, worked out by experts and agreed upon in times of peace.
Then corona came and they tried to implement them. And failed totally because of political considerations and shehanigans which ended up in the catastrophic failure of the whole system today.
With properly implemented pandemic plans, Corona would be history by now, in fact, probably would have been history latest last Summer. Immediate shut down, immediate closure of travel, borders, gatherings e.t.c. while this was possible and short lived, 2-3 months max. We almost were there last summer, but we opened up too soon.
Now we have tenfold to hundredfold the number of sick and infected but have lost public support through failures upon failures. Now the situation is not recoverable, not even with vaccinations, for a long time.
The best laid out plans are for nothing if they are abandoned the moment the crisis hits. This is what happened in most countries around the world. Those who kept to the plan won, covid is there a distant memory unless they relent now and let the dirty travellers in. For us, it will be present for years to come.
Graham wrote:
The powers aren’t widespread though. As you describe, they are limited to being for quite specific, pre-defined, purposes – usually related to known existing diseases, and are quite narrow in scope.
They have been used rarely and narrowly, but they weren’t written all that narrowly. Not all legislation is perfect – if you follow the references on the link above, you will see that some doctors have raised concerns about a lack of checks and balances in it.
But – weren’t all these laws made in times of a much, much less interconnected world? We have become way too interdependent to ‘shut down’. You don’t have to look far at, say, China. Just shutting down any EU country or even region means that this area runs out of food within days. Stop he trucks bringing fruit and veg from Spain to northern Europe just for a few days and you have bare supermarket shelves.
One effect of Covid will be a re-evaluation of global supply chains, but only up to a point. The genie of an interconnected world is out of the bottle and you won’t get it back in, luckily, IMHO. We will need to find a different approach to this and any future pandemic. To a degree, this has already happened – never have vaccines been developed at the speed as the various vaccines against Covid were. The future does not lie in a recourse to medieval practices, but in the advancement of science.
