I agree Australia and New Zealand have geographical advantages. However both had a significant number of cases in the early days, and Eastern Australia has had outbreaks since. However in both cases they lockeddown early and brought the number of cases down to very low levels, and then went on to pretty much eliminate the virus.
The UK is also an island, and you pose the more fundamantal question that if we had closed our borders back in February, where miight we be now? There would have probably been no run on the NHS, or PPE, numbers were very low then. The economic impact would have been relatively small in the longer term. Could we have kept the infection levels to Australian levels – I dont know, but as an island nation we are in fact not that different.
Could we have kept and maintained the levels to a much lower number?
We have discussed the economic impacts, but the economic impacts in Australia have been far less significant than here.
Of course it was a gutsy strategy, and the politicians would have been slaughtered if it had fizzled out, but I personally suspect the scientists had a pretty good idea back then it wasnt going to.
Lets face where we are, which I am not sure is a resounding success.
We were told we were following the science, then being guided by the science, whereas I suspect we have chosen the bits of the science we had no other course than to follow.
If someone can do the maths., I would love to see the impact of the alternative strategies as I hate guessing when a problem yeilds itself so well to maths.
Australian population density is nothing like things over here. nor anything like the interconnections and frequent movements that we have. Don’t forget the EU is open borders and free movement of people It’s a fundamental right…
Imagine what the big media groups would have run with if a Boris had closed the border fully and sent back the inflatables. He would have been accused of all of the worst things. As we saw when Trump stopped travel to and from China.
Although I’m not sure it’ll be possible to top “Hug a Chinese” from Italy early on. Maybe sending ill elderly people back to care homes is also up there.
Off_Field – maybe. I agree Europe had no alternative course.
Borris would have got a huge amount of stick, and possibly would not have survived, but when needs must, politicians are there to make the gutsy decisions. we did lock down (it seems a long time ago) – but was it three weeks after the scientists said we should. Cases at the start of the Summer were brought down to relatively low numbers. This also seems a long time ago. So regardless, it was three weeks lock down, how much more successful would it have been three weeks earlier. Would we have had the same run on PPE, would we have ended up building the Nightingale hospitals. Would the NHS ever been at risk? Would we have had a better shot at containing the virus as we opened up again because the numbers would have been so much lower?
As to the Autumn one, all the writing was on the wall. There was every sense including the school holidays. Yet we missed that opportunity, the invetable just came three weeks later.
I would still like to be convinced we followed the best course. My intuition is we didnt.
Three weeks for the lockdown start time I don’t think would have made a stark difference. Funnily enough flu tends not to be such an issue in the summer.
Perhaps if we had let people exercise more outside they would have got more vitamin d and been healthier which would have helped?
The first lockdown was three weeks to flatten the curve. As we know well flattening the curve does not reduce overall cases just extends the time for them to reduce the load on the nhs. At some point flattening the curve turned into lockdown to try to eradicate the virus which wasn’t really going to happen.
We had a summer with very low cases, and low hospital occupancy. Then along comes the flu season again and things ramp up quickly.
Off_Field wrote:
Three weeks for the lockdown start time I don’t think would have made a stark difference.
I think it would have made a big difference. To be fair to BoJo, I believe he dithered for two weeks rather than three, and I think anyone would have dithered for the first week, but cases were doubling every 3-4 days, so that week meant we went into lockdown with four times more cases than we would have had, had four times more peak deaths, and about four weeks longer in lockdown, because even lockdown only got us halving every couple of weeks.
So the delay was worse for deaths, worse for the NHS, and the longer lockdown and the more nervous emerging customers meant it was also worse for the economy!
Edit: added the qualification : ‘and I think anyone would have dithered for the first week’.
This makes the assumption that Lockdowns are the only thing that reduces the numbers and that they are very effective. The Stanford study at least raises questions about this.
Because there are so many things going on at the same time I think it’s difficult to draw such conclusions so strongly.
We have the direct comparison of Wales going in early with a heavy firebreak and lockdown. Yet following this they had the highest rates in the western world, and above us who didn’t.
Graham wrote:
Is that really true for the 90+? I have no data, but it would surprise me – at least if it were only a small-ish minority.
Dunno about the UK, but in Germany most of the frail population that needs care is actually living at home and cared for by relatives, I think the ratio was about 4 to 1 (home care vs care home), with roughly 4 million at home and 1 million in care homes.
Airborne_Again wrote:
But was that because of a lockdown or a very early border closure? I’m pretty sure it is the latter. No other country has managed to eliminate the virus using lockdowns.
I’m pretty sure, it’s both. Obviously you need border control to avoid new infection starters getting in but you also need internal contact avoidance to reduce spreading within the area. As always said: “Lockdown” refers to to people not getting in touch with each other no matter if they do it because they are simply clever and social enough to do the right things or because there have been strict government lockdown measures.
South Korea has actually been pretty good at it so did Taiwan and Vietnam.
Dubai might be a very good example on how lockdowns actually are of great help: They have been extremely effective in managing the first wave when they implemented a strict lockdown (that was as all rules in UAE actually enforced) but are now loosing on the second wave being to slow implementing a similar lockdown.
Peter wrote:
I am not sure about lockdowns saving lives overall. They just slow the spread of the epidemic so the health service remains within capacity.
Which is what saves lives, particularly of younger people who need to be hospitalised. The death toll in the UK is only 90,000 because the health service hasn’t become totally overwhelmed; cases that need hospital treatment, but are younger people and with hospital treatment have a good prognosis, have been able to happen. If the UK had just gone “yolo” (like it almost did at the start), then the hospitals would be overwhelmed and most people who needed hospital treatment would end up being turned away and would have to take their chances at home without any medical care. Many of the “denied hospital because it’s full” cases would die, and the average age of the deaths would be much lower.
One big factor between cultures is obesity. Speak to anyone working on a hospital here and they will tell you that most of the people on the CV19 wards are huge. The photos and the news footage confirm this. In Taiwan, Vietnam, etc, this obesity epidemic has not [yet] happened. Same as the (previously mentioned) difference between UK NHS staff death rates and German hospital staff death rates; the UK staff tends to be obese whereas the German staff (as reported by a German doctor) is largely East European immigrants who haven’t got there yet.
