Life in Lockdown — 20th May. Hospital admissions here are now…
By: Kev Jackson
Tags: Pandemic, UK, Covid 19, Diary

Hospital admissions here are now steadily moving downwards day after day. There is a corresponding drop in the deaths although with the way these are reported the rolling average seems to be the way to show the trend more effectively.

Testing today has shot-up to a reported 177k tests today — which is making progress towards the latest testing target of 200k per day by June 1st.

The other good news is that the number of patients in hospital is now below 10,000. We’re just about getting there, but with the number of deaths from this disease approaching 40,000 it has no doubt been managed poorly from the start.

My thoughts on the whole mess

I’ve tended to just try to read and digest the information. However I’ve seen enough now to know that there’s a lot of spin now from the government about the start of this crisis.

I have sympathy for the problems they’ve had with global supply chain problems (who knew that if you off-shore all manufacturing to China that when China has an issue you would have issues getting supplies??). But we could all see this coming from February. Certainly in March there should have been some stricter measures.

Leaving the pubs, bars and places where people gather open that additional week has obviously had a massive effect on the spread of the virus. The Liverpool vs Athletico Madrid game should not have happened, the Cheltenham races should not have gone ahead.

I get that I’m looking back with hindsight and it’s oh so easy to be a critic. But I think these kinds of choices were just wrong. I believe (I don’t know as I don’t have evidence), that the behavioural modellers assumed that the population simply wouldn’t obey the rules as effectively or for as long as we’ve been willing to.

As such the decision on when to restrict liberties was pushed back until they couldn’t any longer — based on the idea that people simply wouldn’t be able to stick to the rules.

There is a really nasty calculus going on here — is the damage to education, mental health and real health caused by the lockdown balanced out by the increase in Covid-19 deaths if you don’t implement lockdown for another week? This is essentially the calculation that someone was tasked with before the lockdown and now has to do the same, as the lockdown eases.

The single decision on keeping things open as long as possible because the models assumed many more people would not comply was the reason why the virus spread to so many people — when the rate of growth is exponential every single day counts and that is what is most damaging. I think this is the decision that they got wrong. I pretty much think most of the other decisions were not that bad.

The one decision that seems to be based entirely on a model rather than on some kind of data, was the one big (enormous) mistake the UK government has made. The other problems are consequences of austerity measures over the last decade and, planning for pandemic flu (not a SARS-like virus — Asian countries planned for SARS-like viruses, Europe and US had planned for flu, the results are pretty obvious).

Other problems are caused by demographics, poor diet and general health of the UK population (we’re a nation of fatties according to the NHS stats)