‘We didn’t need lockdown’

comment by it'sonlyagame - Newcastle till I’m dismembered (U6426)
posted 1 hour, 45 minutes ago
Hi there, Rosso. Those are two completely separate, even opposite issues though.

I was talking about the timing for the people of the UK, not the government.
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IOAG

Although I think a strong proportion of the UK public would probably tell you that they had no real interest in people or politicians making any sort of statement about sovereignty or rebirth, or the country recasting its cultural identity, inwardly or outwardly.

Most people either didn’t want it to happen at all and would have happily reversed the whole thing or didn’t really care whether it happened or not. A proportion of the remainder, of course, felt differently and strongly about reshaping the future.

comment by it'sonlyagame - Newcastle till I’m dismembered (U6426)
posted 5 hours, 57 minutes ago
@ Two Balls, One Saka (U19684)

Once again, there are just far too many factors involved. You say it's scalable, but it really, really isn't, not even remotely.

I know what you said about population density, but we are talking different orders of magnitude here:

In terms of population density, we're talking over 280/km2 in the UK, vs 3 in Oz and 18 in NZ.

In terms of highly populated urban areas, England alone has 25 areas with more than half a million inhabitants.
Australia has six.
NZ has only one, two at a push (the Wellington area is borderline.

There are a host of other demographic factors involved, including average age, family size, house size (sq. m per inhabitant), breakdown by income class, and those are just a very few off the top of my head.

There are of course the differences in climate that you've stated. Auckland, New Zealand's main conurbation, has a subtropical climate, which isn't really comparable to anywhere in Blighty.

And it's not as simple as their all being islands either. Remoteness is a big factor that has a huge impact on travel, especially when you think about short breaks to potential hotspots.



The main factor that I do imagine makes a big difference is the strictness of the lockdowns.

My sister in HK had to isolate in a hotel room for three whole weeks and have 9 PCR tests before she was allowed back home after visiting Spain - and that was last summer, not during the harshest period of lockdowns.

HK already had a system in place since the SARS outbreak. Right from the beginning of Covid, there was a publicly accessible website mapping every single Covid case down to the building in which it had been recorded. Once a case was diagnosed, the entire building was put in lockdown, contact tracing began immediately and potential close contacts were tested immediately.

HK now is beginning to relax measures to allow a more controlled spread, but as of today, they have still had only 2,200 cases and 28 deaths per million, in a territory with a population density of more than 6,000 people per km sq.



At the end of the day, the only way I think we can approach more accurate answers regarding the best response in these situations will require highly complicated multivariate analyses, and even then the results will have to be applied in view of all those different social, cultural, demographic, geographic, legal and heavens knows what other categories of variables.
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Couldn’t agree more.

comment by it'sonlyagame - Newcastle till I’m dismembered (U6426)
posted 2 hours, 42 minutes ago
It might be worth casting our minds back to those days.

China's initial lockdowns in Wuhan were viewed as savagely undemocratic and heavily criticised across the west. Every western government initially resisted declaring what still felt like something out of a dystopian film. For quite some time, even travel bans were considered out of the question.

Germany responded furiously when Trump closed the US down to EU flights but continued to allow them from the UK.

Given the souring of relations with the EU, that must have very much been felt like a victory in Downing Street.

The temptation of cozying up to the US and sticking a middle finger up at the EU must have been too much to resist, more so considering that it allowed the government to paint it as a Brexit victory. In addition, failing to align with the U.S. would have likely infuriated Trump and been seen as a huge diplomatic blunder.

Italy only closed down when they hit 7,000 cases and it was clear that it was spiralling out of control. Most governments at that point were still publicly refusing to consider lockdowns, and every major continental nation at that point had more cases than the UK.

Britain could have made any of a number of decisions, but given their international relations, I doubt that anyone in the government thought it made any political sense to be the first Western nation to go down the Chinese route. Herd immunity probably seemed like the best political option if they intended to set themselves apart from the EU.

Which brings me back to what I said before: imo, it was still very much the mark of an incompetent leader to put politics ahead of science at that point.
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A good synopsis of the timelines.

I still think Johnson's a total turnip (TT) though.

IOAG

Good comments again. I agree on some of it but not all.

I remember quite well just how badly Johnson was getting it wrong after having plenty of time to know better. The going around hospitals without a mask for publicity, failure to put in any measures at all when the experts had for several months by that point provided contrary advice. (With other nations having either acted or in serious trouble)

The UK had chances to mitigate a lot of the problems it caused itself but the government waited until it had absolutely no choice to act rather than listening to the experts or being proactive.

Well publicised was also the governments own pandemic studies which were ignored for years leading up to the actual pandemic.

In the end costs both financial and medical were worse due to these delays and many even on this forum had called out the response not just weeks but months before proper action was taken.

The eventual lock down was also so half arrised in crucial areas. No real testing or tracing, no border testing, no real quarantine beyond a faith based system, the leaders and their cronies galavanting to castles for eyetests and apparently regularly partying. It got taken just a tiny bit more seriously for a brief period after Johnson ended up in hospital FFS. Then it was back to opening up again, eat out to spread it about etc etc then when there were again loads of unnecessary deaths, a healthcare system and its staff on its absolute knees another lock down.

The government acted (failed to) in the way it usually does. They remind me of someone who doesn't bother servicing their own car, they brag about saving £100 a year as the car limps on barely making it up hills, then when the car inevitably entirely fails and is hugely expensive to repair they and their blind support can't grasp what's happened. That analogy is far too kind though, hundreds of thousands of people die and the quality of life for millions more is ruined by their moral and economic incompetence.

Sorry Saka, I missed that comment.

I agree on everything you said there, I don't know if I appeared to be arguing the contrary. What I meant was that Johnson is such an incompetent, crap leader that I'm pretty sure that his decision-making and public stance regarding the pandemic, at least in the early days, was largely related to a wish to position the UK against the EU and aligned with the US, and that that in turn was also related to trying too hard to make a point about Brexit.

not to be pedantic but Auckland most certainly does not have a sub-tropical climate.

it has an oceanic climate, similar to much of the UK.

the only difference is the sub classification under oceanic climate.

Auckland is classified as being semi sub tropical and temperate. So to say it most certainly doesn't is pretty daft.

comment by it'sonlyagame - Newcastle till I’m dismembered (U6426)
posted 1 week, 1 day ago
Sorry Saka, I missed that comment.

I agree on everything you said there, I don't know if I appeared to be arguing the contrary. What I meant was that Johnson is such an incompetent, crap leader that I'm pretty sure that his decision-making and public stance regarding the pandemic, at least in the early days, was largely related to a wish to position the UK against the EU and aligned with the US, and that that in turn was also related to trying too hard to make a point about Brexit.

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We’ll show those euros by doing it our way and proving them wrong? Like that? Possibly but I think more that they underestimated how quick and severe it was and were reluctant to pretty much shut everything down.

It is/was one hell of a decision for each leader. Really big decision and huge effect right or wrong; either way there was going to be considerable consequences. All made in what? A month or two? I know that sounds like a long time but it’s not deciding what to have in your sandwich.