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 Originally Posted by OngBonga
Ok, but were any of them saying "but whatever you do, don't start with plan A and then bail onto plan B"? Or was he getting advice saying "plan A isn't working, let's try plan B"? Advise evolves, one person might advise on thing one day and another thing the next day, as the situation develops. And even still, so long as those who make the decision are doing so in good faith, for me it's forgivable. If not for you, fair enough.
I wasn't there obv so I don't know what exactly was being said. But afaik, the problem wasn't just that they went from A to B, it's that a) it took them too long to do it; and b) they're still not fully prepared to implement B properly.
The impression I have from Times and FT articles is both A and B were laid out to the ones who attended the COBRA meetings. Whitty early in March was clearly insinuating we had taken a Plan A approach when he used terms like herd immunity in interviews, an impression which was reinforced in mid March as there weren't any steps being taken to social distance/lockdown.
The ICL study came out about this time and predicted a huge number of deaths, which seemed to scare them out of Plan A. So, they did begin talking about lockdown measures around this time in mid-March, but it was always referred to as some hypothetical time off in the future. So they clearly had a shift to Plan B in mind but hadn't gone over to it yet. Then, as I'm sure you remember, they eventually went into lockdown over the next ten or so days. It's this delay that the Plan B'ers are saying was the biggest mistake. These experts said if you're going to go with Plan B, then every day counts and every day you wait costs lives.
Even still, we're just now starting to get into a proper version of Plan B, which includes test-trace-isolate (TTI), something places like GER, SKO, GRE all had ready to go from the beginning. That's two full months it's taken us to get that set up. Not good. Now imagine if they'd locked down a week sooner, and had not had a big spike in cases and not had to worry so much about PPE and building Nightingale hospitals because who knew how bad it was going to get. So they had to focus their energy on that instead of having an earlier lockdown where they could have kept cases low, and instead focussed on setting up TTI.
I mean, there are people who considered all these things in advance. You say it's unprecedented, but that's not entirely true, at least not in the general sense. They've had models for how infectious diseases behave, and how to deal with pandemics for a long time.
One argument against an early lockdown is it hurts the economy. Well, we ended up having to be in full lockdown for 8 weeks, and are only now just easing out of it, and possibly too early because we don't have adequate TTI yet. Meanwhile other places have had things under control earlier and so their lockdowns lasted less time than ours.
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