CORONAVIRUS PANIC WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE

[OngBonga]

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.

It's likely this is fair and true. But their actions can still be in good faith, the advice they were getting could have been ambiguous enough for them to think they were doing the right thing.

That we were even talking about "herd immunity" in the early stages shows how unprepared we were. It was a serious option at the time, considered to be viable. It was only when it became clear the NHS would not be able to cope that we changed course. The shift to plan B was far from ideal, but idk how you can expect it to be perfect. You're expecting those in charge to balance health, economics and politics. Under normal circumstances, that's their job. But these are not normal circumstances.

The transition from plan A to B was probably too long. Ten days to implement a lockdown is a long time. But you haven't once even acknowledged the point I made about India doing it in four hours. Clearly doing it immediately is worse than doing it in stages. I agree doing it in ten days is too much, but how are we supposed to know this? It's obvious four hours is not enough.

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.

Of course they plan for this, but this is the first time such plans have been put into action.

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.

You're still citing mistakes that can be made in good faith, ie forgivable mistakes.

I do strongly suspect they're being influenced by big business to open up and/or never to have closed, if that makes you feel better.

Why would it make me feel better? I'd rather them be incompetent. Bur it's this kind of thing that isn't forgivable. This is corruption.

[Poopadoop]

It's likely this is fair and true. But their actions can still be in good faith, the advice they were getting could have been ambiguous enough for them to think they were doing the right thing.

It's a subtle but important point that the advice from SAGE wasn't ambiguous, it was conflicting. It said you can either do A or do B. Once you start doing A, it's too late to do B effectively. So you've got to make a decision and be prepared to face the consequences.

The best estimates around early Feb. were that the case fatality rate was about 1%, and that 60% or more needed to be infected in order to achieve herd immunity. So Plan A assumed something like 400k deaths in the UK. That's a pretty fucking stark choice to be considering. And it would have been clear right away the NHS was not going to be able to cope with that. Right then and there they should have been saying "what's Plan B and how do we implement it?"

As it happens (according to the Times story) the official gov't pandemic response plan to an infectious disease was a fully developed and detailed Plan B. IOW, years ago a group of experts had already worked out how to do it and what needed to be done and when, and had written it down. So there was a step-by-step Plan B ready to be implemented, and they chose not to.

But ok fine, a lot of countries made that mistake too, they didn't have their Plan B ready, or they hesitated because it would have meant a big disruption. A lot of the ones that were even going with Plan B from the start, started it too late. We're not alone in that.

The thing is, once we decided we weren't prepared to stick to Plan A and instead needed to get to Plan B, we needed to fucking get to Plan B pronto. Not in some hypothetical time in the future, or a couple of weeks, or ten days, but sooner because every day counts.

And certainly once they decided they were going to Plan B they had to make it clear to everyone this was going to be happening very soon, within days, as soon as practical. That's kinda the whole point of Plan B; you have to lock the stable door before the horses get out.

Their problem was they based their actions on wishful thinking. They seemed to have it in their heads that this would somehow not hit us like it was hitting ITA and SPA at the time. There was no scientist telling them that, they just based it on what they were hoping would be true.