England's Road Map to Normality
So, the people of England are lucky to have a roadmap out of lockdown, taking us from late February 2021 to mid-summer and potential release from somewhat draconian restrictions (the UK was recently assessed as having the third harshest restrictions, Venezuela & Lebanon being harsher than the UK: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-government-response-tracker).
What’s interesting is that the government appears to have learned from previous failures both in implementing and releasing restrictions. In March 2020 the government was panicked into lockdown having had poor scientific advice and then, as you’d expect, was too slow releasing restrictions in the spring. Then came the farcical autumn policies sending schools and universities back just at the beginning of the respiratory infection season and trying to apply regional suppression (the famous Tier system), which was a shambolic failure in England, but appears to still be a favourite in Scotland.
Having parked the science in December 2020 in order to allow a bit of Christmas, as a more infectious variant of Covid was rapidly spreading through the country (Sod’s Law), hospitalisations rocketed leading to another full lockdown with a review date set for the 22nd February 2021. Rather fortunately for the government, vaccinations started in late December and, together with the lockdown, have had a dramatic impact on hospitalisations and deaths. As of late February 2021 all of the elderly vulnerable, who made up the vast proportion of deaths, have had first dose vaccinations made available and the programme is working through the next vulnerable groups. The government must get some credit for the programme for vaccination; however, the vaccine development & production success was down to competent people outside of government (thank god) but with funding from the government. The UK’s vaccine procurement programme was hugely successful (so far). The common theme here is to make government money available.
In the run up to the 22nd February 2021 lockdown review, the modellers (as you’d expect) attempt to factor in all the elements and it appears, based on the recently published papers, make conservative assumptions, which the government turned into the roadmap out of lockdown. As it was back in March 2020, the key metric is hospitalisations and ICU requirement. The roadmap isn’t based on any rocket science. It removes some restrictions and then waits to see how hospitalisations change before any more restrictions can be removed. The government made a bit of a faux pas by saying that the dates in the roadmap, through March, April and May won’t change (but they could get pushed back further). I suspect this is a function of the government’s learning curve in that it doesn’t want to have to do earlier reviews because of the burden; however, if infections are dramatically reduced through vaccination, there is a good chance of bringing forward the release dates. Fingers crossed.
At the time of writing the devolved governments hadn’t confirmed their roadmaps but politics being politics, they won’t be identical to England’s. There’s indications the Scottish government wants to keep suppression front and centre, as before.
Why Are The UK’s Covid Metrics So Bad?
Because the government decided not to properly protect the vulnerable, total lockdowns are the only way of suppressing infections in order “to protect the NHS” in the hope of saving lives. The former happened, the latter didn’t as the 120,000+ Covid deaths sadly demonstrate. The government’s suppression policies failed dismally in protecting life or in protecting the mental health & well-being of the population, whilst destroying huge amounts of value and costing the government up to £400 Billion. But the lockdowns just about protected the NHS for a total bill (borrowing & destroyed value) of approximately £1.5 Trillion. It’s a tragic and avoidable failure. Instead of sending shielding letters to the 2-3 million people identified as vulnerable, the government could have proactively invested in robust infection control programmes for the vulnerable, thereby significantly reducing the number of hospitalisations, plus ICU burden. The cost of doing this is negligible compared with the massive costs of lockdowns. Had this been done, the excess death rates would have been minimal and the NHS able to cope with what in effect would be a bad flu year for the non-vulnerable population. The government’s approach of sending shielding letters, as a means of protecting vulnerable people, is simply laughable. Plus, failing to properly support the blatantly obvious care home sector is possibly criminal.
This explains the large number of unnecessary deaths in the UK.
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