The FT has reported this morning that:
The planned reopening of the economy, the Budget's renewed support for workers and businesses, and the rapid vaccine rollout have boosted UK consumer confidence to the highest level since before the first lockdown last March, fuelling hopes of a spending rebound.
It is said that the fool and their money are easily parted, and I cannot help but think that there is a great deal of foolishness in the mood of the nation at present. The only comfort in that is that the so-called Covid bounce for the government may be as misplaced.
To be blunt, I very much doubt that we are going to see the summer that so many (me included, if I am completely honest) would like to look forward to.
Europe is already heading into third wave Covid lockdowns. The NHS is actively preparing for the same to happen here, before the summer.
The widespread assumption that the Covid pandemic us over as far as the UK is concerned could well be wrong. For a start, we now face a different pandemic from that which we faced last year : the virus has mutated.
And in the face of that England (but not Wales and Scotland, where vaccination has been considerably better managed) faces the nightmare scenario of having a half vaccinated, and so still intensely vulnerable, population in which the opportunity for the rampant spread of vaccine immune variants is high.
We know such spread is possible. Healthcare is collapsing in Brazil right now.
We also know that the AZ vaccine offers little protection against variants; Pfizer maybe a bit more, and Moderna has yet to appear on the scene.
And it is now apparent that in the politically motivated rush for single jabs which do not provide vaccination, whatever politicians might claim, but which are simply the first dose of a course that might do so, there has already been gross mismanagement because it is now becoming apparent that sufficient vaccine to guarantee the delivery of the absolutely essential second doses may not have been held back.
In the meantime cases are rising, most especially amongst the young. There are arguments to be had about the testing: lateral flow tests are notoriously unreliable. But the problem is that this was also the pattern last September.
In fact, the apparent euphoria of this moment feels rather like last August, which was very obviously a false period of hope when seen in retrospect. So too might this moment be just that. If cases rise, vaccines are denied, second doses do not happen on time, and the progression that the NHS fears towards another outbreak occurs rather than the virus following the government's roadmap, then we are in deep trouble. And this moment of optimism will be shown to have been deeply misplaced.
I could be wrong about this, of course. I would like to be. But my instincts tell me that this mood of optimism in the country is misplaced.
This also suggests something else. That is that the sense of disappointment that might follow the crushing of hope that the government has unwisely created will be intense. It might even turn to anger. We may not be in for the summer we hoped for, but that does not mean it may not be eventful, in all the wrong ways.
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As you rightly say, this government has form in catastrophic bad management. I have used my own case study on HMG Covid response a couple of times so far in training sessions to demonstrate how failures in multiple areas can escalate a nasty problem into a disaster.
A delicious commentary on this is a chapter in the Northcote Parkinson book ( he of Parkinson’s law), In-laws and Outlaws where a company discovers an executive who is consistently wrong on everything. He is protected at all costs as the company knows that they should always do the exact opposite of what he proposes.
Brilliant!
Our current leaders fit this bill to a T.
That being the case, we can look forward to every effort from the govt to shift the blame elsewhere. A whole summer of plus ca change then.
I said last summer that when this is over, the NHS would get the blame. Remember *NHS test and trace* (pretty bad, and not much to do with the NHS)
The vaccine roll-out has been largely a success, of a kind, and Scotland and Wales have got there faster, but their population is much smaller than England and the population-density as well: But that success is being claimed by govt.
Check the growing clamour over the DNR “scandal” that is being thrashed through the media. And also there is a blame-rollout on the spread of the virus within hospitals.
I mentioned a while ago that the disease sweeping through the old, poor and sick would not exactly cause the govt any sleepless nights.
Meanwhile, we not have legislation where the govt can effectively make people stay at home, and legislation where the govt can prohibit protest. Along with that the police can seemingly assault people using that legislation….
I should have moved to Spain when I had the chance..
Unfortunately agree. I’ve been applying the “Sign Test” (its easy) to Covid case data over the 22 Welsh unitary authorities to figure out how well Covid case data is falling. Wales Online lists case number for “today and yesterday” in an easy format sourced from GOV.UK [1].
For a couple of months, and until the last week, the number of cases down (-ve) has exceeded the ups (+ve) for each of the 22 regions i.e. its falling. This week the number of up cases has consistently exceeded the down number. Thus small amount of opening up (schools etc) has brought R above 1, its been a swift upturn.
Being vaccinated may prevent serious illness whilst in lockdown, but out of lockdown there will be many who are partially or not immune.
I agree I can’t see this summer being like the last and definitely not “back to normal”.
Is this some sick joke, play on words, by Johnson confounding the words ‘data’ and ‘date’ – “We will be led by the dat*”
[1] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
Thanks
Having a 3 week gap and vaccinating much more people appears to have been a success don’t you think? And the rollout has been impressive. I’ve had my first jab and the whole process was incredibly efficient. So our procurement and rollout of the vaccine has been impressive. And yes mutations will appear and science is working overtime to try and keep pace as it does with the flu and its many variants. The young have paid an incredible price and this just cannot continue. There has been many more suicides than covid deaths (0) at my daughters university and this is the tip of the iceberg I’m sure. So if we do keep hospitalisations under control and by the summer the adult population in its entirety is vaccinated, it seems obvious that the most restrictive measures should involve international travel. We can see the shambolic mess the EU nations are in re the vaccine and it makes no sense to open up popular holiday destinations etc as “importing” more cases seems the biggest manageable risk on the horizon.
I don’t agree with this
But I will let one person say it
The most important word in the comment by that other Andrew (greetings) is a very big “if”.
(We don’t have a three week gap. Three weeks ago (24 February) 18.6 million people had received their first dose – which is a triumph, of course, and many will benefit. But we know many of the more vulnerable groups will only show a good response after the second dose. At present (17 March) fewer than 2 million people have had their second dose, which is about the number who’d had a first dose about 12 weeks ago. They’ve been left vulnerable for another 2 months. The old and the vulnerable have paid a terrible price too.)
It is a sad fact that suicide is one of the leading causes of death people in their 20s, before heart disease or cancer or dementia get them in later life. Some interesting data here. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/causesofdeathover100years/2017-09-18 and https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/articles/leadingcausesofdeathuk/2001to2018
We had very low cases, hospitalisations and deaths over the summer. They all started to tick up in late August/early September, very slowly at first but ever faster, as is the way with exponential increase. The news has recently reported the 27,000 or so excess deaths from unlocking in early December and delaying the third lockdown until early January. That is tragic, but it is a gross underestimate of the unnecessary deaths, by a factor of about two probably. The groundwork was laid by the failure to lock down in September and October. Thankfully they are lower now, but we had more than 400 COVID deaths each day, every day, for the best part of four months. It could have been nipped in the bud, but instead deaths went from 41,000 on 1 September to nearly 48,000 on 1 November, to 77,000 on 1 January, and 124,000 on 1 March.
The government made the same mistake *three* times, delaying by at least a week in March 2020, at least a month and perhaps two in the autumn, and another month in the winter. Each delay caused unnecessary deaths. The government already has much blood on its hands, and I have every expectation they will fail to lock down quickly enough it we need it again.
Thanks
You have more patience than me
“The government made the same mistake *three* times, delaying by at least a week in March 2020, at least a month and perhaps two in the autumn, and another month in the winter. Each delay caused unnecessary deaths”
Government have thousands of persons to advise them.
They have experts on everything available to advise them.
Well over a hundred thousand, mainly old, sick and disabled, have died from [being infected by] this virus.
That’s well over a hundred thousand of the expensive to maintain, and unproductive.
You can see where I’m going with this, I hope?
Think the unthinkable.
Adrian Chiles, Radio 5 Live, today assembled a group of ‘commentators’ whose sole purpose seemed to be to sneer at the incompetence of the vaccine policy of the EU, and trumpet an exaggerated British triumph. For the avoidance of doubt, Britain has over 125,000 deaths from Covid-19; one of the highest per capita death rates in the whole world. It ill behoves the British, the BBC or anyone to trumpet anything we are doing as a ‘success’. The reality is that we have failed badly in Britain, a failure that was years in the making, and instead of seeking redemption for failure (and the humility that goes with it), our politicians are now ignobly failing to rise above our unearned vainglory and hubris, in order to encourage a demeaning preference for the legalism of contractual priorities – in a world pandemic; a pandemic which requires acknowledgment of the fundamental truth that ‘none are safe until all are safe’ (a truth I think remarked by two very senior Pfizer executives a few weeks ago).
There is no room for humility in Britain, of course; which tells you a great deal – about us.
Out of interest, where did you find/read about the increasing rates? I don’t trust what the mainstream media are saying so, if there is a better, more reliable source of Covid information, it would be useful to have it.
Thanks,
Craig
An epidemiologist on Twitter showed the uptick in those under 24 and under 18
Craig it’s all here https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk and you can drill down to local levels.
You can really go-to-town as it has its own API (Application Programming Interface, Python, Java and R) https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/developers-guide
Thanks, both
This has been clear for many weeks now and is confirmed by the inflexion and rising numbers across Europe never mind the Southern Hemisphere which leads us by a season. The next wave will potentially be bigger and will see many more young people facing Covid disease as the elderly did in the first wave.
The U.K. government has done everything to ENCOURAGE the spread with their still insane but now unacknowledged plan for herd immunity through the culling of these who can’t naturally resist infection.
The Road Map to nowhere and the horn blowing of stealing a March on the EU as far vaccinations clearly designed to encourage the flouting of restrictions, clearly on display for the last two weekends show that the populace has taken these flawed messages as the all-clear clarion.
Bozo and his minders are now leading us to 200k avoidable Excess Deaths – that’s 3 times as many as Winnie the Poo allowed with the blitz in WW2.
The appearance by dewy eyed Cummings claiming his high command of all that has befallen the U.K. showed us the true sociopathic megalomaniacs who are in the driving seats – I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch his full performance yet – it was a calculated act, but will force myself,to understand their Narrative Controls a bit more.
The most murderous is the efforts to stop the Sputnik and Sinovacs being distributed globally.
It is clearly a crime against humanity and genocide by the same old Imperialists and their psychopathic CEO’s and Aristos. Hence they need many deaths at home as cover.
Scotland has more people testing positive, per 100,000, than the rest of the UK, @73.4 per 100,000
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases
But the elderly are getting double doses
Broadly agree Richard. Since day one, it’s been run as a political campaign, every flag bedecked ‘press conference’ led by a self congratulating politican – wholely inappropriate for the daily management of a public health emergency.
Bizarrely, the more deaths due to mismanagement, the more relief when we finally emerge, and the more the credit govt will be given.
There must be a continuing campaign, to hammer home in more and more specific detail, the explicit decisions to kill more people – the ‘Black September’ rejection of the science, and the two other delays, in March and December – at least 50,000 avoidable deaths.
And as you say – despite the vaccines, and the ‘data not dates’ they are largely rerunning last year’s scenario. Baby Sunak still doesn’t understand, you cant open the economy unless youve suppressed the virus – see China, S Korea, Tawan, Aus, NZ etc etc.
I completely agree with Richard about the likelihood of another wave. Even though the sun is shining and I find myself instinctively believing that all will be fine in a month or two.
I still disagree with him and I think that giving more people one dose was the better strategy. It occurred to me that the numbers might give a clue to which of us has been right (all from the Government site coronavirus.data.gov.uk).
Looking first at deaths
Lockdown 1, deaths only started to decline after 19/04/20 and fell at a rate of 24.66% per week over the next 2 months
Lockdown 2, deaths never declined (why? too short? variant?)
Lockdown 3, deaths only started to decline after 28/01/21 and have fallen at a rate of 29.78% per week up to yesterday.
Looking at new cases, you have to be careful, because the more tests you do, the more new cases you will find. The number of tests per day nearly doubled from March 8th. I have therefore looked at percentage of tests positive.
Lockdown 1, percentage of tests positive declined at 25.45% per week
Lockdown 2, the rate was only 14.03%
Lockdown 3, the rate so far has been 30.14%.
The clearest conclusion is that lockdown works. After a lag, it reduces new cases and deaths. I suspect that more detailed analysis would show that easing lockdown to mitigate the hardship has almost always failed.
It is less clear whether vaccination has made a difference. Overall, despite variants, the rates of decline have been slightly higher than in Lockdown 1. However, if vaccinating vulnerable groups had a large beneficial effect, you would expect deaths to fall faster than new cases. Does this mean Richard is right? Or does it mean that vaccination of front line workers had a disproportionate benefit? Or is it because the extra tests are rapid flow tests with about a 50% false negative rate. If the actual percentage of new cases is nearly double the figure reported, it could mean that the rate of decline is slower than we think.
However you measure new cases, the numbers are starting to plateau, which makes me as gloomy as Richard.
Vaccination seems to have had less impact than I would have hoped, though I am still not convinced that 2 doses to fewer people would have been any more successful.