I watched much of the PM's press conference on Covid passports, or not, and mass testing, or not, yesterday.
The uncertainty within that sentence is deliberate. Apart from the fact that the reopenings planned for April 12 will happen I learned little from what was actually said, but much more from what was not said.
I think there is good reason for that. The only impression I got from this session was that the government is now beginning to panic. We were promised that vaccines would deliver post-Covid freedom. Now it seems that they do not think that. Testing is instead the new pathway to something else that is much less optimistic.
That something else seems to involve a continuing acceptance of coronavirus. There is no elimination strategy of any sort now apparent. The end of the impact of the pandemic is no longer anticipated. The idea that this might be over has gone. Instead the only goal is to keep the NHS functioning.
The aim is no bigger than that. It is simply containment. In other words, we as individuals and the risks from Covid that we face are the bargaining chips in an equation that is all the government thinks it has left available to it because despite all the bravado no strategy, including vaccination, has yet worked.
That this new containment strategy is based on desperation is indicated by the fact that it is based on lateral flow tests that are not licenced for the negative testing role they are being given, and for which they are not well suited because of their well known false negative rate. Will that really work then? And will people want to partake? And why will they unless there is compulsion from an enforced use of an app based on those tests?
Given that it is thought that only one in four people with Covid symptoms are currently thought to ask for a test the chance of a serious uptake on this new scheme which is targeted at those without symptoms seems low, especially with such poor support being made available for those required to isolate. The government must know that.
In that case it seems like the government is running around like a headless chicken. It knows that the implied promises made in February cannot be delivered now. They know that this crisis is not over. The new message is emerging. That is that we must live with this.
Worse though, I think that the government has set itself up to fail again. It seems certain that SAGE does too. They forecast another wave of Covid in July and August at least as serious as that we have just been through. They could be wrong, of course. But logic is on their side.
Ending lock down, as planned, releases the chance for the virus to spread. The government's logic is that it can be contained below a fixed level. Presume that is a straight line across a graph. The difficulty for them is that this virus grows exponentially. And exponential growth is explosive, and too late to control when it comes apparent, which is forecast for about late June, with a peak in July and August.
No lateral flow testing will prevent that. It seems like SAGE does not expect that vaccines will either. The moment of liberation that they have supplied will be gone at that point. The euphoria could easily become despair as another lockdown is required at the height of summer. I think the government knows that now. And it us clueless about what to do. So, as ever, it is buying time with another meaningless plan that only profits its friends.
Can Johnson survive another lockdown?
When will investment in elimination become the demand?
When too will the realisation that changed behaviour is inevitably required going to be accepted?
And what does the realisation that there is, after all, an externality that imposes a constraint on us going to mean for an entire political philosophy built on the idea that this is unacceptable?
This crisis is far from over as yet. And one day we might even begin to address it in the UK.
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Agreed.
In the meantime, they will I feel look for more scapegoats or other titbits to divert our attention.
It seems to me that a Zero Covid or maximum suppression strategy as proposed by the Indie Sage and practiced by by countries such as South Korea and New Zealand is the only effective approach but sadly one this government has arrogantly set its face against. It has not been argued for by the opposition which is another abdication of responsibility by Starmer and his acolytes. Add to this the escalating deleterious effects of the awful Brexit deal that has been negotiated (note the increasing violence in Northern Ireland), and growing and militant opposition to this governments authoritarian domestic policy – the next few years looks increasingly volatile.
If your car is on a hill it doesn’t matter how slowly it is rolling it will get faster and faster….. and it will end in tears. Either park it on the flat or apply the handbrake. Now, we ARE on a hill – that is a fact, to wish otherwise is fanciful – but the policy of releasing the handbrake whenever the speed is sufficiently low is nuts…… because we know it will just speed up again. We must get to flat ground and that means complete elimination either via vaccination or test/trace/isolate (done properly). There are only two stable equilibria – elimination or “let it rip”. “Let it rip” is unacceptable so we MUST eliminate.
On the political side I detect real restlessness among the young and talk of vaccine passports has really accelerated this. “We have been locked up for a year to save you oldies. You get vaccinated first and now want preferential rights to get out and about! You must be joking.” I presume Vaccine Passports will only be brought in once everyone has had the opportunity to be vaccinated but if not, it will be explosive……. and in any case all the talk about it is making the young feel that everything is stacked against them even more.
If we do need tighter restrictions later this year I doubt there will be consent to this from the young and that will be a problem…… and the result of poor policy making from the start.
Clive, If you are facing downhill, it may also be a good idea to position the front tires toward the curb just in case the handbrake fails for some reason. This requires some foresight, of course, something this government seems to be devoid of.
The government has already locked down too slowly three times, and unlocked too early at least once.
Their unfailingly optimistic approach (that is, the opposite of precautionary or cautious) is based on a number of false or mistaken premises. That people who have the disease once won’t get it again. That one vaccine shot will necessarily stop a person getting infected, or becoming ill, or spreading the disease to others. That the tests are always accurate (ignoring both false negatives, and falsepositives which become important when prevalence is low, and the demonstrated cross-contamination problems at the labs). That people will take tests and isolate when they can’t afford to lose their income for several weeks. That infection in children won’t cause them harm or spread to others. The strategy still focuses on reducing hospitalisations and deaths to acceptable levels (not to zero) and ignores the long term debilitating effects of long COVID for tens possibly hundreds of thousands of people. And the possibility of further variants might develop that could circumvent the vaccines.
Rather than wasting time on a divisive “pass law”, they should be focusing on getting the test, track, trace, isolate system working properly, because that is the best weapon we have to stop the disease in its tracks and keep it under control.
Agreed, entirely
Spot on Andrew. Unfortunately quite a bit of what you say was pointed out months ago and repeatedly over the course of the past year and they took no notice then and are taking no notice now.
Does anyone remember Tomas Pueyo (a non-expert in health) who made a series of “stunning interventions” which criticised the UK position and forecast that even a one day delay in lockdown would lead to a huge increase in cases. This was back in March 10th 2020.
An interesting review here: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/covid-19-blog/what-does-covid-19-mean-expertise-case-tomas-pueyo
I absolutely remember Pueyo’s article, although not the Channel 4 News programme. Like him I’m not an expert epidemiologist or public health scientist, but I can look at data and draw reasonable inferences. It absolutely tipped me over from “what is all this fuss about” and “why are people bothering to wear masks” to “OMG, this could well be it, we have to act now, just look at Italy, the government don’t have a clue, they are not doing enough quickly enough, this is going to be a disaster”. I started working from home (and encouraging others to do the same) soon after I saw it.
The government may not be taking any notice, but frankly they lie to us so often that I don’t really care very much what they say any longer. I do care very much when their idiocy puts peoples’ health and lives at risk.
🙂
We need to have an effective border control policy that requires everyone who enters this island to quarantine, as in New Zealand.
The recent hotspot graphic for the UK is ominous. It seems to confirm that there are established reservoirs of Covid in northern areas of deprivation, from which the pandemic will re-seed itself. These areas have been shown to have low testing rates (because they have high levels of individuals who MUST work). So yet again we return to failures of investment in local control and management.
Thank you for writing this; I have been waiting to read someone post some sane commentary on the situation.
Thank you, Richard. Begining to panic is an excellent phrase to sum up our current predicament.
We have, throughout this pandemic, had the services of some of the finest scientific resources in the world. We cannot complain about the quality of the thinking available to our decision makers, but we can complain with justification about how the politics have woefully, indeed for too many, fatally, served us.
Would it be too late to re-establish local systems of test and trace, already proven more effective, where deployed, than the hastily commissioned national system?
Would it be too late to adopt wholeheartedly a full system of suppression and elimination, successfully followed in certain Pacific regions?
In my own view, the answer would have to be a resounding “No!”
It all falls down to the politics.
I do not believe that we are in thrall to the mindless strain of libertarianism that infects the government benches, and which has guided their incompetent handling of the pandemic, but loud voices need to be raised to point this out at all levels in society.
I have no doubt interesting times await us as a nation.
So what’s your solution, then?
An elimination strategy
The externality may be international isolation by rest of the world. Places which have eliminated or have very low rates will simply ban contact with these plsgue islands.
I can see world splitting up into Covid free and plague sectors. The walls will harden.
Yes, quite.
The entire government strategy from the beginning appears to have been predicated on their, erroneous, assumption that vaccines would be some kind of miraculous cure. Why they’d ever think that, I have no idea, a vaccine isn’t and never has been a cure for anything. It prevents disease (or reduces its effectiveness). With no other measures, it would take years to eliminate any disease with a vaccine-only strategy.
With the nature of this disease, where the vaccine cannot (even if it was 100% effective) infer immunity for any length of time, it needs population-wide innoculation every year for several years at a bare minimum and in the best case. Possibly decades, because of the global nature. That’s a massive programme of vaccinations, and of course the effectiveness is not 100% because it relies on the vagaries of individuals’ immune systems.
Note that the media, right from the start of when the pandemic was revealed to us, talked about vaccines, and the strategy (repeated lockdowns) implies a waiting for a vaccine to come along and save us all. I can’t believe our government could have listened to (the correct type of) advice and come up with this as a strategy.
If we’d had good control measures in place, like Vietnam, then introduced a vaccine – we might have been able to really be starting to get our economy running again this year.
Maybe demands will start being overwhelming this year when people realise that the promised-for miracle cure isn’t one and we are still going through the boom-bust cycle? It will probably take a change of government – maybe the electorate can start voting for adults to run the country? (With the caveat we need to be given that choice too).
Good luck waiting.
Infantile politics seems to explain the current crop of front-runners.
We’ll see some action when the disease starts thinning the millionaire population, or the politician population. Commoners don’t matter much in The Grand Scheme.
The disease among the older population is dropping rapidly (50-69).
The 35-49 group has stopped dropping and has levelled-off as has the 25-44 group.
The age group school-year-12 to age 24 is rising, as is the school-years 7-11.
This was expected with the return of children to schools. The rise is small, but so was the rise when this started!
A major problem is brewing though, in that the vaccination process is hampered in some ethnic groupings by rumours of vaccine components being unacceptable….as usual, the factory-troll-farms are very active on internet groups…
Labour betrayed the nation, by not opposing the worst vaccination programme of any rich nation, by UK being the sole wealthy country to do the 12 week gap between the 2 Covid19 vaccines.
Making both jabs worthless and ensuring variants and mutations can thrive.
The 1st jab is not inoculation, but UK’s mania on getting out just that half a dose, and not the 21 or 28 days between the 2 jabs to make the vaccination effective, means lockdowns are almost irrelevant.
We need the Tory government and Labour opposition to get out of the way, and for us to vote new parties on the Left in local elections in big number, so as to get towards a national government that will do a Vietnam or New Zealand of zero Covid.
To nationalise vaccination production and fully staff and fund a public NHS to do it.
As Grey Swans I try to get Grey Vote pension policies to gain those voters for new parties on the Left. Pension policies based on Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn.
The biggest sabotage done by Labour against Jeremy Corbyn, was not putting Grey Swans pension policies in 2017 manifesto, that would have won him into government. He lost by around 3000 votes in key marginals, when just the 1950s ladies were around 5000 women in most voting areas, with 1960s ladies (with pension age 67 from Labour and turning 60 from 2020) further same in numbers.
Vote Scottish Tusc in Scottish Parliament elections.
Vote Tusc in England and Wales.
Vote Thelma Walker MP, Northern Independence Party in Hartlepool.
I will give one fair warning
This is a bit too party political for here, I think
I do not endorse the views noted