BRITAIN HAD A HEAD START ON COVID-19, BUT OUR LEADERS SQUANDERED IT
“The government’s dithering and lack of transparency will cost many thousands of lives”.
By Professor Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Health at the University of Edinburgh
“In the UK we have had nine weeks to listen, learn and prepare. We have had nine weeks to run outbreak simulations, set up supply chains to ensure sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators, and bring about the availability of rapid, cheap tests. We have had nine weeks to establish algorithms to support contact tracing, and start mass awareness campaigns not only about hand-washing, but about the risks that the virus would pose to social and economic activity if not taken seriously by all.
Countries such as Senegal were doing this in January.
THE GOVERNMENT DID NOT ABANDON ITS CATASTROPHIC ‘HERD IMMUNITY‘ POLICY FOR 9 WEEKS.
On. 12 March, Boris Johnson announced that all minor testing and contact tracing would stop and passive self-isolation would be introduced for those with symptoms, all part of a herd immunity strategy supposedly endorsed by the “best science”. After a backlash from scientists, the government clarified that it was not explicitly pursuing herd immunity, but would be taking measures at the “right time guided by the evidence”, all according to a plan which it did not share with the public.
On 17 March, Imperial College released a study noting that it had revised the model the government had been using, and stating that suppressing the virus was in fact the best way to avoid a vast number of people dying. The earlier model did not include the ICU data shared in the Lancet on 24 January. Instead, it was similar, but much later information from Italy, that changed their recommendation.
So, at the end of the week, the UK government did a 180-degree turn, reversing what it had said only days previously. It made the decision to take the same measures other countries had in order to delay the spread of virus: closing schools except for the children of key workers, closing pubs and other gathering places, asking households to self-isolate for 14 days and focusing on scaling up testing to 25,000 tests per day over the next month.
However, capacity issues and lost time mean that testing will take time to ramp up, PPE supply chains are strained, and all while patient numbers continue to increase as we follow Italy’s path.
The twists and turns described above have created a climate where the public do not trust that the government is responding in their best interests. Many cannot say what the government’s strategy is, or are confused about how serious coronavirus is for their health. Communication during a crisis must be clear, transparent, open and responsive. The confusion over herd immunity, for example, has made people reasonably think that the government wants everyone to get the virus to protect the economy, that it is not taking more decisive action because this is not a serious threat, or that the government does not know what it is doing.
WE HAD A CHOICE...
We had a choice early on in the UK’s trajectory to go down the South Korean path of mass testing, isolating carriers of the virus (50% of whom are asymptomatic), tracing all contacts to ensure they isolate as well, and at the same time taking soft measures to delay the spread. Instead, we watched and waited, and whether it was academic navel-gazing, political infighting or a deliberate choice to minimise economic disruption over saving lives, we have ended up in a position where we are now closer to the Italy scenario than anticipated, and are faced with taking more and more drastic measures.
Full article below.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/23/britain-covid-19-head-start-squandered