Thread about UK's Covid-19 response by Anthony Costello

Here's more detail: https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-12/british-government-wants...

The article mentions that "...allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity, but at a much delayed speed", but also that they don't plan to delay football matches.

I don't understand, do they think that more conservative strategies will slow the virus down "too much"? They mention fear of "constraints on freedom of movement" being lifted too soon, maybe a more rational approach is to just not lift them too soon, rather than encourage gatherings like football matches. Given the numbers in Italy & China, I would argue that several football matches could potentially lead to thousands of simultaneous hospitalizations, which seem to be the biggest problem in e.g. Italy. What am I missing here?

One of the problems that the UK government is going to face is that their under-reaction has completely destroyed any faith people had in the government's ability to deal with this.

People already don't view Boris Johnson as a safe pair of hands. Just to give a flavour of that, supermarket shelves are already consistently devoid of rice, pasta and other likely targets for stockpiling. The government has entirely failed to address this. As well as that, businesses are aggressively pursuing their own emergency mitigation plans despite what the government are saying. The company I work for moved all non-essential personnel to working from home as an immediate reaction to Boris Johnson's speech - literally telling people not to come in tomorrow even if they had no actual ability to work from home. Essentially there are large organisations now that are completely disregarding the govenrment response and taking matters in to their own hands.

Finally it's important to note that late last year the government announced enormous spending plans for the health service in a massive reversal of a decade of policy. The problem is that it takes such a long time to actually see any results from that spending that we're going to be coping with this emergency with the least equipped health service that this country has had in decades.

Finally, you have to add the multiplier - because there are so many reasons to be concerned about this, panic will make everything 10x worse.

9. So in addition to the >1M dead this strategy likely entails (several 100k in the case of a fatality rate below South Korea's 0.6%, which sounds completely unachievable), what long term damage scenarios for the survivors has been factored into the analysis?