It's an island nation, it should have had a head-and-shoulders advantage over continental Europe with full potential for an outcome closer to New Zealand or Australia rather than the US or Brazil.
What went wrong?
They can barely collectively tie their own shoes, yet suddenly they are responsible for managing the biggest peacetime crisis in our history.
Contact tracing was launched on 28th May [2].
It seems to me that what went wrong was a large number of UK residents were overseas in February/March (sspecially on ski breaks) to Italy, France and other mainland Europe destinations. The Government didn't impose any emergency isolation or quarantine on those arriving, as was the case for those arriving on repatriation flights from Hubei and other Chinese destinations.
Given much of the scientific analysis of the virus points to strains being descended from those in mainland Europe, it seems a key reason the UK wasn't "head and shoulders" ahead was the scale of this international leisure travel to countries that ended up most affected. Had those returning been put into quarantine, there might have been a very different outcome, but it's hard to say for sure.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52774854
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Given how effective arrival quarantines have been elsewhere (TW, NZ, SG, et al) and how long they’ve been in effect it’s frankly insane that the UK took this long to implement it.
The key to me seems to have been that measures were put in place slowly, at the pace ministers move at, rather than the pace experts can make decisions at. Asking everyone who returned to quarantine for 7 days would clearly have helped, with the benefit of hindsight.
I think the issue is that politicians tend to want to avoid imposing what are seen as invasive measures where they feel the risk is low. Their assessment of the level of risk posed by those returning from overseas holidays in February was clearly now, in the cold light of day, very poor.
The sheer number of people overseas at the time probably didn't help matters - some suggestions that as many as 1 million people were overseas at the time [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/uk-battling-to...
Frankly, it was clearly very poor even then. That they didn't realise that reflects poorly on them.
I can’t imagine “we’re already drowning, no need to worry about that leak” is really a viable public health strategy in this scenario.
(The reason Italy was reporting so few cases seems to be that they weren't testing people who were hospitalized with symptoms unless they'd travelled to China or had contact with someone who had. There were a few other countries like the US which had similar criteria on paper, but they were generally willing to test other patients based on clinical suspicion. Italy apparently managed to genuinely fail to test hospitalized patients right up until the point where, by sheer coincidence, someone was hospitalized with coronavirus after contact with a traveller from China who turned out not to be the source of the infection.)
This is the same basic situation as Germany. Many of our largest outbreaks in March/April were traced back to a single sick barkeeper in an après-ski in Austria.
Personally, most of my friends and I decided to quarantine a few weeks before the government decided to ask people to do so.
I disagree about the contract tracing app though, I'm glad for any reason that it's delayed.
There is no earthly reason I can't do my job from home (already have everything set-up from way before covid) but they want people back in the office...to have all meetings done at desk via videochat.
I pushed hard but they are not moving..which is why I will be as soon as I get a remote offer at comparable or better salary, started looking immediately after the last call where I got a hard no.
Government advice is "Should work from home if able to" but it's advice, not mandatory nor binding and there is no protection/law behind it - so pretty much nothing I can do other than quit, I've savings to get me through a year out of work but I don't want to deplete those in the middle of a pandemic when no one knows what the outcome of all this and a possible recurrence will be - so like a lot of people I'm having to balance the economic risk vs the real health risk about whether to go back or not.
My bosses bosses irrational hatred of WFH is going to put a lot of people at risk.
We are so fucked.
Our care home sector was also more vulnerable than most because it (a) consists of individual care homes which are relatively large and (b) is staffed in large part by agency staff who work in multiple homes.
We're not the only country or region which made this mistake of course and this wasn't the only mistake made but the surprising thing is how long it took for the government to recognise and correct this. Part of that is probably human nature ("we have a plan, stick to the plan"), but I suspect part of it is old-fashioned civil service incompetence too (the same incompetence which led to this being the plan to start with).
They're not. What version of "every country" do you have in mind? Most other countries also failed at contact tracing early on. The only country in Europe that had and used effective contact tracing was Germany. Almost everywhere else it has made little or not contribution.
If you look at the epi curves then the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have had basically the same outbreak (France a little less). So there is no need to wonder why the UK is special because it isn't. There is plenty to say about which European countries responded well and which didn't and why even Germany's response was markedly inferior to countries like Vietnam but that has to start from a data driven perspective that doesn't pretend that the UK is particularly special.
Politically, locking down borders was not palatable to the government - I don't think we ever closed the border actually, we just made it very impractical for people to travel. Someone was actually able to get to Paris for a haircut a month or so ago.
https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/18/locked-down-brits-in-nee...
I mean, they try. Compared to the US government the UK government doesn’t feel architected in any way, it’s just entirely wacky tradition. The House of Lords is totally bizarre for example and that makes me question both the “modern” and “democracy” part.
Then again we have the parts of the USG responsible for the CFR (as opposed to the US code which comes from the democratic part) which is kind of the same thing (I can’t remember what they’re called off the top of my head.)
A government was elected to "get Brexit done", despite being patently (and provably) hopeless at everything else. Then "Everything else" suddenly became really important, and here we are.
Mexico made a big stink about things, and some politicians there even turned their noses up at the U.S. (still the country most likely to render aid) during its peak, but are going into a mass outbreak of their own, that is on a steady trajectory to kill as many or more than the U.S. one.
Mexico: ~20k deaths, 1.55e-4/capita
Sure, the future could be anything, but on the basis of the current evidence that you’re living in a glasshouse, I really don’t think USA Republicans should be casting stones any time soon.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
That's not luck, it's called competence.
> U.S. overall rates of COVID death are dramatically lower than the UK and Sweden
Is 10% less than the 2 worst european countries really worth applauding? Also 10% isn't dramatic in my book. Average US death rate for the last 7 days is still 5 times higher than France for example. [Edit: this is bad metric, see comments below, my bad.]
> people still frame it like the President is a bloody-handed murderer who gets off on watching people suffer.
He willingly took decisions that clearly, scientifically cost the lives of many people to win some political points with his base. You can't possibly think that the crisis was handled completly optimally with the infos available at the time, and no other handling could have saved any more lives.
Our outbreak started later, and so did most countermeasures, for reasons that appear to be complete coincidence.
> Is 10% less than the 2 worst european countries really worth applauding? Also 10% isn't dramatic in my book.
Well, I could've compared Spain and Italy as well. Spain's outcomes seem like they may have a lot to do with vitamin D.
> US death rate is still 5 times higher than France for example.
Right now the rolling-average daily rate is about 3.8x higher in the U.S. than it is in France (which has been in a lockdown of a sort that would probably be illegal in the U.S.); but that's after ignoring the massive spike in France, almost a flat month of death rates more than 2x the U.S. peak (which didn't last as long).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
> He willingly took decisions that clearly, scientifically cost the lives of many people to win some political points with his base.
Such as what? The President is not a dictator, he does not get to make most of the major decisions involved in an outbreak like this. Thanks to everyone scrambling to make things work, it seems that the standard of care was never significantly impacted by a lack of supplies, and none of the hospitals in the hotspot exceeded capacity. Furthermore, the states that most resembled the White House's recommendations have had better outcomes across the board.
> You can't possibly think that the crisis was handled completly optimally with the infos available at the time, and no other handling could have saved any more lives.
That is a completely unrelated claim, that nobody is making. Hindsight is always 20-20. I think that it would have been politically infeasible to do what Taiwan did for all of North America.
Exactly what new information was discovered in the ~1-2 weeks gap between US and Canada outbreaks that led Canada to start lockdown very early while the US started very late?
spoiler: none. One government and it's provinces decided to follow common sense/scientific advices, while the other did not.
> Well, I could've compared Spain and Italy as well. Spain's outcomes seem like they may have a lot to do with vitamin D.
You could have and you would have seen that they have successfully bent the curve to almost no new cases unlike the US. Do you think people in Florida and Texas lack vitamin D? If not how come cases are spiking again there?
> Such as what? The President is not a dictator, he does not get to make most of the major decisions involved in an outbreak like this
Such as not spending weeks trying to convince americans that this virus was a fake news from the left? Or such as using his political weight to pressure states into going into lockdown earlier/longer? Or maybe not vehemently refusing to wear a mask to not appear weak, leading to all of it's base doing the same?
> Hindsight is always 20-20.
I did very specifically say "with the infos available at the time".
How are you calculating this? Comparing the death rates for these four countries one would need to alter the numbers significantly to get the US at 5x France and the UK/Sweden at >5x France: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-mi...
Note: I hope this chart loads. The page is giving me a JS exception so I could only see the chart on the main page (https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths). If it doesn't load, scroll down the main page to "Total confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people" and edit the chart to add those four curves.
You are looking at the entire timespan while I said "Average for the last 7 days". But I agree that this metric is not a good indicator of anything given the lag between when the epidemy started in Europe vs US. My mistake on that.
What does this even mean? "No, they aren't hopeless, they just don't want this challenging situation to exist, so naturally they won't handle it well. You can't blame them for that!"
/s
We cancelled a bunch of routine treatment and surgery in order to provide surge capacity. We converted existing wards into new ICUs. We had to take unqualified student nurses and convert them to temporary nurses[1], we took doctors from their specialities and got them to cover other work. Finally, we stopped admitting certain groups of people to hospital altogether. Look at the death rate in care homes.
> They got away with 40,000
That number is for people who died after having a positive test. Many people are not being tested, so there are many deaths of people not included in that figure.
At the moment we think the true number is at least 50% higher, so the real number is 60,000.
And there are different ways to count death. If the UK used the same method to count covid-19 deaths as it does to count flu deaths we'd see over 100,000 deaths.
[1] ...and we said we'd pay them, but now they've finished a lot of them are finding that they're not going to be paid.
Total number of COVID-19 associated UK deaths
42,461
Deaths of people who have had a positive test result
There's lots of evidence. See, for example, this:
https://ltccovid.org/2020/04/12/mortality-associated-with-co...
> Data from England illustrates well the importance of paying attention to differences in definitions and methods used to estimate these percentages: the share of all probable COVID-19 deaths in care homes is 27%, whereas the share of probable deaths of care residents is 38%. The share of excess deaths in care homes during the pandemic has been 44% and the share of deaths of care home residents is 52% of all excess deaths. Also, in France, deaths in care homes are 34% of all COVID-19 deaths, whereas deaths of care home residents are 51%.
That's from May. Since then we discharged a bunch of people from hospital to care and nursing homes, without testing whether they had covid-19 or not.