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Comment by celticninja | Hacker News Reader

But the recession has hit the UK harder than many other European countries. That strikes me as comparable and indicates that it has been more poorly handled by the UK than by other countries.

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Do you have any more figures than what's in the article? In the article it's got these figures:

> The economy is more than a fifth smaller than it was at the end of last year. This fall is not as bad as the 22.7% decline in Spain, but about twice the size of contractions in Germany and the US.

I think Germany's handling was exceptional anyway, and for the US it hasn't hit fully yet. I reckon there's a lot more to come in the UK, as well, when the government furlough scheme comes to an end. And not to forget to mention the country is still in the Brexit transition period, which runs out at the end of the year.

Interestingly, the Q2 results for Spain are actually better than for the UK (-18.5% vs -20.4%). It's only the comparison to the end of 2019 numbers specifically where Spain comes out worse.

Debatable why, plausibly because the Spanish lockdown started earlier in Q1.

Since the entirety of the rest of the article is about today's Q2 results specifically though, a comparison of those would be more relevant. Smells like the BBC cherry picking to try and find anything where the UK isn't in last place.

It's almost certainly because the Spanish lockdown started earlier in Q1 - if I remember rightly, other articles have mentioned that the UK saw less of an economic decline in Q1 than many other European countries precisely because of the timing of our lockdown. Comparing Q1 to Q2 results and comparing countries based on that would therefore be misleading, because it's not measuring actual economic differences but an artifact of how lockdown timing happened to align with our arbitrary measurement cut-offs.

(Also, speaking of misleading, it's interesting that all of a sudden the BBC can correctly compare US GDP figures with European ones now that it's the UK they're comparing with. Previous coverage quoted US quarterly figures that had been multiplied by four to annualize them next to non-annualized European ones, making it look like the US was doing worse economically than other European countries like Spain when it was doing better.)

I don't believe it's very productive to say who handled it well and who didn't while we're still in the middle of it. Is a massive stimulus/public intervention the right call, or does it just delay the shrinking but adds plenty of public debt?

The same, I believe, goes for comparing infections & death rates. Calling a marathon by who's in the lead at the 10km mark can turn out correct, but it doesn't have to.

I think any handling mainly has come down to luck and how people responded to the threat. The prevalence of the virus isn't evenly spread throughout different regions with mainly the same rules, with just some local adaptations. I think luck is at least as much important as policies, probably much more relevant though.

There is a well made map in this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_recession

No, the primary reason is that the UK is a heavily service-based economy. Quarantine impacts the service-based subset of the economy the most. Therefore it makes sense that the UK would be hard hit. A “nation of shopkeepers” suffers when the shops are closed...

Really? I'd have thought that stuff like financial, accounting and legal services (things the UK is good at) can be done via work from home rather better than e.g. car and machine parts manufacturing...

Yes, but all the restaurants (lunches), cafe shops (for their coffees during breaks), etc aren't frequented as much because everyone is working from home.

Probably the more clientele in the employee's living neighbourhood doesn't equal it out. While I shop more at the local diary store I don't buy lunches etc.

The UK doesn't have a uniquely large number of restaurants and cafes, nor are the UK's cafes and restaurants uniquely affected by the lockdowns.

When they say the UK has a strong service industry that drives exports etc they don't mean cafes and bars they mean financial, legal etc services. Those should have stayed strong. I suspect some of the decline is actually Brexit related decline in financial services.

Brexit has been in the works for years and the economy was growing before COVID. The obsession with blaming all misfortune on Brexit is tiring.

The UK is hard hit because it went from a fairly moderate response to swinging hard into a deliberate policy of panicking the population as much as possible. The turning point was Imperial College / Ferguson predicting millions of deaths if there wasn't hard lockdown immediately. The UK's SAGE committee is largely responsible for the resulting devastation, including deaths: they literally told people they had a quasi-patriotic duty to stay away from hospitals. This is almost certainly why England is one of the few places in the world to report excess mortality amongst young adults. They have been opening and re-closing parts of the country with only hours of notice ... given on Twitter. Even Trump hasn't done that.

They even used imagery straight from 28 Days Later:

https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/h540/q75/76203_20200408T1313...

This was largely a consequence of SAGE "experts" telling the government they had to deliberately create fear in the population.

Is it any wonder the economy has been crushed when the government deliberately set out to make the population think COVID is the Rage virus?

A no deal hard Brexit was not obvious before the last election.

I said a percentage of the decrease. Obviously Brexit has not caused a 20% economic drop.

In the UK the hospitality industry as whole contributes 3.9% of GDP. Which is higher than similar European economies.

The UK stayed in a deep state of lockdown longer than most other European countries, that's why the relative numbers are bad. Question is, did it work, was it worth it? (saving lives)

Yeah, the one major European country with even worse GDP decline than the UK is Spain, which also happened to have what was generally considered to be the strictest lockdown in Europe. Sweden, on the other hand, had a much smaller decrease in GDP despite their economy being heavily reliant on exporting to the rest of Europe.

> Spain, which also happened to have what was generally considered to be the strictest lockdown in Europe.

And also most flouted?

Yes, but we also didn't close down our economy nearly as much as most other European countries. I'm just saying that there are too many variables to conclude anything at this point, especially given that we won't have a good guess on "final" death toll until widespread immunity (from vaccine or otherwise).

This was arguably because the UK fannied around and failed to implement its lockdown early enough, meaning that the resulting lockdown which was required anyway was more impactful than it would have been. Not just economically, but in terms of lives lost.

At the start, they planned to ignore it completely and aim for herd immunity.

Yep, the "conservative" government made a huge economic gamble, hoping it would pay off by not affecting the economy at all. It backfired, costing both jobs and lives.

Herd immunity might still be the only option on the table. The European countries which locked down early did indeed see fewer deaths during that first lockdown, which was the main benefit touted by the folks blaming the UK Government for not locking down sooner, but they're looking at rapid increases in cases again and there doesn't seem to be a plausible endgame.

Is there any evidence herd immunity is feasible at all?

China is not working on herd immunity, they are containing.

Is or was the WHO advocating herd immunity? I can't recall at least.

It isn't even clear if a long lasting immunity in individuals builds up -- first studies indicate the contrary. Without long-term individual immunity no herd immunity can be reached...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/06/19/imm...

The WHO is definitely not advocating herd immunity - most recently they've been calling for everyone to copy New Zealand's success in eliminating the virus right before New Zealand discovered they actually had community transmission. With that we're now pretty much all out of elimination success stories, so I'm not sure what they're going to do next.

Current evidence suggests "herd immunity" is the only feasible option. There seem to be precisely two kinds of places that can successfully lift internal restrictions without a resurgence: tiny islands like Guernsey with closed external borders that can eliminate the virus, and places like New York City, Italy, and possibly parts of Sweden where a substantial proportion of the population has been infected. That's it (and it's entirely plausible the former have just got lucky so far). Between the two is only an endless kind of purgatory countries like the UK and South Korea seem to have ended up in, where testing and tracing and restrictions short of lockdown keep case numbers down but fail to eliminate the disease and can't be lifted because that leads to exponentially growing infections.

Part of the problem is that the press has heavily obfuscated this. For example, they've tried to spin New York City as a success story and an example of flattening the curve working, when in reality it seems to be a perfect demonstration of what a non-flattened curve looks like - including the much sharper decline than that seen in places with lockdowns that did actually flatten the curve and fewer people infected. They've also mislead everyone into thinking that the decline in antibodies in people infected with Covid means they don't have immunity after a few months, when in reality that's not how long-term immunity works at all.

There will be way fewer deaths though. Treatment is much better than it was in March. A couple of million people across Europe that would have died without the first lockdown will live if they catch it now.

Also it seems that mild cases don't result in lasting immunity so lasting herd immunity via live infections is impossible.

> because the UK fannied around

Found the brit.

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