Check out the data on the UK Gov dashboard if you've not seen it:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
Also - we are all in lockdown, which helps.
The UK (in particular, England) is currently reporting the second highest new death rate per capita in the world, still higher than it was at any point in 2020. It continues to report 1000+ unnecessary deaths per day.
And, is it still the case that the UK has 50% more excess deaths than it is reporting in the daily coronavirus figures? A mystery...
Deaths will start to stop soon, COVID infections are already dropping in many countries, with vaccines being part of the reason (but only part - again we cannot know how much)
I believe it's (now) listing UK up to 2020 Week 51, and Bulgaria to 2021 Week 3.
That's a 5 week difference in which Bulgaria was hit pretty hard. We don't see the effect in this data set of the British variant yet.
Having messed this up so very badly doing idiotically risky things from the start the latest big risk taken by the UK government didn't actually backfire as badly as the previous ones. Others have pointed at the current per-capita deaths. This completely ignores the long-term effects to survivors accross the population.
It can be a challenge to see how the UK government could have dealt with this worse. It's a highly educated population that has put the brakes on the most destructive policies from the very start.
I really hope the wider population comes to an appreciation of "asymmetric risk" from this the way "metal fatigue" entered popular usage with the aeroplane disasters of I think the DC-10.
...taking a flyer on an utterly unproven vaccination strategy was a huge, huge risk and had it not come off there would be no vaccination strategy. Relying on being lucky doesn't seem like a "spot on" strategy to me.
"We gambled everything on red it and came up so we deserve credit for the strategy."
edit: This is in relation to the additional time between first and second jabs that was untested in the strategy - for which this result suggests we no longer need to be concerned that the vaccination might be reduced in protection as we were before this data came in.
When they do well you still say it's because of their incompetence.
At every turn they’ve had credible expert advice telling them to do contradictory things. They’ve had to use judgement.
If only they had the sense to use hindsight, like you.
There were rather a lot of people suggesting that doing an unproven vaccine strategy of getting the maximum number of people their first vaccine and a longer period between first and second that had not yet been trialed, at all as a thing that was risky. People said it in advance. Who were the credible experts who recommended it? What support did they give that it wasn't a pretty big risk? If there was some and I missed it I'll put my hand up and say I was wrong. As I recall there was some serious doubt about whether anyone would get benfit from vaccination at all. Again if it was /known/ that it was likely to work that's not a bad decision - but I haven't seen that analysis. Have you? Please do link it if you have. I'm also not clear about what the upside for running that risk was. Are there better results for people contracting covid after only one jab? Do we have data? Or was that a flyer that it might turn out to be? Any links you have with an analysis of that is welcome.
The "herd immunity" strategy was also described as risky by most experts that I saw. I think the word I used when looking at it, in advance of the numbers coming in was "insane," while being well aware there was at least a nonzero chance it could work better than the conservative approach. To say it has not come off is an understatement. If it did come off somehow due to dumb luck it would have been equally terrible decision making. It's too big a risk to take, the downside is immense.
It is reasonable to criticise a risk-loving gambling strategy for a nation's health whether it comes off or not. I criticisised it before and after and I criticisise it when it comes off and when it doesn't. By contrast a considered and careful strategy is to be commended even if it turned out to be incorrect based on subsequently available facts.
This is literally gambling on uncertain outcomes with people's lives and health. You want to do that as sensibly as you can. You want the analysis. You want it public. You're paying the downside. Getting lucky to get results out of bad decisions does NOT make a decision a good one.
But hey, take the thing as a whole. Has it been good, covid management in the UK or not? It's worthwhile analysing what when wrong and why and how that compared with other, differing strategies. Taiwan's looked pretty good initially and continues to. South Korea and Japan looked to have pretty good strategies and continue to. New Zealand and Australia had very different strategies to the UK.
It's entirely reasonable to criticise a gambling addict's decision making when they bet the rent check and the bet wins.
I hope that makes the point clearer for you, please disagree if you like but it should be clear that hindsight has nothing whatever to do with the criticisim.
But the EU also gambled - they gambled that more time thinking would pay off, and it didn't. I think this is where you're going wrong with your argument: spending more time for care and consideration is also a gamble.
How do you know how much care and consideration is the right amount? Is more care and consideration always better? Would it be better to still be considering whether to buy any vaccine at this stage? Would you commend that? No, obviously not. So at some point more care and consideration is bad, and you can't just say 'more care and consideration please' forever. At some point you need to apply judgement to stop considering and act. That's a judgement. That's a gamble. It's a gamble to stop considering your situation and it's a gamble to keep considering your situation.
Both the UK and the EU took a gamble. The EU gambled that more consideration was better and they were wrong.
So everyone's a gambler, if you want to look at it like that. But one gambler had better judgement than the other.
If my impression of risk-loving decision making is wrong and there really was careful analysis of risks I'd love to hear it. It would restore a /lot/ of faith.
What was the assessed risk that that an increased period between first and second jabs would greatly reduce the coverage?
What was the advantage of the increased period? (ie is it likely that one jab will keep more people alive and/or do less damage to more covid survivors).
Is the risk of going with a longer period between first and second worth it? With the benefit of hindsight there appears not to be a downside. To be totally clear: this is very, very, very welcome news. Now it's a proper asymmetry and it seems like this strategy is all upside from here.
The alternative was to give people the two vaccine jabs the exact amount of time apart as had been tested and was known until this data came in. Then switch to this strategy. That is the conservative decision as you pretty much know what you're going to get. Is the longer period between first and second to get more people a first jab faster going to pay off? Again to be 100% clear let's hope so. Really let's hope it's a huge, huge win.
This analysis of UK vaccination policy and the maximum coverage of first jabs that the new 3-month data helps to further (but not completely) inform has nothing to do with the EU or New Zealand or Taiwan or Brazil.
Assessing the UK's gamblers' strategy of taking flyers is a reasonable thing to do in comparison to other EU nations, or NZ or Brazil...
There are other aspects to the UK's various strategies that don't have much to do with the Oxford vaccine showing sustained protection of 76% ...
If the UK has made some good calls in there based on risk asymmetry and balances of probabilities to go with the plethora of terrible ones they probably should trumpet them very loudly just restore people's faith that it's possible and that we can do better than 'gut-feel' or taking a flyer or "if she comes home we'll be loaded!" Which is how it's looking.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Membership listed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/joint-committee-on-vacc...
> What support did they give that it wasn't a pretty big risk?
Analysis available here: https://app.box.com/s/iddfb4ppwkmtjusir2tc/file/759357623956 (via the minutes hyperlink on the JCVI page above)
Relevant conclusion:
"The Committee advises initially prioritising delivery of the first vaccine dose as this is highly likely to have a greater public health impact in the short term and reduce the number of preventable deaths from COVID-19."
>The "herd immunity" strategy was also described as risky by most experts that I saw
Herd immunity was not government policy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54252272
>Others, however, have suggested, despite the denials, that "herd immunity" was indeed the strategy for a period of time.
So I'm one of those. I'll accept that it wasn't announced as government policy by name, but what of that?
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/uk-herd-immunity-coro...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51892402
Obviously denying the bet was made is the best course of political action to do otherwise would be a resignation letter.
Accepting responsibility for the very large losses would take some kind of integrity, bravery and honnesty that is more than a little unusual accross the entire spectrum of professional politicians.
I think you're admitting here that you're determined from the start to assume the worst under all circumstances, success and failure, that you will never believe anything they say either way, and that no amount of reason will persuade you to give them an inch of credit or even just tolerance for them trying to do their best and it sometimes not being perfect.
I hope you aren't subject to this kind of cynical, relentless, and impossible to satisfy abuse in your job as you're dishing out to them.
The policies have had a massive cost countable in deaths and misery. Those who advanced those policies have to deny that consequence or resign. They deny like weak politicians. I don't believe them. I'm not alone among people who would much rather be noting their successes.
If the long wait between really was a good bet with limited downside and not yet another big risk I would be so relieved. That wasn't the way it was reported at the time.
If you take one thing to understand about this point of view I am expressing make it this:
Being conservative about risk with decisions where countless lives are at stake is a good thing. Gambling and winning does not retropsectively make it a good decision.
It's not necessarily! Being too conservative can be as bad as being not conservative enough! If you wanted maximum caution you'd never take a decision and never do anything. If governments did nothing yet about COVID and were still carefully considering a course of action at this stage we'd be fucked. No thanks.
"But I made it home without killing anyone." Is not a defence for downing 3 family sized vodkas and driving. "You'd condemn me weather i killed people or not!" Quite. Being too conservative we'd never have put the wheel on a vehicle. SFW.
Sensible conservative approaches to public health policy with tens of thousands of lives at stake is a reasonable thing to insist on. Herd immunity policies were NOT that. The additional, un-tested time between jabs was widely reported as being risky. If it wasn't actually terribly risky, then the prior risk assessment was spectacularly badly communicated.
"I made it home alive." Which this report, mercifully, confirms to my relief and joy, forms stuff all part of analysing the risk that was taken and the sense behind it.
Noting also you can take every reasonable precaution and still get a bad result without that result being sufficient to condemn the decision making. So absolutely the result is not the most important thing when there's a risky decision made. But it's really, incredibly bloody hard to ignore when 3 family-sized vodkas in, having been told not to drive you do anyway, straight into some children. Or 110,000 covid deaths. Those kind of losses are rather hard to ignore when they're the consequence of risk-taking. Even if at first blush you didn't think it was pretty reckless even though it was described frequently as such, in advance.
As has already been pointed out to you, there was no herd immunity policy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54252272
You need to be able to tell the difference between someone using the words 'herd immunity' in a sentence, and it being official policy.
Your response to this is just 'nah... I'll ignore that and just assume they're lying'. That's where your prejudice is coming into it.
>At the start of the pandemic, the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, spoke about "herd immunity" - the idea that once enough of a population had been exposed to the virus, they would build up natural immunity to it.
This was when the virus spread really kicked off. There was a press conference I saw with disbelief where people were encouraged to attend football games because on average a positive case will infect 5 others so attending football games is fine.
>"Our aim," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that morning, is to "try and reduce the peak - not suppress it completely, also because most people get a mild illness, to build up some degree of herd immunity whilst protecting the most vulnerable".
"to build up some degree of herd immunity" is not a herd immunity policy.
See you could call that policy "isolate, trace and contain" and that name does not make any difference to what the policy actually was.
That particular knight of the realm was clearly speaking so badly out of term about the UK following a policy that was not being followed that he was of course immediately fired. I just can't find the link. Maybe it didn't happen and I just assumed you'd have to be fired if you literally lied about government policy in a pandemic and that has been confusing.
>in a BBC interview on 11 March with Dr David Halpern, chief executive of the government-owned Behavioural Insights Team, known as the "nudge unit", and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
He told the BBC: "You'll want to protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don't catch the disease and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity's been achieved in the rest of the population."
Let's call the policy "Geoffrey" and between us declare that name official to this discussion. That doesn't change anything either.
As long as we can treat this:
>"In a statement, a government spokesman said the emails "make clear… herd immunity has never been a policy aim".
With at least some of the utter contempt mustered by the bbc journalist in that piece.
I hope my another repitition of my rejection of what has "been pointed out" is now sufficiently clear to you. The policy was followed the aim of spreading the virus achieved the hoped for payoff for that strategy has been elusive. Or perhaps they just stumbled into following a herd immunity policy by accident while talking about it. The distinction is not important to me.
It certainly wasn't known. And scientists used to working with statistically significant proof rightly called that out. That said, my understanding is that it works this way for most (but not all) vaccines. So unlike some of the other UK government decisions, it was a somewhat reasonable gamble with quite a high likelihood of working out.
The upside is being vaccinate twice as quickly (esp. valuable early on when supply is constrained).
Is one jab much use to prevent bad results it was that unknown and we're still hopeful that it will turn out that it is?
The issues European production partners (one in Belgium I think) are suffering with the AstraZeneca vaccine are similar to those already solved at the UK production sites months ago because of the risk taken to start production early.
Each production facility can have unique issues that effect yield that simply need time to resolve.
Maybe AstraZeneca over promised, but it feels like risks to production yield were not properly assessed by those in charge of ensuring vaccine supply in the EU.
The unproven strategy that I meant was the one where a longer period ellapses between first and second jabs than had ever been tested. This new data is the test and shows that we probably don't now need to be concerned about that as we did when the strategy was first decided on and implemented.
The conservative approach would have been to ensure everyone got 2 jabs with the elapsed time between them the amount of time that had been tested until this data came in to show that a longer period would actually still work.
I don't know what the advantage of more people with a single jab is. Does anyone? Are you less likely to die? Or we hope so but don't have the data yet - the other leg of this bet so to speak.
The problem is that AZ had also promised the UK it would have priority over the goods produced on its soil :
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/dragging-a...
instead of AstraZeneca plc (.uk parent company) their contract is with AstraZeneca AB (.se subsidiary)
the UK vaccine operation will be under the control of AB plc
I would bet the commission insisted on having it with an EU entity without having thought the ramifications
It's hard to understand how you can mess up worse than that.
For example they could have delayed ordering vaccines, like the Europeans have.
And it took all the way to December to implement testing at the borders for the UK government while they were obviously allowing their citizens to take advantage of those travel policies.
If saving lives is the end goal then countries that took it seriously from the start and had a competent strategy for social distancing and containment are still better off.
Barely a month ago Boris was promising a normal Christmas.
Half the time we look at a country as being a good example of this, things fall apart within a few weeks... When a single person can infect hunreds of others, or none, there's a lot of randomness that models cannot easily account for. There are still a large number of infections where we don't know how the person was infected.
:)
I’m very glad NZ is COVID free but they got lucky by not having much community spread before the first lockdown and closing the border, and they are lucky by geography in this case.
What the UK has gone through is unique to the UK and it is hard to easily compare it to other countries. It's bad, don't get wrong, and I wish that travel lockdowns would have happened sooner, but let's not ignore a huge amount of relevant data so you can have a dig.
Anecdote : I live near a busy high street in London and went out for my daily lockdown exercise at around 6pm today.
About 10% of the "highly educated population", as you say, was wearing a mask. Even more worrying, if you looked through the windows of estate agencies and other such ""essential"" shops, it was exactly 0% indoors.
To people outside the UK reading this : supermarkets here have only made face coverings mandatory a couple of weeks ago ("unless you tell us you're exempt", of course) because the government finally asked them nicely to.
All these months, their CEOs have been emailing us bullshit newsletters about how "your safety is important to us in these unprecedented times", and to that effect they were politely asking customers to "keep your distance" and "wash your hands" and "follow local guidance about face coverings" (i.e. "none"). Meanwhile their employees were free to spend their whole shift unmasked and potentially filling the air with virus, getting their colleagues and customers sick : that was totally cool. And no mention of any effort regarding store ventilation or aerosol risk either.
There is no enforcement of lockdown whatsoever, except for the most egregious cases of partying. It all seems to be based on a gentlemen's agreement, except there seems to be very few gentlemen left indeed. It is all so hypocritical.
This situation is in stark contrast with what I hear from friends & family on the continent. Last time I was in Paris for instance, mask adherence was probably 80% in the street and 99% inside shops. And the French are not exactly known to be fond of rules.
So yeah, B.1.1.7 probably didn't help, the government has probably f**d up on everything except the vaccination programme, but the behaviour of the population alone is in my view, more than enough to explain the terrible UK death/cases figures.
In my area (near Oxford) I haven't seen a maskless person in a supermarket since masks became compulsory.
The UK started out very briefly with a Sweden-like strategy. We now know the Sweden strategy was correct: their results are in line with the EU average[1] despite a drastically smaller decline in GDP, a much smaller backlog of non-COVID health care problems and of course, a critically higher freedom and quality of life. The UK was 'bounced' into this reversal by its most highly educated people: literally university professors.
Later it turned out that those professors had forced the reversal using a computational model that was filled with mission-critical bugs[2][3]. It was so buggy that it produced totally different predictions every time it was run depending on what CPU architecture executed it and how many threads it used. There were typos in the constants of the hand-rolled PRNG, memory corruption errors in hand-rolled sorting functions and of course the whole thing was impossible to understand, being a single 15,000+ line C file in which basically every variable had a single letter name. The guys behind it were not merely incompetent but knew they were incompetent: the lead author (the notorious Ferguson) told a national newspaper, "For me the code is not a mess, but it's all in my head, completely undocumented. Nobody would be able to use it" [4] as if these statements weren't a contradiction. They brought in developers from GitHub to try and patch the code into an acceptable state before it was released, and then did a git squash to try and hide all the bug fixes.
People who pointed these problems out were told that it didn't matter because none of the models actually mattered - all that mattered was that "Epidemiology is not a branch of computer science and the conclusions around lockdown rely not on any mathematical model but on the scientific consensus" [5]. That is obviously 100% pure pseudo-science.
Some UK ministers and MPs have repeatedly expressed frustration that whenever they try and introduce some perspective, quietly ignore obviously dodgy numbers or reduce the damage of the proposed policies, the "scientists" immediately run to the press and whip up a mob that forces them to obey. Yet these people - the most highly educated of them all - have shown consistently very low standards about everything they are expected to know about.
Vaccines are the first chance we get to see what can happen when the British government is able to tackle something without dodgy epidemiologists constantly fucking everything up. Actual scientists, working in the world of real experiments and trials instead of student-quality C programs pretending to be theories, were paired with the private sector and a government that worked hard to clear obstacles from their path. The results have been extraordinary.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
[2] https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
[3] https://lockdownsceptics.org/second-analysis-of-fergusons-mo...
[4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/neil-ferguson-interview-n...
[5] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led...
* for major countries (incidentally, the UK territory Gibraltar is 2nd in the world if you include minor countries), and only considering the first dosage, which in fairness, appears to be the correct for this specific vaccine.