Where is this negativity coming from? From the outside, it looks like you're doing something right.
In order to promote compliance with the lockdown, we're on a 24/7 diet of bad news.
> British numbers are on par with other European nations when controlled by population.
According to [1], per capita the UK has 2x as many deaths as Germany, 3x as many as Canada and 33x as many as Japan. We've even got 20% more than America.
Admittedly part of that is differences in reporting standards, population ages, and the chance occurrence of new variants - but I don't think anyone will be taking the British response as a model in the future.
Are you cherry picking numbers that you like? Because you're cherry picking numbers that you like. UK is about average compared to developed countries. The per capita deaths are not out of line with the rest of the developed world. Yes, this also means there are countries that did better. There are countries that did worse.
You also ignored the vaccination rate, of which UK is a leading nation.
Why do people feel the need to be negative on this point and single out UK when every country is struggling with COVID. In the US, California has been under a near total lockout and is about the same or worse compared to states like Texas or Florida.
There are no easy answers, and I'm not sure if lockdowns are worth the cost, given the spread that we're seeing.
>Admittedly part of that is differences in reporting standards, population ages, and the chance occurrence of new variants
Yes.
Believe me, I would like nothing better than to report the UK's response had been good.
But if I'd quoted the reported death rates from China and Russia you'd have claimed they were dodgy numbers from dodgy governments; if I'd quoted numbers for Australia and New Zealand you'd have claimed I'd cherry picked remote island nations; if I'd quoted numbers for Taiwan and South Korea you'd have claimed I'd cherry picked countries with SARS experience, and if I'd quoted numbers for Kenya and Iraq you'd have claimed they have young populations and limited testing facilities.
Every single one of those countries has less than half the deaths per capita the UK has, according to that BBC map.
> Why do people feel the need to be negative
What you consider "being negative" is what I call acknowledging factual reality.
When you claim that British numbers are on par with other European nations per-capita, and you offer no citations, then I look at the numbers and I see that we've got twice the deaths per capita of Ireland and Germany, of course I disagree with you.
It's not about UK's response being good or bad. I'm not seeing evidence of any particular COVID strategy working wonders. Especially in the presence of confounding factors like different viral strains, climates, population densities and centers, age demographics, testing strategies, data gathering methodologies (e.g. how the dead are counted as 'COVID' cases), etc. etc. etc.
Are you sure you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison when you just read a number from some internet dashboard?
What is the magic answer to COVID? Masks and Lockdowns? California and New York have been at a mask mandate and full lockdown since March/April. Florida has been largely open throughout the entire time. Texas was somewhere in the middle (though more like Florida). For months Florida and Texas were beaten up by the press while New York and California were praised. I'm looking at their population-controlled case counts and death rates [1][2] and California, Texas and Florida are basically identical. New York has been under lockdown, and their death rate is through the roof most likely because they made one huge mistake in their retirement home policy early on.
It's going to take us years to figure out what happened.
>When you claim that British numbers are on par with other European nations per-capita, and you offer no citations
Come on, we're looking at the same numbers but that's not the point. You can't just do a straight numbers comparison. What I'm seeing is every country struggling with this in pretty much the same way. I'm sure some are doing something better than others. But AGAIN, hard to figure out what that is given its close to impossible to control for all kinds of variables. Talk to me 5 years after the pandemic is over - we'll have some good answers then.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109004/coronavirus-covi... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
I can't claim to have a magic answer, but there are loads of things the government fumbled.
For example, in July the government was claiming to be surprised by asymptomatic carriers even though they'd been well known since the Diamond Princess, right at the start of the pandemic. Perhaps we could have had leadership who were on top of basic, well known facts?
The national track-and-trace system was a shambles - surprising no-one, as it was built by contractors with a long track record of failed projects, overseen by unqualified cronies.
Perhaps back in March, the decision not to covid test patients being discharged from hospitals into nursing homes wasn't such a smart move?
Perhaps we shouldn't have made the bizarre decision to reopen universities for in-person teaching, sending loads of students travelling up and down the country to live in cramped, shared accommodation.
Maybe it wasn't so smart to have that period between lockdown 1 and lockdown 2, when people were allowed to go on holiday to france and spain - then the government would announce a rules change with 24 hours notice, forcing holidaymakers to race back to the UK? That was some truly weird public policy.
Perhaps the government's announcement that they wanted people to stop working from home and go back to working in offices, a few weeks before the had to call for the second lockdown, wasn't such a smart move?
Maybe when we had a second lockdown we shouldn't have announced an end date for it up front, and ended it when the load on hospitals was clearly still rising. Maybe that way we wouldn't be in our third national lockdown right now.
Perhaps we shouldn't have waited nine months before we started testing truck drivers and others entering and leaving the country? And perhaps new arrivals' self isolation should be something more credible than them giving a pinkie promise?
Given this, I think there is widespread surprise that the vaccine rollout in the UK has been well-handled – because it has. Many of us were genuinely expecting the other shoe to drop, but fortunately good decisions have been taken and this should be celebrated.
Are there any confounding factors that need to be controlled for? Like different viral strains, climates, population densities and centers, testing strategies, data gathering methodologies (e.g. how the dead are counted as 'COVID' cases), population age distributions.
Are you sure you're doing apples-to-apples comparison?
Yes, definitely. Are they likely to knock the UK from "almost worst in the whole world" to "did a good job"? Nae chance.
As a _people_ we have worked together to do wonderful things.
The government has done one good thing, and one brilliant thing, and many many stupid things.
The good thing is job support. Its not perfect, but its almost at a par with the wider continent.
The brilliant thing is taking a risk with the various vaccines. Paying for doses regardless of outcome makes sense. The cost of the unused doses/useless doses is nothing compared to the loss of 1 million jobs.
But.
The lifting of the second lockdown. The in inability to monitor isolation, the inability of the tracing infrastructure to predict winter. The sheer vindictiveness of the late third lockdown.
40% of all deaths happened because Boris wanted to "save" Christmas. He couldn't stomach the decision to cancel it, even though it was obvious from october. He dithered, dithered and dithered until there was no choice.
I can forgive the first lockdown lateness, we didn't know. Second lockdown not so much. Taking councils to court to force them to re-open schools even though the local hospitals were running at 190%, un-fucking-forgivable. I say this as someone who is vaguely right of (british) centre.
In short, its not an embarrassment of being british. Nothing of the sort, I just wish that our political class would stop tarnishing our country by being so terminally shit.
We should all celebrate a vaccination program being effectively rolled out. It looks like the UK, including government, has handled this well. Credit where its due, etc.
It's not a surprise that many of us were skeptical given the poor handling of so much else. But the UK government completely fucked its pandemic response overall and 100k people are dead. This is a terrible outcome, and I'm honestly kind of concerned that they'll get away with it in part because there will be so much collective loss of memory in the wake of a successful vaccination rollout.
Israel: 24%
USA: 2.75%
Denmark: 2.35%
Slovenia: 2.05%
Malta: 1.98%
Italy: 1.87%
and way down the bottom
UK: 0.73%, just below Romainia.
"What share of the population has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19?"
The UK has decided to skip the second dose, which wasn't tested and wasn't recommended by the manufacturers. It's a massive gamble.
If there isn't enough vaccine to go around (which there isn't) giving people the recommended 2nd dose is also a gamble.
> The UK’s strategy to delay the second dose of both ... vaccines is so that more people can be vaccinated with their first dose rather than giving a smaller number of people both doses. The hope is that this will save more lives
-- https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/20/revisiting-the-uks-stra...
Do you think the advantage of the 1st vaccine is less than that of the 2nd? i.e that it is better to have 1 person with the recommended 2 vaccines, and another with no vaccinations; versus, two people with only the first vaccination.
It's a big gamble that it won't lead to more vaccine resistant strains.
I'm also not sure there is a big problem:
"Neither bacteria nor viruses evolve resistance to vaccines as easily as they do to drugs, they wrote. Smallpox vaccine never lost its effectiveness, nor did the vaccines for measles or polio, despite years of use."
-- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/science/covid-vaccine-vir...
"Why the evolution of vaccine resistance is less of a concern than the evolution of drug resistance" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6304978/
There will always be at least some from EU promoters, the vaccine saga is the first to contradict some of the "better together" rhetoric against Brexit.
Just look at the vaccine distribution BS; Factory raids, export laws..