Thread by @ChristabelCoops

THREAD: The UK is not the only place seeing a recent sharp rise in Covid cases.

Difference is *just like last time* our government had advance warning by looking at other countries. And not only did they do nothing to stop the rise, they actively encouraged it. 1/10

This a graph from the @FT of Covid cases from Spain and France (both of which were hit badly last time). Cases in Spain start rising mid July, cases in France take off during August. Cases in the UK still remained relatively low during this period 2/10

I had some thoughts on why our numbers were so low in this thread - basically reluctance of Brits to go back to shops, pubs and restaurants, plus more working from home than in other countries.

So what does our government do? 3/10

https://twitter.com/ChristabelCoops/status/1296488679146389504?s=20

It tells people to go back into the office (often via public transport) and spends 100s of millions of public money bribing people to eat out more. There is now some evidence that the Eat Out scheme directly contributed to the rise in UK Covid cases. 4/10

https://twitter.com/kieran_walshe/status/1304709371956473856?s=20

More generally government messaging was deliberately encouraging people to believe that the worst was over and we could start going back to normal life. Even though we could see from other countries that this was resulting in a second wave of cases. 5/10

But this isn’t all. Given the government knew that a rise in cases was possible, why did it not build up testing capacity to deal with an increased number of people reporting Covid symptoms? Instead, it allowed the testing system to fall over. 6/10

https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/status/1305047753983225858?s=20

@Chrischirp explains here why this is such a problem – if we can’t test, then we can’t trace and isolate cases either, so Covid spreads even further. 7/10

https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1303646373041115137?s=20

But the government just blames young people, and to starts talking about an ambitious new £100bn testing program rather than fixing the system we actually have.

This is a really good thread from @scienceshared on the problems with “Moonshot”. 8/10

https://twitter.com/ScienceShared/status/1304016643174133760?s=20

I get the government has been trying to help the economy, but a significant second wave is going to do far more damage to jobs and the economy than anything else. Restrictions will have to be re-imposed, and individuals will start avoiding shops and restaurants again anyway. 9/10

All this could have been anticipated, but this is not a government that leads – it only reacts, and when it reacts, it does so incompetently.

They must be held to account for this. 10/10