"The scrutiny provided by our legislature was absent when it was most required.
The social costs of lockdown are extraordinary: the burden of proof for every day it was maintained should have been more extraordinary still. +
"It should never have been down to a cabinet, let alone the coronavirus quad or a poorly prime minister, to decide when rights we have taken for granted since Magna Carta should be restored: their suspension should have needed justifying daily, with the bar set high. +
We should be profoundly concerned at the precedent: the legislation was fatally flawed by the omission of a dead man’s switch, such that civil liberties would be restored automatically the moment their suspension was not overwhelmingly and objectively justified. +
We needed checks and balances at every point. Presented with accurate data from the ground (rather than output from models) the government should have been not just enabled, but compelled, to say: the evidence has changed, we’ve changed our mind: no harm, no foul. +
Some backbenchers made this point, but couldn’t get us out of the eel-trap."
This is Toby Young (@toadmeister)'s response to my piece in the @spectator, which he very fairly follows by a frontline account from an in-house senior doctor in London.
I am still a lockdown sceptic, and Toby sets out very well the principled objections to lockdown that I still believe too. 2/n
I still think the 1st lockdown went on too long, with harms likely to have outweighed the benefits. TikTok punting videos while people missed basic healthcare is revolting.
I don't think the 2nd lockdown was well justified: the arguments that convince me now didn't then. 3/n
ONS: Incidence now up to 35k per day, 0.9% overall; huge variance regionally and by age group, with young getting infected *much* faster than old (good news), and this is backed up by Zoe (KCL/CSS) data: (
My experience of contact tracing.
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My daughter was sent home from school to isolate Tuesday morning, following a positive test by her teacher (who had been isolating since Friday).
She rapidly developed (moderate) fever and kept falling asleep (fine now), so was tested /1
This was 2.30pm Tuesday.
Result came through 10pm Thursday; within half an hour we had phoned all contacts (piano teacher, school, houseguests, other direct contacts).
Contact tracers phoned us 17 hours later (Friday afternoon); we gave them all the same information. /2
I asked what the point of contacting people we had already contacted; they confessed "basically... not much".
Since then they have repeatedly been contacting us (in isolation) by phone and text to confirm our details, even though I've told them we're isolating. /3
Note sharp age distinction in ONS / REACT1; if you favour the "GB Declaration" approach (see below) you would want the difference between young and old incidence and trajectory as great as possible
The headline is that during the most recent week (18 to 24 September) there were around 8,400 new infections per day not including those living in institutional settings, *down* from 9,600 previous week.
We also had the Imperial "REACT1" interim incidence report this week which also pointed to a slowdown, and the KCL Zoe app (tracking symptomatic cases) points in the same direction