The whole idea of Test & Trace was that we could 'whack a mole' with local outbreaks. It has been over capacity since 23 August when demand for tests started to be 'throttled'
And it's not a battle of the economy vs health. This is a false dichotomy.
Get the virus under control, people will be more confident, and will go back to a nearly normal life.
Look at South Korea, look at New Zealand.
Muddling through does not work for pandemics. My letter in the @ft from March
Government policy should not be led by the media cycle or focus groups. That's not how pandemics work. It requires leadership, understanding, and a respect for the virus.
Let's take a little review of where we are with UK Covid restrictions.
It wasn't meant to be like this.
A Thread.
With apologies to Nandos.
It wasn't meant to be like this. Remember the Alert Levels (the 'Nandos chart')? The whole idea of that was to set some sort of policy - a roadmap if you will - of how we get out of a national lockdown.
As a society, we are so divorced from the mechanisms of death that we are forgetting that the people dying of Covid are parents, siblings, grandparents. It is all too easy too look at statistics and be removed from the real lives that are cut short from this dreadful disease
A journalist has just deleted their tweet saying that the average age of those dying from Covid is 82, as if in some way that reduces the tragedy of that individual death.
And to refute the belief that it's 'only' old people - these are the people dying from Covid in the second wave (from @PHE_uk).
Over 1,000 70-somethings
Hundreds of 50-60 year olds and 60-70 year olds
The Sunday Times cover the first wave of the virius, up to May 2020. But the question remains - could it happen again? And what is the Government doing to prevent this?
Matt Hancock told the Commons today, placing Stoke, Coventry & Slough into Tier 2
"In all those areas, there are more than 100 positive cases per 100,000 people, cases are doubling approximately every fortnight and we are seeing a concerning increase in cases among the over-60s"
So, it appears that we now appear to have criteria for placing local authorities into Tier 2:
- more than 100 cases per 100,000 people
- cases doubling approximately every fortnight
- concerning increase in cases among the over-60s
100 cases per 100,000 seems arbitrary, especially considering it doubles the previous rate for interventions: