Thread by @petermbenglish

I was involved in the public health management of the first identified UK resident case of Covid-19 and, within weeks it was no longer true that "… said Bell, adding that nobody knew enough about the virus to begin with…"
bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-p…

What we did was to interview the first or "index" case, to obtain detailed information about the people he'd been in contact with, the restaurant, churches, and other venues he'd visited, and the nature of the contact he'd had with people.

In the same way, we followed up the people he'd been in contact with to identify people who had been infected by him ("secondary cases"), the people they infected ("tertiary cases"), and so on.

Our index case had only been slightly unwell, had a busy life with many contacts, and there were many secondary and tertiary cases.

The data from this gave us a huge amount of information - more than enough for a rational and effective public health approach.

We learned a lot about the sort of contact that led to infection. It was obvious that it was almost certainly airborne spread, as transmission patterns were similar to other airborne infections like flu, RSV, chickenpox, measles…

There was also information from China, Singapore, Italy and other places which had cases before the UK.

We already knew a lot about how long it took after exposure to a case to become ill, and to become infectious, and how long cases remained infectious for.

Sure, there were many details we did not know then, and others we don't know now. Exactly how effective might vaccines be, when they eventually became available? What was the optimum hospital treatment for severe cases?

But we had the information needed to propose a rational and effectively public health response by mid February.

Do not buy the "we didn't know what to do" excuse - it is a lie.

@threadreaderapp unroll