[ali k]

in mid-march most other countries worldwide instigated some kind of border control. There's a clear difference in approach there for which an explanation would be nice.

In light of that it looks like we were one of the only countries following the WHO recommendations you provided.

Could it be that the WHO is fully aware of the implications that a total travel ban would have on a nation’s economy (it even says something along those lines in the text Pete provided) and therefore is reluctant to get involved in those political and economic decisions so errs on the side of advising against?

If that were the case the disparity could be that those other countries have made a different political decision to us based on their specific circumstances / state of preparedness. I don’t know, just a hypothesis?

[Oldmanmatt]

Just to break the routine, here’s a quote (supposedly from a CofE Vicar is his weekly news letter):

“And, finally, congratulations to the Prime Minister on the birth of his sixth child. Of course, that’s just counting the ones born in hospital, the real total may be higher...”

[Nigel]

“And, finally, congratulations to the Prime Minister on the birth of his sixth child. Of course, that’s just counting the ones born in hospital, the real total may be higher...”

I doubt even the PM knows the "all settings" number....

[Nigel]

No the guidance didn’t change, what I posted is the current WHO advice on international travel restrictions if you go on their website today. Same as feb 29th.

I have checked, and on that you are quite right.

Other countries may have done. But they weren’t ‘following the science’!

They may have been following this? Hidden away on the WHO Technical Guidance pages, "Management of ill travellers at Points of Entry (international airports, seaports, and ground crossings) in the context of COVID-19": https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331512/WHO-2019-nCoV-POEmgmt-2020.2-eng.pdf

Published 19th March. From the intro:

Under the International Health Regulations (IHR), the public
health authorities at points of entry—international ports,
airports, and ground crossings—are required to establish
effective contingency plans and arrangements for responding
a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and to
communicate with the National IHR Focal Point on relevant
public health measures. The current COVID-19 outbreak has
spread across several borders, which has prompted the
demand for the detection and management of suspected cases
at points of entry.

It is of course just a guess, but the publishing date would tie up with when the vast majority of countries started some kind of controls i.e. around that date in March: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus-travel-restrictions-border-shutdowns-country-200318091505922.html

[Offwidth]

“And, finally, congratulations to the Prime Minister on the birth of his sixth child. Of course, that’s just counting the ones born in hospital, the real total may be higher...”

I doubt even the PM knows the "all settings" number....

Disappointed by that vicar.....  no mention of z values for excess births.

[ali k]

On international comparisons. This is a tweet from a Conservative MP on the 15th March comparing Italy and the UK in an attempt to argue that our strategy is working. He’s now deleted the tweet.

https://mobile.twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1257970488103534592

[petejh]

That's nothing. There around 60 thousand posts on ukb comparing us with Italy in an attempt to argue that our strategy isn't working. Neither views are based on reliable evidence.

[ali k]

That's nothing. There around 60 thousand posts on ukb comparing us with Italy in an attempt to argue that our strategy isn't working. Neither views are based on reliable evidence.

Yeh, except (a) none of us are serving MPs so our output means fuck all; and (b) the important point about the tweet is that he wrote it when the numbers supported his argument but deleted it when they didn’t, which shows the integrity of the man. And that is also consistent with how the stance of the government has shifted at the daily press conferences in terms of international comparison.

[Offwidth]

Views on the UK C19 response from around the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/06/complacent-uk-draws-global-criticism-for-covid-19-response-boris-johnson

[mrjonathanr]

On international comparisons, this tweet from PMQs shows Starmer and Johnson discussing the issue:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1258010797902565377

[Nigel]

Also on international comparisons, there now follows a message from our old friend Prof Spiegelhalter:

https://twitter.com/d_spiegel/status/1258087627003179009

Not happy about people misusing his Guardian article. Up to and including the PM!

[Nigel]

Anyway, going back to my previous post about why other countries piled into lockdowns and border controls in mid-March, I had overlooked that the WHO had declared Covid to be officially a pandemic on 11th March. I think, looking at everything in the round, the period March 11-23 will be a crucial one for any future public inquiry. Its in that time window that most other European countries started taking concrete steps, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-52103747

It is also in that time window that the UK abandoned contact tracing (12th March) and did nothing much else except gave handwashing advice. For whatever reason.

I know it only looks like a short window but the transmission is exponential. It would be informative to do a trial model of our current lockdown measures but starting a week earlier - what would that show?

[mrjonathanr]

Views on the UK C19 response from around the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/06/complacent-uk-draws-global-criticism-for-covid-19-response-boris-johnson

No-one's interested in dismal stuff like that Offwidth, we have the salacious headlines about Neil Ferguson's love life to keep us distracted. Thank goodness the Telegraph was able to publish it on the same day as this stuff about overtaking Italy's death toll. I wonder why they published it nearly a month after the event?   

[Offwidth]

I fondly remember the days when Prof's lockdown tryst with married belle would have meant something different. Even then it might have been a useful distraction from bad news.

[Nigel]

Its a childishly blatant deflection tactic. The sad thing is it might just work given the press we have in the UK (including the BBC). Going by these two articles in the Guardian (sorry!), it looks like the scientists on SAGE might be twigging that they are being set up to share / take the rap. Surprised it took them this long, that much was obvious from the first utterance of the phrase "we (UK Gov) followed the science".

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/06/uk-scientists-being-drawn-into-very-unpleasant-political-situation
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/06/author-of-guardian-article-on-death-tolls-asks-government-to-stop-using-it

We might see all SAGE advice to date getting leaked soon at this rate, by the scientists.

[Nigel]

It is also in that time window that the UK abandoned contact tracing (12th March) and did nothing much else except gave handwashing advice. For whatever reason.

I know it only looks like a short window but the transmission is exponential. It would be informative to do a trial model of our current lockdown measures but starting a week earlier - what would that show?

Apologies in advance for going well outside of my area of expertise, if it is all bollocks then I will retract, but there is a link here to paper on this subject (caveats - not-peer reviewed, seemingly high R): https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.20052340v1.full.pdf

Obviously garbage in etc, so I would choose to ignore the exact figures themselves and rather look at them relatively, but from the abstract:

In a 12 week lockdown from 24 March with transmission parameters reduced to 20% of their previous values, around 63,000 severely ill patients will need hospitalisation by mid June, 37,000 critically ill will need intensive care, whilst over 81,000 are expected to die. Had the lockdown begun on 17 March around 16,500 severe, 9,250 critical cases and 18,500 deaths would be expected by early June. With 10% transmission, severe and critical cases peak in April.

I know that you can take this argument to the extreme i.e. if we were in permanent lockdown since 1800 then no one would ever catch anything, but it is illustrative that being slow to lockdown, even by a week, does have a big effect. A statement of the obvious of course, but I thought it was interesting to put some numbers on it.

There is a context with regard to coming out of lockdown. A week earlier at the start would arguably save many more weeks at the other end.

[Offwidth]

I agree entirely with that argument but that's not what SAGE were telling the government according to the Times expose. SAGE failed on timing, not Boris. You can partly blame the government for too much emphasis on modelling in SAGE and too little on epidemic control and the medical and logistical aspects of epidemic management but the experts involved have to take a big part of that blame (unless we are missing something else). Late last night there was some interesting discussion on the Czech and Slovac Republics who closed borders and instigated social distancing very early.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/czech-republic/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/slovakia/

I fear for the UK with the congratulatory frenzy in this mornings tory press. I cant see how R can remain below 1 unless what Boris is set to propose for Monday is all cosmetic spin and no change to social distancing in content (even then it's risking 'bursting the dam' of the tory side of public support for social distancing). Current UK infection levels seem to me to be not much below peak and were the highest in Europe. If the message is muddled and we end up with 2 weeks of growth at an inadvertant R=2 we will see an order of magnitude increase in infections and we are then too late to stop that proportionally increasing serious hospitalisations and subsequent deaths:  hospitals will be back at an unstoppable serious risk of being overwhelmed. Levels of infection in Spain and Italy have come down significantly from their peaks and their relaxation looks not much different from where we are now, despite our more serious position. I don't get it and in particular I don't get how SAGE could support such high risk changes.

[tomtom]

Maybe people will heed the lesson of how early intervention helps - and transfer that to how we deal with climate change....

[mrjonathanr]

Ever wondered what Operation Cygnus recommended in 2017 to prepare for a pandemic?
Here it is: https://www.scribd.com/document/460161101/Cygnus-Redacted-Annex-01scribd-Redactedv3#from_embed

[petejh]

Nige I haven’t read that link yet. But what matters is what they knew at the time. There’s little use in judging past decisions on present knowledge. Lets see what they were being told at the time by SAGE and the WHO.
Future pandemics, great we can learn and hopefully remember it for the next one.

[tomtom]

Nige I haven’t read that link yet. But what matters is what they knew at the time. There’s little use in judging past decisions on present knowledge. Lets see what they were being told at the time by SAGE and the WHO.
Future pandemics, great we can learn and hopefully remember it for the next one.

Like SARS, MERS and swine flu. That we learnt from then partially ignored what we learnt...

[ali k]

On the manipulation of testing numbers by Hancock:
https://mobile.twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/1258294599833001986

Summary: We haven’t ever achieved over 100k tests in a day. So there is no ‘drop off’ in tests carried out. False accounting to ‘achieve’ an arbitrary target he set himself. Pure and simple.

[stone]

Some sort of logistics FUBAR meant that barely any samples were sent to Alderly Park on Tuesday. Should have had 18000 samples to test but only got a couple of thousand.

[Nigel]

Nige I haven’t read that link yet. But what matters is what they knew at the time. There’s little use in judging past decisions on present knowledge. Lets see what they were being told at the time by SAGE and the WHO.
Future pandemics, great we can learn and hopefully remember it for the next one.

Yeah, I know all this is raking over old coals and largely pointless, accepted!

But I disagree about it only being a learning process for future pandemics. Seems a counsel of despair. We haven't finished with this one yet, not by a long way. And the same people that were making the decisions 7 weeks ago, are still making the decisions now (SAGE + HMG). To my mind something went a bit skew-whiff with our initial UK response (you may disagree?). If that was due to SAGE, then ideally lets see what they said, assess it, and swap in some folk who called it right to help us with the next bit. Or maybe set up an official "shadow SAGE" to offer an independent check / balance / confirmation? If it was political then ideally lets know about it now, find out where the bollocks were dropped, and get parliament to scrutinise things now they're back (seeing this in action now on for e.g. the app). Given where we are right now, we could really do with getting the timing and process of lifting the lockdown spot on. The current messaging and actions I see on that is not filling me with confidence to be honest!

Yes you're right we can't change the past, but to reverse your sentence, I think there is some use in judging present decisions on past knowledge. The time to improve our response is right now. I would much prefer that to waiting a few years for an inquiry and the solace that we might be OK in 50 years time. Given that we ignored Cygnus from 4 years ago I wouldn't hold out too much hope for that either tbh. Your point still applies btw i.e. what use is blathering about it on here?! I don't know. Hopefully we can go climbing soon.

[Nigel]

I agree entirely with that argument but that's not what SAGE were telling the government according to the Times expose. SAGE failed on timing, not Boris.

Interesting, do you have a link that can be read free? I don't discount this as being the case. Although you might think someone at the foreign office might have put their hand up and, in the light of the rest of Europe going into lockdown and shutting borders, asked why our science was different to, er, everywhere else's?!

I fear for the UK with the congratulatory frenzy in this mornings tory press. I cant see how R can remain below 1 unless what Boris is set to propose for Monday is all cosmetic spin and no change to social distancing in content (even then it's risking 'bursting the dam' of the tory side of public support for social distancing). Current UK infection levels seem to me to be not much below peak and were the highest in Europe. If the message is muddled and we end up with 2 weeks of growth at an inadvertant R=2 we will see an order of magnitude increase in infections and we are then too late to stop that proportionally increasing serious hospitalisations and subsequent deaths:  hospitals will be back at an unstoppable serious risk of being overwhelmed. Levels of infection in Spain and Italy have come down significantly from their peaks and their relaxation looks not much different from where we are now, despite our more serious position. I don't get it and in particular I don't get how SAGE could support such high risk changes.

Agreed.