In an ideal world, your pandemic plan might be:
1. Be fully prepared with testing equipment, sufficient quantities of up to date PPE, a robust healthcare system, responsible media*
2. Realise immediately that this disease, unlike previous respiratory disease scares, is the one that will become a pandemic
3. Immediately instigate lockdown and quarantine anyone entering the country**
4. Lift lockdown when track and trace measures are in place and infection levels are still low
5. Keep infection levels very low until a vaccine is available
* Also maybe don’t be in the middle of massive constitutional upheaval and a bitter culture war.
** Perhaps just from affected areas to begin with but given people are infectious long before they are symptomatic, maybe that wouldn’t be enough?
Some of this (2–4) seems to have happened in Greece which is now lifting lockdown measures after a mere 150 COVID deaths (amazing), but to compare the UK to Greece, which we must, we need to assess the relative impact on both countries of closing down anything from socialising, tourism, business travel and more. Quarantining or preventing people entering the country in Greece in March is not comparable to doing the same in the UK. The impact on business and tourism would be immense. That’s not to say the UK shouldn’t have done it, but it is to say that it would have been a monumental thing to do back when it would have been impactful to do it.
The UK’s health system, battered as it is by austerity and bad politics, was able to withstand a peak far higher than Greece’s could withstand, so the risk to the NHS was measured on that basis. The knock on effect of dedicating our entire health system to emergencies-only for this period will be felt for years to come — I hope can be mitigated by good spending and management going forward, and I worry that it won’t.
The UK’s death toll is horrific. The continuing spread is horrific. The situation in care homes is horrific. The lack of equipment for the people who have to care for the sick is horrific. When official excess mortality figures from comparative economies can be fully compared for this period it may well be confirmed that for the first wave of this disease, we suffered far worse than our peers. An inquiry may clearly point to our government’s management during the crisis as the cause of this, or it’s possible the blame could be mostly laid on poor planning and management in advance. Factors unique to the UK as a densely populated, business-heavy hub of travel may also have played a role. It’s also possible that we will see we suffered worse overall, when all is tallied up, when this is in the past. We don’t and can’t know that yet.
There is no vaccine and no hope of one being available in less than a year, maybe longer. It is not unreasonable to look at the cost to health and quality of life of maintaining or dropping any and all lockdown options over the course of the next year. Every option should be assessed not only on its potential to limit the impact of the virus but also its impact on the ability of the people and businesses of the UK to generate revenue and for individuals to keep healthy. The money the country makes pays for the services that mitigate the impact of poor health and unemployment. These things do matter. Discussing the cost of lockdown measures and the impact they will have isn’t the same thing as choosing to sacrifice the vulnerable to this disease. Both things need to be weighed up in every decision.
On garden centres: Supermarket-sized shops with large outdoor areas, big employers whose stock will be laid to waste if it can’t be sold soon, whose employees won’t have a job to come back to if that happens. Yes there’s an inequality between the haves and have nots when it comes to having a garden (though it does not necessarily follow that someone who lives in a place where gardens are cheap is doing better in general than everyone who lives in a place where they are not), but there are rational arguments for opening them, it doesn’t have to be part of a culture war.
On VE Day parties and gatherings in parks and beaches: The people partying in the street aren’t the real culprits, that happened because lockdown-reduction ideas were floated irresponsibly. We do need the government to spell out and justify their next moves, but it is absolutely inevitable that most touted plans will be handled irresponsibly by the press and, it follows, sections of the public. As being outside is allowed, and because the consequences of being casual at best regarding social distancing are invisible to most people, the boundaries do gradually fray, limits are pushed.
Outdoor gatherings flouting lockdown violations are incredibly hurtful to people who can’t visit their loved ones in hospital, or have a proper funeral for those they have lost, but dispassionate, rational thinking will tell you why those rules are in place, and are easier to make people stick to. Large indoor gatherings of people who have travelled from different communities are clearly out of the question at the moment, as is even taking the slightest risk of bringing coronavirus into a hospital ward. We do need clearer guidelines about what we can and can’t do outdoors, we need police forces across the country to be properly and universally briefed on the rules and their powers, and we need the media to back that up by spreading the right message. Whether we can have that I don’t know.
On language and communication: Government messaging has been poor. They have aimed, I think, for manipulation rather than clarity, knowing that they have a suspicious, divided public to control, and also self-interested media. I’ve seen a lot of anger at ideas being unofficially briefed to selected outlets, to be discussed and torn apart and then reshaped in-house before becoming policy. It’s manipulative and unpleasant. It might be effective, I can’t really measure it.
The biggest cockup in messaging, in my opinion, was when the government announced its lockdown measures. The Prime Minister said you could go to work if you couldn’t work from home. The government website said the same. The government’s widespread advertising for all that evening said you can only go to work if you are a keyworker, and the message absolutely stuck. A lot of businesses immediately closed down unnecessarily, and a heck of a lot more people got furloughed than the government was expecting. A lot of people who believed only keyworkers were allowed to work gave other people a hard time for continuing to do their jobs. GDP will be affected more than the Government calculated for.
This is what they mean when they say the ‘Stay at home’ message was too effective. Not that the virus has been eliminated, but that people stopped working when that was never the plan. I’m not going to form an opinion about the new ‘Stay Alert’ message until its meaning has been clarified, but I assume it means ‘alert to risk’ as opposed to ‘complacently leaning across me in the supermarket to get to the beans’.
I’d like to see our government’s long-term thinking, and see it compared to France and Germany’s plans for how to get through the year ahead. I don’t think our leaders have been clear enough on what their thinking is, what predictions and interpretations they are working with, and what their goals are. But I also don’t think that information would be responsibly handled by the press on on the social media battlefields so in many ways I understand the manipulative approach they have attempted, even though it doesn’t help me personally understand what they think they’re up to and whether it is wise.
Has our government been too complacent? I don’t know. Have they made huge mistakes? Almost definitely. Did they listen to the wrong scientists or prioritise the wrong things? Maybe. Can we know that for sure right now? I don’t think so. Are they deliberately trying to kill us all? No, no they’re not, and it’s bad-faith arguing on that basis that’s made me reflexively defensive of the UK’s response to COVID-19, although my goal has been to be open minded because I really, really don’t think we will be able to measure who came out of this well for a very long time. It’s not over til it’s gone.
