Day 92 of lockdown

The government are planning to reduce the social distancing measure to 1 metre from 4th July. This is being pre-announced all over the media. Meanwhile Go Outdoors, owned by JD sports, has just called in the administrators with a risk to 2,700 staff across 67 stores. Just the latest of many. Pubs and restaurants look set to be allowed to open but even with a 1m social distancing measure in place this will not be financially viable for many.

People like the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, suggests that unless we can develop either a vaccine or treatment that means that the vulnerable groups do not suffer so badly from the disease, we shall have to continue with some form of social distancing probably into 2021. 

I suspect that this will be economically ruinous and that, in the longer term, the impact on deaths of the measures we have taken to control the virus will turn out to be much more severe than the deaths directly attributable to coronavirus, when controlled for deaths that would have occurred normally at that time of the year. 

I've read some interesting analyses of the distribution of deaths from coronavirus. Most deaths are of people with underlying health issues, who probably wouldn't have died had they not caught coronavirus, and the very elderly, possibly with health conditions as well, who may well have died even had they not caught the virus. They were suggesting that with an above average overall death count in the month of May, this may well be balanced out by a lower death rate in June because some of the people who would have died anyway in June had died a month earlier. Well, that seemed to be the basic gist. 

The trouble is, coronavirus deaths are dreadful, and they are immediate, in the here and now. The suicides, the domestic abuse exacerbated by the lockdown and the unavailability of support and the economic deprivation, the mental health issues, the deaths from undiagnosed cancers and untreated neurological complaints, will only become truly apparent in the longer term. 

I'd like to hear a question posed, during these tedious daily governmental coronavirus briefings, asking if it would be possible to have a return to normal with minimal social distancing. I heard today on Radio 4 that there has been a suggestion that when the distancing is reduced to 1m, that people with health issues could wear a ribbon or badge to show that they prefer larger social distance if possible. Well could we not eliminate all social distancing and get everybody back to working normally, with rigourous cleaning and hand sanitisers available. However this would need to be backed up by rapid testing should anybody exhibit symptoms and fast lockdown of any developing clusters of infection. 

This brings me onto the app. So the Govt have done a complete U turn and are now trying to write an app that will use the Apple/Google API. Privacy conditions are stringent. No central storage of data being key. Matt Hancock, Health Secretary tried to but a positive spin on this, but failed. At the very start, I wondered why they didn't just go with the Apple Google app, but instead they've spend, I believe I heard, somewhere in the region of either £11million or £17million. How can anybody spend that much on developing an app that just doesn't work properly. 

I don't think any government would have been prepared for this, least of all one that only came into power on 12th December and that has all the Brexit negotiations to work on on top. However I do ask myself who is advising them. All along I've found myself questioning decisions - 

• The decision to stop testing in the community once the virus took hold in March, but to limit testing to hospitals. That seemed daft and counter to the practice of all the countries, e.g. Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, that had caught the virus and nipped it in the bud. 
• The UK Govt. decision to go their own way and try to develop an tracing app that basically did not conform to Apple or Google privacy guidelines which ultimately wasted money and time.
• The Govt. refusal to back the Covid-19 symptom app that was released by Kings College with a small company Zoe under the aegis of Professor Tim Spector and which now has nearly 4 million contributors. At the time, they said they were concerned in case it caused confusion with the public with the govts. own app (which has failed testing). Even now, I don't think they are partnering with Kings. 
• The Public Health England (PHE) refusal in the early stages to even respond to the offers from private laboratories to use their facilities to fast-track Covid tests. PHE were trying to keep all tests to their own labs in, I believe, Milton Keynes. So testing was so slow to get going in the UK, the virus really took hold. 
• Then there was the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) fiasco. There were companies in the UK that held stocks of PPE and were giving them free to their local hospital (Birmingham) and contacting PHE offering to be their supplier. However they weren't used and to their great despair, had to use their stocks to fulfil orders for PPE coming in from abroad, whilst our own frontline workers were poorly protected.

Many many mistakes. Lets hope the government have learned from them and maybe get their advice from a wider set of sources.

Day 83 of Coronavirus lockdown, give or take a day

Wow, that's a long time! Losing track of the days a bit. The government seems to be wavering this way and that. As of my last post, certain years (reception, 1 and 6) were due to return to school with the rest of primary back in school before the summer. A bit of resistance from parents and wholehearted opposition from the unions who want 100% risk-free environment to be guaranteed, which of course is not possible. So now the government say other years will not return, and that secondary pupils 'may' return in September. 

Independent schools are hopping mad. Several really ancient ones have closed already. There seem to be arbitrary rules about what percentage of pupils are allowed to return into class which, since the independents already have smaller class sizes. So allowing 25% of a class which, when full, only numbers 15 is quite different to 25% of a class of 35 pupils. The independents are challenging the government (cannot recall how) but they plan to have all years return to school in September and putting in place their own track and trace processes as well as hygiene measures etc.

Academies are also aiming to get back. This ludicrous 2m social distancing rule is making everything so much more difficult. Businesses are on the verge of going bust because they cannot operate with that sort of constraint. Schools will struggle too - they are doing awful things like having kids in little social bubbles and trying to keep them apart in the playground. To be honest, it feels like we have this dreadful disease, and we are using it as an excuse to punish our children by isolating them from their friends and impeding their education so that we can be absolutely confident that they will not catch it asymptomatically and inadvertently pass it on to us. What a society!

As for the 2m rule, aparently the govt is considering reducing it to match up with WHO guidelines of 1m. That is what many other countries have and they have no great outbreaks. But they are going to take 3 weeks to think about it! How many hospitality businesses will close in the interim. How many thousands of staff will lose their livelihoods. It doesn't bear thinking about. 

Then you have the discredited Professor Ferguson who piped up, about a week ago, saying something like the fatalities would have been halved had we locked down a week earlier. Fortunately the SAGE papers are being made available and it turns out that he was on SAGE when they definitely did not recomment that Boris Johnson initiate the lockdown. Quite the reverse, they recommended that social distancing measures (which in now seems were having a measurable affect based on when the peak occurred) be continued. Professor Ferguson's imperial college paper which put the frighteners on everybody by suggesting that if no changes to behaviour were undertaken, 200,000 fatalities might occur also mentioned the word lockdown only once, and in the context that we should not need to impose it. 

The Imperial College code for the program was eventually released. That was a joke! It originally consisted of one long line of code (bad coding practice) and they held off releasing it until they'd had time to improve it a little (but not much). Nevertheless, when other universities (Edinburgh?) tried to run it, they found that the same input variables could produce estimated fatalities that varied by 80,000 between one run and the next. i.e. the model was worse than useless. And this was the thing that scared the government into imposing lockdown.

I can see how it helped for the first 3 weeks. Everyone was scared that the NHS would be overwhelmed like the health service in Italy.

Well it wasn't. So we should have started to release lockdown much sooner.

We now have young people (who would be hardly affected by the virus) who are ineligible for the furlough scheme due to their 0hour contracts committing suicide and leaving behind family and children. How desperate must you feel to do that. 

Yet still the government dithers. 

Finally there is a little more information at a regional level. Milton Keynes (my nearest big place) has had no new positive tests the entire month of June. The rate in the community is well below 1 in 1600. The virus is concentrated in care homes and hospitals. 

This morning I took a look at the coronavirus legislation. Turns out that this week they modified it to make it an offence to gather more than 6 people. Like that is going to make any difference to the thousands who are demonstrating #blacklivesmatter after the dreadful killing of George Floyd by a US police officer which was filmed and shared on social media.  There were even MPs joining in the illegal marches and protests in London. Feels like one rule for them and one for everyone else. If you are participating in a 'woke' campaign, then you can ignore the rules. 

Then there is the 14 day quarantine for everyone coming into this country from abroad. Everyone that is, apart from the people most likely to spread the virus - people who commute between countries like lorry drivers and people who live in one country yet work in another. Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. What is laughable is that New Zealand, where they have shut the borders and eradicated the virus, allowed two women to fly in from the UK on compassionate grounds (a parent was dying). Believe it or not, they were tested on arrival and found to have the virus! So we in the UK are exporting it! There is much lobbying from MPs and a court case from the airlines to try to get the government to reverse this stupid ruling. I hope they succeed and soon otherwise this will be the first Conservative government ever to completely trash the country's economy beyond all recognition.