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.