NWR new zero tolerance covid thread

Well - in the end, everything gets better, and in the end, we are all dead. It's all a matter of timing really.

With regard to the media - it’s interesting how small a section of the world it is. Money isn’t everything…but by my googling…it is just over a trillion dollar industry - about a fifth of travel and tourism, a twelfth of construction, a twentieth of financial services. Unlike those industries, however, it is uniquely placed to tell us how important it is.

Anyway - I have certainly had my happiness increase considerably since stopping watching or listening to any form of broadcast news, and deliberately minimising my exposure to news websites.
I worry when people turn away from reality, hence my response about eternal vigilance. But I've reread your post, Leon, to understand your intention. My sense now is that you are distinguishing between news and analysis, with news potentially creating anxiety and noise if consumed too frequently, whereas analysis enables more realistic, less noisy, pattern recognition. I agree.
 
I worry when people turn away from reality, hence my response about eternal vigilance. But I've reread your post, Leon, to understand your intention. My sense now is that you are distinguishing between news and analysis, with news potentially creating anxiety and noise if consumed too frequently, whereas analysis enables more realistic, less noisy, pattern recognition. I agree.
Jeremy - you articulate my thoughts so much more clearly than I was able to. Although @Po-yu Sung 's point about the BBC's coverage potentially being part of what actually drove some of the UK's positive outcomes, in terms of compliance with lockdown and vaccine uptake, is one I hadn't given enough thought to. I'm still not prepared to start watching the news again, heaven forbid, but perhaps my position is a little less rabid than it was.
 
Jeremy - you articulate my thoughts so much more clearly than I was able to. Although @Po-yu Sung 's point about the BBC's coverage potentially being part of what actually drove some of the UK's positive outcomes, in terms of compliance with lockdown and vaccine uptake, is one I hadn't given enough thought to. I'm still not prepared to start watching the news again, heaven forbid, but perhaps my position is a little less rabid than it was.
Ditto!!!!!!
 
My strength is knowing how low my intelligence is. All this talk of relativity and trying to make sense of all the raw numbers is way beyond me. I've managed to get along in life by simply finding what is most successful and copying it. Obviously, it's not quite that simple, but you get my drift.

In terms of COVID, New Zealand and Victoria, Australia seem to have an extremely successful model. Why on earth we couldn't have followed it is beyond me. I've been banging on about it like a broken record since midway through the pandemic. If such a dimwit as I could latch onto this winning formula in that length of time surely our leaders should have be into it even sooner.

Unfortunately they never did and we're in this mess and, I fear, it's going to get a whole lot worse.

At least we'll be a useful model for other countries going forward.
 
At the risk of stating the obvious, the big difference with AUS/NZ is just how far away they are from everything else. Their economies are built around that fact - the UK is so much more intertwined with the nations around us, even with Brexit. Food security is one of the big ticket items that we're on a completely different level versus AUS/NZ. To that end, completely shutting UK borders is a lot easier said than done.
 
You may think that the best solution would have been to completely close our borders well over a year ago, no exceptions, and hopefully have avoided most of the Covid wave. That's a perfectly valid opinion. But it's not incontrovertible fact. Matters of geography, population density and absolute popluation, among other things, mean it may not have been possible to implement here in a successful manner. And we still don't know how the Aussie/NZ situation will play out when they do eventually have to open their borders again with a population that's had almost no exposure to the virus.

I'm not sure why you are so certain what the winning formula is. When we look back on all this in five or ten years it might be obvious, but to me at least it's very far from obvious right now.
Bryan, Johnny, I found myself Liking both your posts which perhaps itself reinforces the point about how hard it is to be certain what's best.

But in five years' time I imagine consensus will be fairly clear about inadequate preparation, unnecessarily inconsistent policy and messaging, and repeated slowness to act.
 
At the risk of stating the obvious, the big difference with AUS/NZ is just how far away they are from everything else. Their economies are built around that fact - the UK is so much more intertwined with the nations around us, even with Brexit. Food security is one of the big ticket items that we're on a completely different level versus AUS/NZ. To that end, completely shutting UK borders is a lot easier said than done.
Very good point Julian and one I hadn't considered. Our supply chain relies to a great extent on trucks being driven by the same person on either side of a ferry / train ride. 10,000 lorry drivers a day is a not inconsiderable number - at the very least one can say that in spite of our island status, we could not have done what Australia and New Zealand did.
 
Perhaps, Jeremy, although if the government had declared two years ago that they were going to spent a huge amount of time and effort preparing for a potential coronavirus crisis (as opposed to all the other potential crises that might just as well have happened) there would have been widespread disbelief, quite understandably. We never know exactly - or even approximately - what is around the corner, and it would be ridiculous to prepare specifically for everything that could just possibly happen. Perhaps we should have spent all that effort on averting a resurgence of a new strain of plague, or a catastropic volcanic eruption, or aliens landing and zapping us with ray guns.

General preparedness is generally of limited use, although no doubt there is more that could have usefully been done. But it's very difficult to convince people that it's worth spending money on unforeseen and unforeseeable (at least in detail) contingencies. And that goes for every country in the world.
An influenza pandemic had been widely predicted by government advisers and HMG wargamed it but didn't follow the resulting recommendations. Had even those influenza recommendations been acted on during 2016-2019 I guess we might have been in better shape for sarscov2.
 
I don't doubt it, Jeremy. I do wonder though how many other recommendations for other possible disasters were also not followed, that we don't now hear about because the situation never arose. Apologies, I'm not trying to be too fatalistic or dismissive, but it's very easy to look back with hindsight.
As long as people don't use such things as an excuse not to prepare for climate change.
 
It would seem very surprising that we've reached the peak already, but the numbers do make it look at least possible. I'd wait and see what happens for another week before being sure, though.

Forgive the slightly self-indulgent attachment but I knocked together this chart, which shows rolling seven day averages of positive tests (blue), hospitalisations (orange) and deaths (grey). This is based on the gov.uk coronavirus data. I've put in a four day lag for hospitalisations and a 12 day lag for deaths as this makes the peaks line up quite nicely time-wise, and I've scaled the yellow and grey lines so they peak at the same point as the blue line. It really does demonstrate that the link between cases and deaths appears to be well and truly broken. Obviously deaths aren't the only possible "bad outcome", but even so - amidst all the doom and gloom, let's not ignore what does look like some genuinely good news.

View attachment 20247
Incredible that the grey and orange peaks line up even in the y-axis - does that suggest that the ratio of hospitalisations to deaths hasn't changed from first to second wave?
 
While I agree that it is very hard to know what will happen over the next few years and the Aus/NZ approach definitely has its own problems, I think at the moment my own personal not-public enquiry at the moment goes something like (staying away from economic issues as those really are political):

Unrealistic zero-covid scenarios that it is pointless to criticize the govt for:
Not introducing border controls early enough to have made a difference stopping it - the only countries that have done this successfully are far more self-sufficient and aren't transit hubs.
Taiwan/SK style contact tracing etc from the beginning - not only did we not have the infrastructure, by the time we knew we needed it we almost certainly had too many seed cases for it to work. There's obviously a tipping point where there are just too many cases for these approaches to work (c.f the difference between 1st and 2nd waves in Germany). I'm not sure we've ever really got below that point....

Obvious errors:
A week late into lockdown in March 2020 and the failure to have a 2 week fire-break in Oct 2020.
Not trying harder to restrict overseas tourist travel Summer 2020 - too many mixed messages there and it definitely seeded cases for Sept.
Care home/hospital interaction in the first few weeks.

Obvious successes:
Managing the vaccine programme by risk category so rigorously, buying good vaccines in quantity, and avoiding the free-for-all and politicization that has happened elsewhere.
More controversially, the relaxation of restrictions over the last few months. Delta is bad, but it would have been bad anyway (and is about to be bad elsewhere), and I hope and reckon we did, as Bryan's graph shows, get enough people vaccinated in time.

Structural things that couldn't have been fixed at the last minute but have made it worse and need to be addressed:
Long-term inaction over obesity and diet inequality in particular and health inequality more broadlly.
Investment in prophylactic (not sure that's really the right word here) public health infrastructure.
The insanity of turning public health issues into personal freedom ones.
 
I just don't see any strong arguments against the ANZ COVID strategy.

If you close your borders it doesn't matter where you are. How does population, density or absolute make such a difference? Australia and New Zealand is a very different in any case. If the argument is that the UK is more densely populated then look to Hong Kong and the like who have also been very successful in dealing with COVID.

Neither of these countries are self sufficient. They have little manufacturing and import huge amounts of products. Even Australia with its diverse climates still imports a large amount of packaged and frozen food. Most other goods are imported. Again, places like Hong Kong import almost everything and haven't seen the chaos we're dealing with, either.

What happens after borders are opened up is a completely different argument. Let's stick to the last 9 months or so. Although I can't see why having a minority of people who have had covid making a huge difference. And having a disciplined population (mask wearing, rule following) will only benefit them when they do open up. Piss ups and 2 fingers to anyone who disagree are what await us.

The ANZ approach may not have been as successful here if implemented properly, but it may have been just as or almost as successful.

It surely couldn't have been worse than the disastrous mess that we find ourselves in. This is much worse than Brexit. Certain people, like the Beijing government, must be jubilant at how totally useless this once proud nation was.

I dread to fear what depths we will sink to next. The mind boggles.
 
I just don't see any strong arguments against the ANZ COVID strategy.

If you close your borders it doesn't matter where you are. How does population, density or absolute make such a difference? Australia and New Zealand is a very different in any case. If the argument is that the UK is more densely populated then look to Hong Kong and the like who have also been very successful in dealing with COVID.

Respectfully - this is I think the point that @Julian Seers-Martin made (and which I hadn't understood). I don't think the argument is against the ANZ strategy per se, just whether it could have been replicated by the UK.

Even setting aside the level to which Australia and New Zealand may rely less on imports of food and other necessities, everything that arrives in those countries arrives by ship or by plane, and can be removed from the vessel without any interaction with the people who brought it over.

On mud island, however, freight mostly comes from the continent, and mostly comes by truck - 10,000 trucks per day - and the driver stays with the truck. Therefore, in order to deliver the same level of isolation as those countries, we would have had to create some kind of new logistical system which avoided having the drivers coming into the country, and avoided any close contact between those drivers and people in the country already.

I have no idea whether anyone even went down the path of trying to plan such an endeavour, but instinctively (to me at least) it sounds orders of magnitude more complex than, say, the Berlin airlift.

That's not to argue, at all, that the borders shouldn't have been shut down earlier, or that lots of other things shouldn't have been done differently - but certainly the simple question "Australia and New Zealand did it - why can't we" seems to have a simpler answer than I realised...
 
On mud island, however, freight mostly comes from the continent, and mostly comes by truck - 10,000 trucks per day - and the driver stays with the truck. Therefore, in order to deliver the same level of isolation as those countries, we would have had to create some kind of new logistical system which avoided having the drivers coming into the country, and avoided any close contact between those drivers and people in the country already.
My partner works in logistics and what you described is pretty much what happened during the lockdowns. Foreign drivers stayed in their cabs when visiting sites and had as little contact as possible (preferably none) with locals.
 
Respectfully - this is I think the point that @Julian Seers-Martin made (and which I hadn't understood). I don't think the argument is against the ANZ strategy per se, just whether it could have been replicated by the UK.

Even setting aside the level to which Australia and New Zealand may rely less on imports of food and other necessities, everything that arrives in those countries arrives by ship or by plane, and can be removed from the vessel without any interaction with the people who brought it over.

On mud island, however, freight mostly comes from the continent, and mostly comes by truck - 10,000 trucks per day - and the driver stays with the truck. Therefore, in order to deliver the same level of isolation as those countries, we would have had to create some kind of new logistical system which avoided having the drivers coming into the country, and avoided any close contact between those drivers and people in the country already.

I have no idea whether anyone even went down the path of trying to plan such an endeavour, but instinctively (to me at least) it sounds orders of magnitude more complex than, say, the Berlin airlift.

That's not to argue, at all, that the borders shouldn't have been shut down earlier, or that lots of other things shouldn't have been done differently - but certainly the simple question "Australia and New Zealand did it - why can't we" seems to have a simpler answer than I realised...
I guess you read my first paragraph.
 
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