Just read the following article:
Boris Johnson’s latest Covid strategy: no hope and no end in sight
Article says:
However, shortly afterwards documents were released showing that Sage had advised the government three weeks ago to bring in five measures including a short “circuit breaker” lockdown, or else face a “very large epidemic”.
The official documents dated 21 September also called for a ban on household mixing in homes; the closure of all bars, restaurants, cafes, indoor gyms and services such as hairdressers; and all university and college teaching to be online “unless absolutely essential”.
So all this was significantly watered down.
Inevitable the growth R will increase when relaxing lockdown measures. Hence, if R is only marginally below 1, it is inadvisable to relax all the lockdown measures since this will likely increase the R rate to above 1. It was especially foolish allowing students to go to University as people from all over the country are mixing together there.
R needs to be substantially below 1 before reverting back to normal life and this needs to be applied to all the different regions of the country. Alternatively, we can let the virus rip through most of the population, but try to keep the vulnerable isolated.
But the choice has to be made. The Government appears to have opted for the former. But why on earth wasn't the advice from Sage followed? Allowing R to get above 1 can be calamitous since this is exponential growth we're talking about here. Sorry, but I regard the Government -- and especially Boris Johnson -- as utterly incompetent, at least at handling a pandemic.
I wrote about the virus way back in March on my other blog here. And on this blog both here and here.
1 comment:
Yeah, I had a similar experience on Twitter. I was a fan of Elon Musk and followed him on Twitter. In late February/early March, I was reading stuff from experts on science websites already saying that if the virus gets going in the U.S., it would be a miracle to end up with less than 100,000 deaths.
Anyway, Musk kept downplaying the virus on Twitter and saying that it was no worse than the flu, and any restrictions would be ridiculous and alarmist, etc. I Tweeted him a number of times, begging him to quit saying stuff like that, that he was going to get people killed, and I warned him that his Tweets weren't going to age well. Obviously, he ignored me.
Turns out I was right. Does that mean I'm smarter than Elon Musk? Somehow I don't think so...but I might be a bit wiser...
Not sure how I feel about Musk anymore. But I still love his companies--especially SpaceX. I mean, they're building the biggest, most powerful, most capable, cheapest-per-ton, most reusable rocket ever...in a friggin' open field, for gods' sake! And it's working!
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