Mirth wrote:
I don't think it's right that no delay has been given, the first case in the UK was at the end of Jan in Brighton which was a couple of weeks before Italy detected the bulk of its cases and fell into chaos so there was a lag.
I don't know the science well enough either but - before this took hold, if you'd asked me what needed to be done in the face of a pandemic, I would say that the gov should not politicise it and should hand to the experts. I'm not sure why a Silicon Valley businessman with a background in modelling gets equal weightage as a Professor of Epidemiology.
The main criticism of the gov should be the sorry state of the healthcare system after a decade of cuts because in an actual crisis it's given the experts a tougher hand to play with.
I think that post is spot on Mirth.
I suspect the UK, like Sweden, experience the result of decades of right-wing cuts to taxes and NHS underfunding right now, and those cuts, more than anything else, have hamstrung our ability to cope with large-scale epidemics like this. Material, facilities and personnel are lacking, and those are the main reasons the very sick won't always be able to get care.
There are no easy answers, but time and again it has been confirmed that politicians who use a sledgehammer to fasten a nail tend to do more harm than good. Epidemiologists seem to agree that countries like the UK, Finland and Sweden have taken an approach in line with what the available research suggests, which gives them a better chance at controlling how the infection spreads and to whom, rather than obsessing over isolated cases which they're not going to stop either way.
Again, I'm not an epidemiologist, but I'd put my trust in one of them ten times out of ten when the alternative is Concerned Boomer Dad who rants about quarantining immigrants and closing borders on Facebook when he's not busy telling the government how to run public education and manage resources during a crisis. Our national results through testing across a broad spectrum of people so far suggest that there isn't a big unknown number of infected people out there yet, and they also show that schools have been an insignificant factor in the spread of corona.
I think both the number of cases and the number of deaths validate the methods so far, which was a point the national epidemiologist made on tv this morning: We have as big a population as Denmark and Norway combined, but only half as many cases in total (and virtually no deaths or critically ill patients) based on available data, despite the draconian response we've seen from the Danish state lately.
