I dont know enough about the risks to have a fully educated opinion, but personally I'd have been very wary of going to something like Cheltenham at that time. With hindsight it obviously looks like the wrong decision for it to go ahead. The large scale events is probably the one where action should have been taken earlier.
I can see events being the very last thing to return to some form of normality. I think people will be cautious in going into large crowds again for some time.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and if we had a crystal ball that worked everything would be a lot better for all of us.
I've shied away from being too critical of the people making the decisions, mainly because it is incredibly difficult when you're dealing with something which is entirely new, and the ramifications of getting it wrong is literally life and death.
But there were three concerns I had at the time when I thought, this doesn't seem right. Common sense says this is wrong.
Firstly, and probably most importantly, I thought that we, and the rest of the west, were far too complacent when details of this started emerging from China. The long incubation period when the virus was most contagious and impossible to detect, even with testing, made it noteworthy, but the hospitalisation and death rates made it unique in modern times. Perhaps we were given a false sense of security by the fact that we came through previous Chinese inspired flu epidemics relatively unscathed. But when we saw how countries previously effected by SARS etc reacted, that should have put us on alert and started to make plans. Those countries closed their borders to China and went into almost simultaneous lockdown without showing much in the way of sign of any contagion. I remember thinking this could be serious.
Secondly, we should have had more control of the flights coming into the country. Anybody coming in from China initially, and later places like Northern Italy and Iran, should have gone into controlled isolation like we did with the Princess Cruise people . Not just asked to self isolate themselves. And all passengers on board all flights should have been handed out questionnaires on which countries they had visited in the previous 2 week. Anybody that had been to a high risk country should have had to go through controlled isolation too.
Thirdly, once we knew that the virus had rooted itself here, we should have stopped large mass gatherings earlier than we did.
Nothing to do with hindsight or expert knowledge, just using common sense.
