Barnfred 55
Player Valuation: £80m
I agree that the Government should have gone into full lockdown on March 16th. However I say this with the benefit of hindsight, but also the reason I would have gone into lockdown then was the scenes coming out of Italy which were distressful to say the least. It was a view based on emotion rather than science or any high degree of knowledge of the situation in the UK.
The cabinet, at the time, were following the science based on the findings of SAGE, and the advice from the permanent government staff such as the CSO and CMO and their teams. The SAGE meeting minutes around that time confirm this. The meeting on 16th resolved that more social distancing needed to be introduced, but further research was required on expected hospital ICU utilisation and on effect of school closures. The estimates at that stage was that infection was doubling every 5/6 days. That evening was when Johnson announced the first round of measures which you refer to above.
There was a further SAGE meeting 2 days later. They were of the opinion that the existing measures were sufficient to sustain hospital ICU capacity provided they were being adhered to in sufficient numbers. They estimated the infection was still doubling every 5/7 days, but the measure that had already been introduced would bring that down .
As you know, the government gave instructions on Friday 20th March for all hospitality linked establishments to close, except for takeaways. Obviously more information had come to light between 18th and the 20th, and I very much suspect it was the news that the infection was now estimated to be doubling every 3/4 days.
The next SAGE meeting was held on 23 March. They had data on the effect of the existing measures and it showed that many people were complying. Public transport was down 80/90% and a smaller reduction in retail and hospitality outlets. Despite this, because of the new infection rate of 3/4 days, they concluded that the current measures would probably result in the ICU capacity being overwhelmed. Hence the introduction of full lockdown that evening.
So whilst I personally would have introduced full lockdown on 16th, I can fully understand why the government didn't. I don't agree with you saying that implementing full shutdown on that date would have saved tens of thousands of lives, because the science does not back that up. Data shows that the advice of the government was pretty much adhered to, and they actually imposed closure of many of the hospitality and leisure outlets 3 days before the actual lockdown. I know you gave an example of pubs being full, but equally I can give examples near me where the opposite is true. Me and the missus went for lunch in a popular local restaurant on the Wednesday of that week and apart from one guy having a drink at the bar, we were the only people in there. they said it was he same on the Tuesday, and hat on a normal nice day they could reasonably expect 40/50 diners. Also, I know I've seen a medical report that, using the peak new cases in hospitals as a base point, worked back to when the infection rate started to reduce substantially, and that was 16th March, not the 23rd March when full lockdown commenced. Annoyingly I can't find that report on the web now.
Had lockdown took place one week earlier on 9th March, I have absolutely no doubts that tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. Unfortunately at that time our science was telling us that we were 4-8 weeks behind Italy and clearly we weren't.
