Tuesday, March 17, 2020

The UK Only Realised "In The Last Few Days" That Its Coronavirus Strategy Would "Likely Result In Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths"

Scientists advising the government say an aggressive new approach adopted to attempt to "suppress" the virus may have to be in place for 18 months.


The UK only realised "in the last few days" that attempts to "mitigate" the impact of the coronavirus pandemic would not work, and that it needed to shift to a strategy to "suppress" the outbreak, according to a report by a team of experts who have been advising the government.

The report, published by the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team on Monday night, found that the strategy previously being pursued by the government — dubbed "mitigation" and involving home isolation of suspect cases and their family members but not including restrictions on wider society — would "likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over".

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The UK Only Realised "In The Last Few Days" That Its Coronavirus Strategy Would "Likely Result In Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths"

2 comments:

Peter Pan said...

In 18 months this will have been forgotten and the dead will have been buried.
Wonks will be able to read all about in the statistics.

KongKing said...

The very influential UCL report can be downloaded from:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
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The report is being widely interpreted as justifying a supression policy. However, on my reading the report justifies the original UK strategy - take the pain now and go for herd immunity.
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Figure 3 seems to show that a rigorous suppression strategy now will merely postpone the crisis at enormous social and economic cost. It will greatly reduce the crisis in May-June 2020, but a few months after the measures are relaxed the crisis will re-appear (in December 2020).
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The authors state that:
"we emphasise that is not at all certain that suppression will succeed long term; no public health intervention with such disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time. How populations and societies will respond remains unclear."
Kingsley Lewis